Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers, and Jordan Klepper agree: Rex Tillerson was a terrible secretary of state

(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/The Daily Show)

last updated 14 March 2018

Secretary of State and "human Grumpy Cat" Rex Tillerson was just one of three Trump administration officials fired on Tuesday alone, Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show. "Working for the White House is basically like being in a Saw movie: You show up, you get tortured for a while, and then you get killed off." It's not clear why Trump decided to fire Tillerson now, Noah said, but he summed up their fraught relationship with the "serious mind games" Trump played with Tillerson on North Korea. "It's like Trump was trying to get Tillerson to break up with him," he said. Still, the people who dissed Tillerson early on "turned out to be right," Noah added. "Tillerson was a pretty bad secretary of state." He gave some examples — funding cuts, exodus of diplomats — then drily celebrated "Rex Tillerson's greatest achievements." Or rather, achievement.

"I'm not saying Rex Tillerson was a great secretary of state — he had the energy of a 14-year-old bloodhound on his third mint julep," Seth Meyers said on Late Night. "But if you're going to fire Cabinet secretaries for being bad at their jobs, let me refer you to Betsy DeVos' appearance on 60 Minutes. Not only was she wildly uninformed, but 60 minutes is also her longest work day so far." Tillerson, like Gary Cohn, was never going to "rein in Donald Trump," he added. "If the White House is a fraternity in an '80s movie, Tillerson was the dean — and the dean never wins in an '80s movie."

"There's a million reasons why Donald Trump should have fired Rex Tillerson," Jordan Klepper agreed on The Opposition. "He called Trump a 'f---ing moron'; for a guy in the State Department, he wasted a lot of time in foreign countries"; and worst of all, he added, Tillerson wanted to punish Russia. Watch more below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.