Trump fires Sec of State Tillerson by Twitter
CIA director Mike Pompeo expected to be confirmed as replacement
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and said he would nominate CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him, ending Tillerson’s difficult tenure by tweeting an ouster that had been long expected and yet was shocking in its abruptness.
“We disagreed on things,” Trump said Tuesday after the tweet, a diplomatic version of a difficult relationship with his top diplomat that included reports that Tillerson had called the president a moron in meetings with other officials.
Trump’s change puts an ardent foe of the Iran nuclear deal in charge of U.S. diplomacy as the president also dives into highstakes talks with North Korea.
Trump mentioned differences over how to handle the Iran agreement, which he wanted to withdraw from.
“So we were not really thinking the same,” he said.
Though Trump and other officials said he’d been considering replacing Tillerson for some time, the president said he made the decision only recently and “by myself.” Tillerson will be “much happier now,” Trump said.
The reshuffle comes at a time of intense turnover within Trump’s administration that has alarmed those both in and out of the White House. Top economic adviser Gary Cohn announced his resignation last week, not long after communications director Hope Hicks and staff secretary Rob Porter both departed. For Trump, the shift comes at a critical time for several key foreign policy priorities, including a decision on whether to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Iran deal that Pompeo has called “disastrous.” Tillerson had long pushed Trump to remain in the agreement and had been pursuing a strategy with European allies to try to improve it.
It also comes amid a dramatic diplomatic opening with North Korea, with Trump set to hold a historic meeting with leader Kim Jong Un in May. Pressuring North Korea with sanctions and other isolation measures had been a top Tillerson priority, and he had been one of the administration’s more vocal advocates for holding talks in some form with the North. When Trump ultimately accepted Kim’s invitation for a meeting, Tillerson was in Ethiopia, though he said he spoke with Trump about it shortly before it was announced.
The president said he was nominating the CIA’s deputy director, Gina Haspel, to take over for Pompeo at the intelligence agency. If confirmed, Haspel would be the CIA’s first female director. Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, has already been confirmed by the Senate for his role at the CIA, making it extremely likely he will be confirmed for the State Department role. Trump tweeted, “He will do a fantastic job!”
As for his relationship with Tillerson, Trump said, “Really, it was a different mindset. It was a different thinking.”