‘Different mind-set’ prompted Trump to fire Tillerson

Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, who was swiftly fired for contradicting the White House’s version of events. But Tillerson perhaps should not have been surprised by his ouster, which has been so long in the making that recurring rumors of his demise took on a nickname: Rexit.

“Rex and I have been talking about this for a long time,” Trump told reporters Tuesday morning. “I actually got along well with Rex, but really it was a different mind-set, a different thinking.”

Trump and Tillerson have disagreed over strategy in key areas of foreign policy, such as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the approach to North Korea and the overall tone of U.S. diplomacy. The president was disdainful of his secretary of state for being “too establishment” in his thinking and for disagreeing with him in meetings.

In a sign of the tension, Trump made one of his biggest foreign-policy gambles without so much as consulting his secretary of state. The president decided Thursday to accept North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s invitation for a face-to-face meeting, but Tillerson was traveling in Africa and was frustrated to have been excluded from the internal deliberations, administration officials said.

Tillerson had long expressed interest in a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff with North Korea, but Trump until recently had largely dismissed such talks as a waste of time and opted instead for a campaign of “maximum pressure” that included bellicose rhetoric from the president.

In the fall, Trump publicly undermined Tillerson after the secretary said he was reaching out to Pyongyang to try to open a diplomatic channel. In a pair of tweets, Trump wrote that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man... Save your energy Rex.”

Yet last week, when Trump shifted strategy to meet with Kim, Tillerson was left out of the loop. If that angered Tillerson, it pleased Trump, who boasted to advisers that he enjoyed the process more without Tillerson involved, officials said.

On Monday, flying home from Nigeria, Tillerson appeared to break with the White House in his assessment of the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain. He singled out Russia as responsible for the attack, echoing the finger-pointing of the British government – something White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to say earlier that day.

And the deposed Tillerson made a clear statement about Russian aggression in his departure remarks Tuesday.

“Much work remains to respond to the troubling behavior and actions on the part of the Russian government,” he said.