“So often, the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it,’" Tillerson said, according to the Houston Chronicle, “and I would have to say to him, 'Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.”
Tillerson also appeared to take a shot at Trump’s chief method of communication, Twitter.
“I will be honest with you: It troubles me that the American people seem to want to know so little about issues — that they are satisfied with a 128 characters,” Tillerson said.
He was quick to say that that wasn’t meant as a shot at Trump, but our political system more broadly. Next to his other comments, though, it wasn’t difficult to see he was lumping Trump with all those Americans who aren’t intellectually curious enough about policy and the actual details of U.S. government.