(Updated: 8:00 a.m.) The firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was a textbook example of Donald Trump’s approach to personnel decisions: abrupt, humiliating, and executed from a safe distance. The White House maintains that Tillerson was encouraged to resign twice last week and warned that Trump would take action otherwise. The State Department, on the other hand, said Tillerson and his colleagues only found out about his ouster when President Trump tweeted it Tuesday morning, shortly before getting on a plane to California:
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018
Tillerson’s departure had been expected for a while. A well-sourced New York Times article in November suggested the former Exxon CEO would be leaving the State Department within weeks. It took several months, but the outcome should hardly have been a surprise.
The relationship between the two men (and between the White House and the State Department) soured almost immediately. In February 2017, Tillerson’s first pick for his deputy, Elliott Abrams, was rejected by the White House even after what participants considered was a good meeting in the Oval Office among Trump, Tillerson, and Abrams. The episode was an inauspicious beginning.
Their differences where chiefly on policy—particularly on the Iran nuclear deal. Tillerson’s actions and advice were always aimed at pulling the president back from his inclination to end the deal. Trump was grumbling about having to recertify the Iran deal from his first deadline, in April, after being convinced to do so by his aides, including Tillerson. And at the next deadline in July, it was Tillerson who pushed hard to recertify again and who unreversed Trump’s last-minute reversal on certification. But the president who promised to dismantle the Iran deal in his campaign had had enough by October, when he overruled Tillerson and others (including Defense secretary James Mattis) and refused to recertify.
There were the personal disputes as well. Following the summer’s violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tillerson was asked about concerns from foreign leaders about Trump’s values. The president had said blame for the violence fell “on both sides” of the protests, even though it was a white supremacist who killed a protestor. “The president speaks for himself,” Tillerson deadpanned when pressed about Trump’s comments. And then there’s infamous “moron” comment, which Tillerson had a difficult time denying.
Tweet/Headline of the Day
EX-EXXON TEXAN EXEC REX NEXT EX-SEC
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) March 13, 2018
Mark It Down—“I think Mike Pompeo will be a truly great secretary of State. I have total confidence in him.” —President Trump, March 13, 2018
One More Thing—Tillerson’s departure might not be the last shakeup we see from the administration this week. From the New York Times:
Facebook Watch—The official page for a far-right, anti-Muslim group in Britain is being removed from Facebook, the social-networking site says. Citing “repeated” violations of Facebook’s own community standards, the company has taken action against the pages of Britain First and two of its leaders, Jayda Fransen and Paul Golding.
“We recently gave the administrators of the Pages a written final warning, and they have continued to post content that violates our Community Standards. As a result, in accordance with our policies, we have now removed the official Britain First Facebook Page and the Pages of the two leaders with immediate effect,” Facebook says in a statement. “We do not do this lightly, but they have repeatedly posted content designed to incite animosity and hatred against minority groups, which disqualifies the Pages from our service.”
Britain First, which declares itself “Islamophobic and proud” and had more than 2 million followers on its Facebook page, was a little-known fringe group until last November when President Trump retweeted three of its videos posted by Fransen. The videos claimed to portray recent violence perpetrated by Muslims in Western countries, but they were questionable and unverified, and at least one was revealed to have been taken in Egypt in 2013. Trump said earlier this year he would be willing to apologize for promoting the group Fransen.
Must-Read of the Day—In Politico: “The Financial Whisperer to Trump’s America” by Tim Alberta.
President Trump made his second visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as president Tuesday. He traveled to San Diego to examine prototypes for a new border wall that have been constructed there. At the site, Trump gave his rough criteria for the kind of wall he wants: partially transparent, and too high for even the best climbers to summit.
“The larger it is, the better it is, because it’s very hard to get over the top,” Trump said. “These are like professional mountain climbers. You’re incredibly climbers. They can’t climb some of these walls. Some of them they can—those are the walls we’re not using.”
After weeks of focusing on other issues, including school safety and steel tariffs, Trump returned to the topic of immigration several times on Twitter Tuesday, sharing a study that argued the border wall would pay for itself via correspondingly lower welfare spending, savaging California’s sanctuary city policies as putting “the safety and security of our entire nation at risk,” and insisting that “if we don’t have a wall system, we’re not going to have a country.”
Photo of the Day
Donald Trump inspects border wall prototypes in San Diego on March 13, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
Song of the Day—“Freedom Hangs Like Heaven” by Iron & Wine
