New Yorker reports<\/a>: Largely overlooked in the daily flood of Trump-era news, a week ago, his former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said in an interview that Trump had repeatedly pressed him to violate the law. \u201cI\u2019d have to say to him, \u2018Mr. President, I understand what you wanna do, but you can\u2019t do it that way. It violates the law, it violates treaty.\u2019 He got really frustrated,\u201d Tillerson said. \u201cI think he grew tired of me being the guy who told him, \u2018You can\u2019t do that.\u2019 \u201d The coverage of Tillerson\u2019s interview with the journalist Bob Schieffer focussed more on Trump\u2019s outraged response than on the underlying revelation. \u201cTillerson calls Trump undisciplined. Trump calls Tillerson \u2018dumb as a rock,\u2019 \u201d one headline, in the Washington Post, read. But Tillerson\u2019s allegation was more than just another bout of Trump-era name-calling between a former Secretary of State who once called his boss a \u201cfucking moron\u201d and the President who fired him by tweet. Imagine Tillerson before Congress come January, testifying under oath and live on television, about which laws Trump told him to break. Speaking of testimony, I can hardly wait for that of the two White House chiefs of staff whom Trump also fired\u2014the latest one, John Kelly, just this week. When asked about the chaos of the Trump White House, Reince Priebus, Kelly\u2019s predecessor, who was dumped by tweet while on Air Force One, once told the author Chris Whipple, \u201cTake everything you\u2019ve heard and multiply it by fifty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All eyes and ears are what Cohen said this week about been directed by Trump to pay hush money. Pecker cooperating with the special council [Read More]<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diary","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/trump_cohen_packer.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peter.murmann.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}