WASHINGTON — President Trump undercut his own secretary of state on Sunday, calling his effort to open lines of communication with North Korea a waste of time, and seeming to rule out a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear-edged confrontation with Pyongyang.
A day after Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said he was reaching out to Pyongyang in hopes of starting a new dialogue, Mr. Trump belittled the idea and left the impression that he was focused mainly on military options. Mr. Trump was privately described by advisers as furious at Mr. Tillerson for contradicting the president’s public position that now is not the time for talks.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, using the derogatory nickname he has assigned to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. “Save your energy Rex,” he added, “we’ll do what has to be done!”
While some analysts wondered if the president was intentionally playing bad cop to the secretary’s good cop, veteran diplomats said they could not remember a time when a president undermined his secretary of state so brazenly in the midst of a tense situation, and the episode raised fresh questions about how long Mr. Tillerson would remain in his job.
A former chief executive of Exxon Mobil with no prior government experience, Mr. Tillerson has been deeply frustrated and has told associates that he tries to ignore the president’s Twitter blasts. But these would be hard to disregard as Mr. Tillerson returned from China, where he was trying to enlist more support from North Korea’s primary trading partner and political patron.
