The long-simmering tensions between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson came to a head Tuesday, when the commander-in-chief announced the ouster of the country’s top diplomat with a tweet.
One political analyst told Cheddar the move was telling.
“It speaks a lot to the character of the two men,” commentator Rick Wilson said. “When Donald Trump was selling steaks, vodka, and a fake university, Rex Tillerson was building Exxon into the largest energy company in the world.
“The anxiety that Trump has about Tillerson being more competent than him has finally played itself out.”
Tillerson reportedly found out about his firing after Trump took to Twitter to announce that CIA Director Mike Pompeo would take over at the State Department.
The president later said he and the former ExxonMobil CEO “were not really thinking the same,” but that Pompeo had a “similar thought process.”
Still, the decision to remove Tillerson came hours after he voiced his support of UK Prime Minister Theresa May and the British government, who on Monday said Russia was likely behind the poisoning of an ex-Moscow spy.
The Trump administration did not officially second those findings.
But Wilson said Tillerson was right to consider Russia “an imminent national security threat.”
“Donald Trump doesn’t see it that way,” he told Cheddar. “There’s something wrong about Donald Trump’s relationship and viewpoint about Vladimir Putin that makes him behave this way, even when serious and consequential people around him are warning him.”
The White House denied Tillerson’s dismissal had anything to do with Russia, instead saying it wanted to have new leadership in place before Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, expected this spring.
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/no-collusion-and-tillerson-is-out).
In the aftermath of earthquakes, one of the U.S. territory’s top architects is making the case for short-term assistance combined with long-term vision.
When President Bill Clinton was impeached more than 20 years ago, the Senate leaders who controlled his fate say they sought to appear neutral and separate from the White House and wanted to make the trial a bipartisan process. At least that’s how Trent Lott and Tom Daschle remember it today.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Facebook’s behavior “shameful” during her weekly press conference Thursday.
The federal government's watchdog agency said Thursday a White House office violated federal law in withholding security assistance to Ukraine.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Thursday, January 16, 2020.
The House delivered the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate Wednesday hours after Speaker Nancy Pelosi named seven managers to handle prosecute the trial.
“[Trump] would win right now because the Democrats have not succeeded in making this election a referendum on Trump,” longtime Republican and political strategist Rick Wilson told Cheddar on the eve of another sort of referendum — the president’s impeachment trial.
President Trump signed a so-called "phase one" trade deal with China on Wednesday, signaling a détente in a protracted trade war that resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars of tariffs being exchanged on exports between the world's two largest economies over the better part of two years.
Weeks after the White House unexpectedly derailed a bipartisan tax deal for electric vehicles, offshore wind energy, and other major green priorities, dozens of emissaries from the nation’s renewable energy industries and environmental advocacy groups are gathering in the nation’s capital to begin charting their green-energy push for 2020 — and to dissect what went wrong in the final hours of its 2019 influence campaign.
Here are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday, January 15, 2020.
