You may get a tweet
Good morning Chaos.
As is typical of His Rudeness, he told the world without telling Tillerson.
Mr. Tillerson learned he had been fired on Tuesday morning when a top aide showed him a tweet from Mr. Trump announcing the change, according to a senior State Department official.
Well at least His Rudeness didn’t wait until Rex was in Ulan Bator and then expect him to make his own way home.
Oh wait, yes he did.
But he had gotten an oblique warning of what was coming the previous Friday from the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, who called to tell him to cut short a trip to Africa and advised him “you may get a tweet.”
So if Kelly hadn’t warned him, Tillerson would have been stranded somewhere in Africa the way Comey was stranded in LA when HR fired him. Trump is a sadistic pig on top of everything else he is. I have no brief for Tillerson, I think he’s awful, but that doesn’t justify Trump’s behavior.
Also that “you may get a tweet” – what kind of garbage is that?
Let’s look at the tweet that Rex “got”:
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
That is a very strange way for a president to tell the Secretary of State “you’re fired.”
In even worse news, Pompeo is replacing Tillerson, so everything will get more terrible still.
“We were not really thinking the same,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House, explaining his decision to replace Mr. Tillerson.
What Trump does can’t be called “thinking.”
The move caught even the White House staff by surprise. Just the day before, a White House spokesman berated a reporter for suggesting there was any kind of split between Mr. Tillerson and the White House because of disparate comments on Russian responsibility for a poison attack in Britain.
But a senior administration official said that Mr. Trump decided to replace Mr. Tillerson now to have a new team in place before upcoming talks with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader he plans to meet by May. The president also wanted a new chief diplomat for various ongoing trade negotiations.
Of course none of that explains the insanely abrupt and informal way the “replacement” was put into effect.
The White House’s purge extended to Mr. Tillerson’s inner circle. The under secretary of state for public affairs, Steve Goldstein, was fired, and the status was unclear of Mr. Tillerson’s chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, and his deputy chief of staff, Christine Ciccone.
Mr. Tillerson, who was at the State Department on Tuesday morning, may speak to the staff around 2 p.m.
Or he could just do a couple of tweets on his way out the door. Whatever.
While other cabinet officers made their goals plain, Mr. Tillerson never set clear diplomatic priorities other than to pursue Mr. Trump’s slogan of “America First,” a term he never really defined. In an odd admission more than eight months into the job, Mr. Tillerson told employees in September that his top priority was to make the State Department more efficient. Yet he never fully addressed what diplomats should be doing with that greater efficiency.
Congress rebelled, declining to endorse his suggested 30 percent cuts in the State Department’s budget. But the message of his tenure seemed clear: At a moment when money was being poured into the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, diplomacy seemed less valued than at any time in recent American history.
He’s no loss, but Pompeo will probably be even worse.
But perhaps the most puzzling part of Mr. Tillerson’s tenure was his poor oversight of the State Department. As a former top business executive, his managerial skills were thought to be his chief asset.
But he failed to quickly pick a trusted team of leaders, left many critical departments without direction and all but paralyzed crucial decision making in the department.
He approved one global conclave in Washington just eight days before the event was to start, ensuring that few leaders from around the world were able to attend. He rarely sat for comprehensive briefings with many of his top diplomats and often failed to consult the State Department’s experts on countries before visiting.
Foreign diplomats — starting with the British and the French — said Mr. Tillerson neither returned phone calls nor, with much advance warning, set up meetings with his counterparts. Strategic dialogues with many nations, including nuclear weapons powers like Pakistan, were ended without explanation.
The State Department’s policymaking process devolved into conversations between Mr. Tillerson and a lone top aide, neither of whom had much experience or knowledge about many of the countries they discussed.
The State Department’s policymaking process devolved into conversations between Mr. Tillerson and a lone top aide, neither of whom had much experience or knowledge about many of the countries they discussed.
Utterly shambolic.
Worse to come.
That Tillerson was an utter disaster as SoS is undisputed. But to replace him mere months before this supposed sit-down with Kim Jong-un makes what already looked like a catastrophe in the making even more terrifying. And now Trump’s also fired the guy who confirmed that Trump’s tweet was how Tillerson found himself with a pink slip because it contradicted the patently nonsensical White House narrative.
If your intention is to make the US look like a complete basket-case, congratulations! You totally nailed it, Mr. President. We’ll be paying for this presidency for the rest of this century, I suspect.
If we’re lucky. At this point, we might not make it through this century without civil war, or worse.
It’s not just the US that will be paying for the Trump presidency, if Trump starts a trade war the entire world will pay. What a dickhead. The mandarins in the Middle Kingdom probably can’t believe their luck.
Even more so if he starts a nuclear war.
Not actually puzzling – he wants a weak state department, otherwise they might offer resistence to his goal of erasing all barriers to Russian oil deals and further personal enrichment.