Stephen King’s Donald Trump Remark Goes Viral After Election Prediction

It’s six months until the presidential election and horror author Stephen King has reminded people that Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, allegedly once called Trump a “moron.”

Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is the slight favorite to win this year’s presidential election, according to the latest odds given to Newsweek by Betfair. Trump’s odds of a second White House term are 6/5 (45.5 percent) against 7/5 (41.7 percent), with the U.K.-based bookies.

While favoring Trump to win overall, because of the Electoral College system, Betfair concluded Biden is the firm favorite to win the popular vote. The bookie gave Biden odds of 2/5 (71.4 percent) to secure the most votes across the U.S., against 4/1 (20 percent) for the Republican challenger. Betfair did favor the Republicans to take back control of the Senate in November, with odds of 2/5 (71.4 percent) on this happening against 2/1 (33.3 percent) for the Democrats maintaining control.

King, who joined the Democratic Party in 1970, often takes to social media to share his thoughts on a variety of political issues—and Saturday was no different.

“Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, called Trump ‘a f****** moron,'” the author and vocal Trump critic said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Newsweek emailed spokespeople for King and Trump for comment on Monday.

The author’s post is in reference to the fact that back in 2017, Tillerson made headlines for allegedly calling Trump a “moron”—not a “f****** moron” as suggested by King—while working for him as secretary of state, per NBC News.

At the time, Tillerson refused to deny the allegations, resulting in a State Department spokesperson releasing a statement: “The secretary did not use that type of language to speak about the president of the United States.”

Tillerson and Trump disagreed on a number of foreign policy matters, but Tillerson wouldn’t resign. Ultimately, in 2018, Trump sacked Tillerson via a post on X.

At the time of writing King’s post had been viewed 659,300 times, with people taking to the comments to share their thoughts.

“Out of 44 of Trump’s ex-cabinet members ONLY 4 say they’ll vote for him as GOP candidate! Who knows if those 4 aren’t lying to keep from getting Trumped on if he somehow wins? You can tell a lot about someone by his supporters but even more about him from his ex-supporters,” one person wrote.

“Rex has a front row assessment of Donald j toddler,” another commented.

“That says more about Rex Tillerson than it does about Trump,” someone else said.

A fourth added: “… and he was justly fired.”

This post comes after King stated that Republican voters will only accept the results of the November 5 election if they win.

The 2024 presidential election is widely expected to be unusually bitter, following the contested 2020 outcome, with both main candidates accusing the other of being a danger to American democracy.

During a speech in January, President Biden claimed “democracy is on the ballot” in the upcoming election, while during a rally in April, Donald Trump—the presumed 2024 Republican nominee—shot back at the Democratic incumbent claiming “he’s the threat to democracy.”

King wrote on X on May 9: “The Republicans will accept the results of the election. If they win, that is.”

At the time of writing it had been viewed 558,000 times.

While campaigning in Wisconsin on May 8, Trump said of the results of the 2024 election in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The former president continued: “But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results.”