With regard to the firing of Secretary Tillerson, Ezra Klein confirms on Vox the firing of the #4 person at State as well, and then lets his jaw go slack:
Let’s count the eye-opening things here:
- Trump, whose television catchphrase was “You’re fired,” couldn’t bring himself to fire America’s top diplomat in person. This is similar to how he fired FBI Director James Comey, sending his former bodyguard Keith Schiller to deliver the news. The two incidents together confirm frequent press accounts that for all his bravado, Trump actually is loath to fire people himself.
- Tillerson reportedly only found out about his firing when Trump tweeted about it on Tuesday morning. This statement likely represents shock on the State Department’s part as well.
- The lead State Department spokesperson is openly insulting the president by leaking details about Tillerson’s dismissal that paint him in a negative light.
- Tillerson, whose tenure in Foggy Bottom was widely seen among foreign policy experts as one of the worst (if not the worst) in modern history, still believed he was doing a good job at the time of his firing.
- It’s still unclear why, exactly, the secretary of state was just fired at this particular moment in his spectacularly unimpressive tenure as America’s top diplomat.
In the Trump administration, chaos is something of a norm. But this is shocking even when grading on that curve.
With regard to Ezra’s #5, my previous offhand remark that this is cover for a possible disaster for the Republicans in the PA-18 special election has grown on me. Ezra’s making the classic error of trying to evaluate the event without thinking about the political context. Since Tillerson was out of favor with Trump, it was easy to sacrifice him.
And while Tillerson may have been one of the worst to occupy the post in recent memory, Pompeo may try to best him in that department. Assuming he’s confirmed in the post.
