Early Wednesday morning, NBC News was up with a big story: the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, came close to resigning this summer, it said, and he had to be talked out of it by Vice-President Mike Pence. Citing three unnamed sources, the report also said that, on July 20th, after a meeting at the Pentagon in which Donald Trump and his advisers discussed military options in Afghanistan, Tillerson referred to the President as a “moron.”

Within hours, Tillerson was standing at a lectern, addressing reporters. This in itself was unusual. In keeping with his status as the former chief executive of ExxonMobil, a hidebound business empire that traces its roots to John D. Rockefeller, Tillerson has generally adopted a dismissive attitude toward reporters. Usually, he barely tells them where in the world he is going. Calling them in for an unscheduled announcement raised everybody’s expectations. Was he resigning? He was not. He was refuting.

“To address a few specifics that have been erroneously reported this morning, the Vice-President has never had to persuade me to remain as Secretary of State, because I have never considered leaving this post,” Tillerson said, in his Texan twang. “Let me tell you what I’ve learned about this President, whom I did not know before taking this office. He loves his country. He puts Americans and America first. He’s smart.” The last assertion was evidently meant to address the “moron” quote. Tillerson didn’t explicitly refer to the NBC News report, however, so after he had finished reading his statement, a reporter asked him to do so. “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” Tillerson replied. “The places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense. And it is intended to do nothing but divide people. And I’m just not going to be part of this effort to divide this Administration.”

Parts of the media quickly leapt on that response as a non-denial. Within minutes, the Daily Beast was running the headline “Rex Tillerson Will Neither Quit Nor Deny He Called Trump A Moron.” Another headline, at the Washington Post’s Fix column, said, “Rex Tillerson might as well have just admitted he called Trump a ‘moron.’ ” On MSNBC, meanwhile, Stephanie Ruhle, one of the NBC News reporters responsible for the scoop, informed viewers, “My source didn’t just say that he called him a moron. He said an ‘effing moron.’ ”

Later in the day, Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokeswoman, issued a more explicit denial on Tillerson’s behalf. “The Secretary did not use that type of language to speak about the President of the United States,” Nauert insisted. “He did not say that.” But if Nauert’s statement is true, and Tillerson didn’t use the M-word, you have to ask yourself: Why not?

The Pentagon meeting on July 20th came a day after another meeting of Trump’s national-security team, held in the White House Situation Room. According to a previous report by NBC News, Trump stunned many of those present by threatening to fire the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, whom he hadn’t even met, and suggesting that he could get better advice by talking to someone far less senior. He regaled those in attendance with a story about how, back in the eighties, he hired an expensive consultant to advise him on renovating the “21” Club, in midtown Manhattan, only to discover that he would have been better off listening to one of the waiters.

Five days after that display of contempt for the expertise of his experts, Trump delivered a speech at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree, in which he boasted about the size of his electoral vote, called Washington a “sewer,” and joked about firing Tom Price, who was then the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Tillerson has lifelong ties to the Scouts. His father worked for the Boy Scouts of America. He himself was an Eagle Scout, and from 2010 to 2012 he served as the organization’s national president. It isn’t hard to imagine what he must have thought of Trump’s speech.

And yet, rather than telling off the President and moving back to Texas, Tillerson stayed in his post. He gritted through it, just as he must have, this past weekend, after Trump took to Twitter and informed the world that his Secretary of State was “wasting his time” trying to reach a diplomatic settlement with North Korea. (This Trump outburst came as Tillerson was getting back from China, where he had met with top Chinese officials, including the President, Xi Jinping.)

But Tillerson also seems determined to carry on as best he can, partly by working with officials in other agencies to navigate around Trump. “What we have accomplished, we have done as a team,” he said in his statement. He cited the tightening of economic sanctions on North Korea; the intensification of the military assault on ISIS inside Syria; and the adoption of a new strategy in Afghanistan, which Trump, despite the scathing attitude he initially adopted, eventually signed onto.

As members of the “team,” Tillerson mentioned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, the Ambassador to the United Nations, and the Defense Secretary, James Mattis. “General Mattis and I communicate virtually every day, and we agree there must be the highest level of coördination between our diplomatic efforts and our military efforts,” he said. “You can’t have a stronger partner than a Secretary of Defense who embraces diplomacy. And I hope he feels he has the partner he needs at the State Department.”

Having name-checked some of the principals, Tillerson went on: “And this is just the beginning of the list of partners and friends across the government who are all working for the American people. There is much to be done, and we’re just getting started.” Yet, despite his efforts to pursue a diplomatic solution to the North Korea crisis, it is debatable how much, if anything, Tillerson has really accomplished this year. A number of national-security experts, including Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, have called on him to quit. “Rex Tillerson has been dealt a bad hand by the Potus & has played it badly,” Haass tweeted on Wednesday. “For both reasons he cannot be effective SecState & should resign.”

Tillerson is no George C. Marshall or Dean Acheson—that’s for sure. Since taking office, he has spent far too much time on his personal crusade to downsize the State Department, and too little time surrounding himself with experienced diplomats and foreign-policy specialists. But, if Tillerson were to quit, Trump would hardly replace him with anyone in the mold of Marshall or Acheson. (John Bolton, anybody?) Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for many people in Washington on Wednesday when he said, “I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, and Chief of Staff Kelly are those people who help separate our country from chaos . . . I hope they stay because they’re valuable to the national security of our nation.” In any case, Tillerson seems to be staying put, at least for now.

This post has been updated to include Senator Corker’s comments.