The biographical particulars of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, who was nominated to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state on Tuesday, seem crafted from a Mad Libs sheet of Michael Moore’s grimmest nightmares. A “tall, strapping Texan” with “a twang to show for it” and “silver coiffure,” Tillerson is an Eagle Scout-turned-multimillionaire after a four-decade run at one of the biggest and most domineering global corporations. And his favorite book is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Tillerson’s myriad feats as a businessman—forging the deep ties required to negotiate billion-dollar oil deals with Russia, for example—quickly fomented anxiety, even among the Republican senators whose support his confirmation requires. But it’s these very accomplishments that President-elect Donald Trump chose to broadcast when he announced Tillerson as his pick for America’s top diplomatic post.
The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2016
Regardless of whether Tillerson manages to get confirmed, his nomination reflects the sometimes unfathomable extent of American power—American corporate power, that is. In 2014, Exxon earned $32 billion in profit, more than the GDPs of more than half of the countries in the world. At times, Exxon has exerted its influence in ways that supplant foreign policy. “Take, for example, Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa,” writes Steve Coll in The New Yorker. “During the mid-two-thousands, the entirety of U.S. aid and military spending in the country directed through the U.S. Embassy in the capital, N’Djamena, amounted to less than twenty million dollars annually, whereas the royalty payments Exxon made to the government as part of an oil-production agreement were north of five hundred million dollars. Idriss Déby, the authoritarian President of Chad, did not need a calculator to understand that Rex Tillerson was more important to his future than the U.S. Secretary of State.”



