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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Trump soured on Tillerson as his top diplomat
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was asleep in his Nairobi hotel room early Saturday morning fighting a stomach bug when White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly called to wake him around 2 a.m. to relay a terse message from President Trump: The boss was not happy.
The president was so eager to fire Tillerson that he wanted to do so in a tweet on Friday, but Kelly persuaded Trump to wait until his secretary of state was back in the United States from Africa, two people familiar with the conversation said. It was Tillersons first trip there since Trump disparaged parts of the continent as shithole countries.
But Kelly had also warned Tillerson to possibly expect a pejorative tweet from Trump over the weekend, a State Department official said. Tillerson failed to fully understand that the chief of staff was gently signaling to him that he was about to be fired.
And so, just over four hours after Tillersons government plane touched down at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday morning, the secretary of state learned of his dismissal from a tweet Trump issued just minutes after The Washington Post first reported the news.
Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Trump tweeted, in a message that began with congratulations for CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trumps pick to become secretary of state. The president also nominated Gina Haspel to lead the CIA, making her the first woman to run the spy agency, if confirmed. Both she and Pompeo are subject to Senate confirmation.
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Officials at the White House and the State Department, who have been at loggerheads since the beginning of the administration, offered conflicting accounts of just how the departure occurred. And the chaotic aftermath led to collateral damage this time in the form of Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, who was swiftly fired for contradicting the White Houses version of events.
But Tillerson perhaps should not have been surprised by his ouster, which has been so long in the making that recurring rumors of his demise took on a nickname: Rexit.
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Trump and Tillerson have disagreed over strategy in key areas of foreign policy, such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, how to handle China and the Middle East, the Paris climate accord, the approach to North Korea, and the overall tone of U.S. diplomacy. The president was disdainful of his secretary of state for being too establishment in his thinking and for disagreeing with him in meetings.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/it-was-a-different-mind-set-how-trump-soured-on-tillerson-as-his-top-diplomat/2018/03/13/899b1fba-26d7-11e8-b79d-f3d931db7f68_story.html?utm_term=.c0cc30d50b6f&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1
The dotard wants yes men. We're fucked.
dalton99a
(81,073 posts)One source of weakness, the president felt, was Tillersons media profile. Trump told one adviser he was amazed at how much negative press Tillerson received. This guy never gets a good story about him, Trump said, according to this adviser.
Tillerson isolated himself from the thousands of career diplomats working for the State Department; maintained a distant and at times frosty relationship with his press corps for most of his tenure; and struggled to gain stature on the world stage, as many diplomats and foreign leaders correctly concluded that the secretary did not speak for the president.
Inside the White House, Tillerson had few allies. He was routinely undermined by Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law and a senior White House adviser who took charge of the Middle East and Mexico diplomatic portfolios. Tillerson resented appearing subservient to the 37-year-old, who had no foreign policy experience. He sometimes took days to return Kushners phone calls and griped that he felt the White House was keeping the State Department out of the loop.
no_hypocrisy
(45,774 posts)by making him fly back on commercial airlines on his own penny.
GusBob
(7,286 posts)Rex was done when he called Trump a fucking moron
Trump had to punish him for that