Analysis: Rex Tillerson is Donald Trump's idea of a perfect Cabinet secretary
WASHINGTON - The news that Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was the presumed pick as President-elect Donald Trump's secretary of state sent shock waves through official Washington over the weekend. Tillerson, after all, has never served in any elected office or in a presidential cabinet before! Plus, he has reportedly close business ties to Russia!
Both of those facts, of course, make him the ideal sort of secretary of state for soon-to-be President Trump.
Don't believe me? Here's what Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said about Tillerson in an interview Monday on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports": "Rex Tillerson is a very Trumpian-inspired pick because it's somebody who, like Donald Trump, has a career outside of politics and he's somebody who is accustomed to making big deals and making - translating that into big impact."
Time and time again on the campaign trail, Trump insisted that he had so many - believe me! - decorated business people ready to help him if he were elected president. In fact, he was remarkably consistent on how he knew the best people and how, if elected, he would put them to work.
What Trump offered in the course of the campaign was a radical change in the way of doing the business of the American public. That change included - and, in many ways, was typified by - the sort of people he said he would surround himself with if he were elected. He is, quite literally, making good on a central campaign promise by favoring people like Tillerson.
And yet, there is a general sense of shock within the political establishment about the idea that someone with Tillerson's background might be the fifth most powerful person in government.
Much of this consternation is built on the political establishment's inability to fully grasp that the old rules of "how things are done in politics" are simply not operative with Trump. As he has made clear over and over again, Trump simply see no rules or, if he does see them, he chooses not to acknowledge that he is governed by them.
He likes Tillerson. Tillerson is a titan of industry. That's all Trump needs.
But, for all of Trump's flouting of the established political order, he can't totally ignore it. After all, Tillerson - and almost all of the rest of Trump's Cabinet - needs to be approved by the Senate. And, in Tillerson's case, there are already signs of dissent among Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which needs to give him preliminary approval before a full floor vote.
Given that, it would have been possible for Trump to bow to political reality and nominate someone as secretary of state who was much more easily confirmable like Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker. But, to anyone surprised that Trump stuck with Tillerson, you must not have been paying attention to what the president-elect has been saying for, oh, the last 18 months or so.