Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired

President Trump ousted on Tuesday his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, the most dramatic in a cascade of personnel moves that suggest Trump is determined to surround himself with loyalists more willing to reflect his “America First” views. Trump announced that he would replace Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director and former Tea Party movement congressman, who has cultivated a close relationship with the president and has taken a harder line than Tillerson on critical issues like Iran and North Korea.

Tillerson’s dismissal, on the heels of Gary D. Cohn’s resignation as Trump’s chief economic adviser after a dispute over steel tariffs, pulls the Trump administration further out of the economic and foreign policy mainstream and closer to the nationalist ideas that animated Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.