STATE OF

Trump fires Tillerson by tweet

PRESIDENT TRUMP sent Secretary of State Tillerson packing Tuesday, blindsiding the nation’s top diplomat with his decision to replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

The abrupt announcement was made in a Twitter message, posted ahead of Trump’s trip to California to visit border wall prototypes on Tuesday.

“Mike Pompeo, (below) 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!” he tweeted.

Tillerson cut short a trip to Africa on Monday — arriving in Washington hours ahead of the announcement of his dismissal.

“Rex and I have been talking about this for a long time. We got along actually quite well, but we disagreed on things,” Trump said during a brief appearance on the White House lawn.

Two White House officials told The Associated Press that Tillerson was told he was out on Friday.

But Steve Goldstein, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, released a statement saying Tillerson “did not speak to the President and is unaware of the reason.”

Tillerson “had every intention of staying” in the job because he felt he was making critical progress in national security, the close Tillerson aide added.

Goldstein was promptly fired after his statement contradicting the White House was released, sources told the Daily News.

Tillerson, meanwhile, only learned of his termination when he read Trump’s tweet on Tuesday morning.

White House chief of staff John Kelly had called Tillerson Friday and gave him a heads up, telling him to keep an eye out for a Trump tweet about his fate in the near future, sources told the AP. Tillerson, 65, took over the State Department last February. The former ExxonMobil CEO maintained an at times contentious relationship with the President during his 13 month tenure as the head of the State Department. His exit comes a day after publicly splitting from the White House’s refusal to blame Russia for a nerve agent attack in England. He issued a harshly worded condemnation of Moscow, going much further than the White House’s response. “We have full confidence in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible for the nerve agent attack that took place in Salisbury last week,” Tillerson said in a statement. White House press secretary Sarah