It's done. The inevitable has now happened. A secretary of state who was never particularly liked nor trusted by the president has now been unceremoniously fired – the first such removal of a secretary of state in the modern history of the United States. It may be that the thin-skinned Donald Trump decided to can Rex Tillerson after he reportedly called the president “a fucking moron” last year, and only now felt ready to drop the guillotine.
But before Tillerson rides off into the Texas sunset and is dismissed by his critics as the worst secretary of state in decades, let's be honest about something: Tillerson may have played his hand badly. But the one he was dealt all but guaranteed a premature departure or marginalization. In short, the secretary's fate was never entirely in his hands the minute he decided to offer honest instead of enabling and toady advice to the president.
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