White House shakeup:
President Trump fires Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and picks CIA chief Mike Pompeo as his replacement.
WASHINGTON— President Trump on Tuesday ousted his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, extending a shake-up of his administration, 14 months into his tumultuous presidency, and potentially transforming the nation’s economic and foreign policy.
Trump announced he would replace Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director and former Tea Party congressman, who forged a close relationship with the president and is viewed as being more in sync with Trump’s America First credo.
Tillerson learned he had been fired Tuesday morning when a top aide showed him a tweet from Trump announcing the change, according to a senior State Department official. But he had gotten an oblique warning of what was coming the previous Friday from the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who called to tell him to cut short a trip to Africa and advised him “you may get a tweet.”
It was an abrupt end — after months of speculation — to a rocky tenure for a former oil executive who never meshed with the president who hired him. Tillerson clashed repeatedly with the White House staff and broke publicly with Trump on issues ranging from the dispute between Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the U.S. response to Russia’s cyber aggression.
“We were not really thinking the same,” Trump told reporters at the White House, explaining his decision to replace Tillerson.
He added: “Really, it was a different mindset, a different thinking.”
Trump announced his decision on Twitter.
At the State Department Tuesday afternoon, Tillerson said the president had called him from Air Force One just after noon — more than three hours after Trump had tweeted the news of his firing to his 49 million followers — to inform him personally of the dismissal. Tillerson said he planned to immediately step aside from his post, turning over all responsibilities by the end of the day to John Sullivan, the deputy secretary of state.
During a short statement in a briefing room packed with reporters, Tillerson said he would end his service at midnight March 31, but was encouraging his policy planning team and undersecretaries and assistant secretaries “to remain in their posts and continue in our mission at the State Department.”
“I’ll now return to private life, as a private citizen, as a proud American, proud of the opportunity I had to serve my country,” Tillerson said. He took no questions and left the briefing room.
The firing of Tillerson 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 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 Trump decided to replace 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.
The White House’s purge extended to Tillerson’s inner circle. The undersecretary of state for public affairs, Steve Goldstein, was fired, and the status was unclear of Tillerson’s chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, and his deputy chief of staff, Christine Ciccone.
At the CIA, Pompeo will be replaced by the current deputy director Gina Haspel, who will be the first woman to head the spy agency. Both she and Pompeo would need confirmation by the Senate to take the positions.
Tillerson has been out of favor with Trump for months, but had resisted being pushed out. His distance from Trump’s inner circle was clear last week when the president accepted an invitation to meet with Kim, to Tillerson’s surprise.
Trump said Pompeo “has earned the praise of members in both parties by strengthening our intelligence gathering, modernizing our defensive and offensive capabilities, and building close ties with our friends and allies in the international intelligence community.”
“I have gotten to know Mike very well over the past 14 months, and I am confident he is the right person for the job at this critical juncture,” the president continued, in a statement distributed by the White House. “He will continue our program of restoring America’s standing in the world, strengthening our alliances, confronting our adversaries, and seeking the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
In a Twitter post, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader from San Francisco, warned that the turnover at the top of the State Department had diminished the United States with foreign leaders.
Tillerson, a former chief executive of the oil giant Exxon Mobil, had once been viewed as an intriguing, if unorthodox, Cabinet choice. He had deep experience with Middle Eastern potentates and knew Russian President Vladimir Putin through Exxon’s extensive efforts to explore for oil in Russia.
But the early enthusiasm for bringing a business sensibility to the State Department faded fast, as Tillerson seemed overwhelmed by the diplomatic challenges before him and isolated by career foreign service officers whom he often froze out of the most important debates.
His profound disagreements with the president on policy appeared to be his undoing: Tillerson wanted to remain part of the Paris climate accord; Trump decided to leave it. Tillerson supported the continuation of the Iran nuclear deal; Trump loathed the deal as “an embarrassment to the United States.” And Tillerson believed in dialogue to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis, but Trump repeatedly threatened military options.