Unceremoniously dumped
Next up in the Don-Rex news is the meta-story of how the firing really went down.
President Donald Trump unceremoniously dumped Secretary of State Rex Tillerson by tweet on Tuesday and picked CIA Director Mike Pompeo to take his place, abruptly ending Tillerson’s turbulent tenure as America’s top diplomat and escalating the administration’s chaotic second-year shake-up.
Tillerson was ousted barely four hours after he returned from an Africa mission and with no face-to-face conversation with the president, the latest casualty of an unruly White House that has seen multiple top officials depart in recent weeks.
And, apparently, with no official notification: no letter, no phone call, no message sent by courier – only a tweet declaring the fact. A tweet. A tweet.
In an illustration of the gulf that has long separated Tillerson and Trump, the White House and the State Department vigorously disagreed about the circumstances of his firing.
Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein and other State Department officials said Tuesday morning that Tillerson hadn’t learned he was dismissed until he saw Trump’s early-morning tweet, and hadn’t discussed it directly with Trump. Goldstein said the former Exxon Mobil CEO was “unaware of the reason” he was fired and “had had every intention of staying.”
A tweet.
The president fired the secretary of state in a tweet.
A tweet.
Then Goldstein, hours after making those comments, was fired, too.
But, being an underling, he didn’t get even a tweet.
Multiple White House officials said that Tillerson had been informed of the decision Friday, while he was in Ethiopia. One official said chief of staff John Kelly had called Tillerson on Friday and again on Saturday to warn him that Trump was about to take imminent action if he did not resign and that a replacement had already been identified. Tillerson canceled his entire schedule that Saturday in Ethiopia, with the State Department telling reporters he was sick.
When Tillerson didn’t step aside, Trump fired him, that official said.
A distinction without a difference.
On Tillerson’s plane trip back from Africa, he had told reporters he had cut short his mission by one night because he was exhausted after working most of the night both Friday on Saturday and falling ill. He mentioned that after his 2:30 a.m. call with Trump on Friday about North Korea, the next night he “got another call at 2:30 that woke me up,” but declined to say what that call was about.
“I felt like, look, I just need to get back,” Tillerson said.
So that at least he wouldn’t be in Nigeria when The Tweet fell, having to buy his own plane ticket back.
Nothing to see here folks, don’t worry.
That sounds so much less bad than it really is…
I can empathize with Tillerson, having been fired once without being told. I showed up for work one day and found I was written off the schedule. The manager did not know I had been fired, the crew did not know I had been fired, and the assistant manager who fired me wasn’t able to be reached to sort things out, so I was sent home until we found out what was happening. Later that evening, I found that indeed I had been fired, in a way that is almost certainly not legal, and for reasons that were never stated and probably not legal (i.e., the assistant manager was afraid of the fact that I had found her sleeping in the break room when she was supposed to be on duty). The manager was a weak soul who always wanted to be “nice” to people, so he refused to take action, afraid that rescinding the firing would undermine the authority of the assistant manager. He found out why he was wrong only when she had fired 90% of his most talented night crew and he had no one who could keep the store running.
I tell this story so people understand what it is really like to work for Trump…I can empathize with Tillerson, but I cannot like him as Secretary of State. Still…Pompeo. OMG.
Doing it by tweet is cowardly.
Not an original observation, but how ironic that the guy who starred in a “reality” show where he fired people all the time is such a chicken about doing it in actual reality.
I hate to believe Trump’s side over anyone, but Tillerson’s people may be playing games here, and he may have been asked to resign as Trump’s people are saying. If not, then it’s quite a coincidence that he cancelled the rest of his schedule after allegedly being told he was being removed.
I do think it is a distinction that matters if he was told he had to resign and chose not to. In that case the firing wasn’t out of the blue. Using a tweet is still ridiculous though.
To be fair, the real decision maker, Putin, may have fired Rex by phone.
#3
I’d actually be surprised if Putin wanted this, as Rex had goals comported pretty well with Putin’s – opening Russia up to oil and gas export deals.