| | 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: |
|
| 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. Read more... | |
|
Tweet/Headline of the Day |
|
| 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: President Trump, fresh off replacing his secretary of State and CIA director, is considering firing his secretary of Veterans Affairs and installing Energy Secretary Rick Perry in the post, according to two people close to the White House. Mr. Trump did not make a formal offer to Mr. Perry when the two men met on Monday. But the people said the president has grown impatient with the department’s current secretary, Dr. David Shulkin, and may want to replace him with someone already in his cabinet. It was unclear if Mr. Perry, who was an Air Force pilot before entering politics, would accept the change in position if Mr. Trump offered it, or if Mr. Trump had a successor in mind to lead the Energy Department. | |
|
| 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.” | |
|
|
|