By that afternoon, Tillerson was frogmarched in front of cameras to declare that he had never threatened to resign, and that he had not needed any persuading from the vice president to remain in his post.

It was a thoroughly uncomfortable affair with a distinctly Stalinist feel; one imagines that in the coming months, he’ll be shipped off to the gulag and airbrushed out of cabinet photographs.

On the critical point of name-calling (a crime so serious that it routinely brings reprimands for eight-year-olds on the playground), he hemmed and hawed about not stooping to address such pettiness. In Washington, we call that a “non-denial denial”, and it almost always means that the allegation in question is true.