Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday provided stunning insight into how Donald Trump’s executive branch functions, telling an audience at Stanford University he receives print-outs of the president’s tweets and has to figure out how to “use” them to craft the administration’s foreign policy.

Describing it as “actually … not a bad system,” Tillerson said he never gets a heads up about the latest topic on Trump’s Twitter feed. “There’s not a whole lot I’m gonna do until it’s out there,” the Secretary of State said.

ADVERTISEMENT

“The challenge is just getting caught up because I don’t even have a Twitter account that I can follow when he’s tweeting,” Tillerson said. “So my staff usually has to print his tweets out and hand them to me.”

“It might be five minutes, or it might be an hour before somebody hands me a piece of paper and says, ‘Hey, the president’s tweeted this out,'” he continued. “It allows me to now think about … is it a foreign policy issue? What is it he’s tweeting about, and how do we take that and now use it?”