By firing Rex Tillerson, Trump is creating a team in his own image, not likely to contradict him but rather to provide affirmation

Donald Trump has demonstrated yet again that he is the opposite of his reality TV persona who relished telling contestants to their face: “You’re fired!”

In real life, FBI director James Comey learned of his termination last year from television screens in a room where he was making a speech to bureau agents in Los Angeles. And on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson found out about his demise when Trump announced it in a tweet, according to state department officials.

Strangely for a hard-nosed, swaggering New York businessman, Trump appears to have a congenital aversion to delivering the bad news in person when it’s not a TV show. Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus was also ousted by tweet, while former chief strategist Steve Bannon got wind of his imminent removal while Trump was at Camp David.

But why now for the secretary of state? Tillerson – who had reportedly branded Trump “a fucking moron” and been challenged by the president to an IQ test – appeared to have weathered the worst storm. Last November, White House officials let it be known there was a plan to replace him but, after a lunch with Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump proclaimed that it was all “fake news”.

The secretary of state reached his first anniversary in charge. Perhaps even he was surprised. At an event with one of his predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, in Stanford, California, in January, he was sufficiently relaxed to joke about Trump: “Well, he’s world class at social media and I’m not and I want to confess here in the heart of the creation of this great technology, I have no social media accounts. I have never had any and I don’t intend to have any.”

But as the low-tech Tillerson trudged on, something changed in the White House in recent weeks. The turnover of staff, already dizzying, gathered even more momentum. Many close observers have described Trump as newly unfiltered and unshackled, with fewer and fewer pairs of hands to save him from himself.

This has two components. First, more unilateral decision-making by Trump himself. Last week alone he followed one of his few core ideological beliefs by announcing trade tariffs on steel and aluminium, despite warnings of a global trade war, then suddenly said he was ready to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Secondly, personnel. Trump is creating an administration in his own image, not likely to contradict him but rather to provide affirmation. Less a team of rivals than a chorus of praise singers. “So I’ve gotten to know a lot of people very well over the last year and I’m really at a point where we’re getting very close to having the cabinet and other things that I want,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

The tariffs decision led to the resignation of his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, another moderating influence who had dared to disagree. The North Korean move exposed how Tillerson was being left out of the loop. On Tuesday, Trump also highlighted how the two men differ over the Iran nuclear deal, with Tillerson in favor and Trump against. Trump’s replacement secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is on “the same wavelength” as his boss, as the president put it.

Trump and Tillerson, an imperious corporate CEO from Texas, did not have that kind of chemistry, and the president’s mind was made up by the end of last week. Chief of staff John Kelly called – and woke up – the secretary during his tour of Africa, though what was said remains disputed. Disagreements over Russia in the past 24 hours were therefore not decisive, and Pompeo is no fan of Vladimir Putin.

The exact timing seems best explained by Tillerson having arrived back on US soil on Tuesday morning. Even so, the optics of firing him soon after he condemned Russia in appreciably harsher terms than the White House were jarring. It also remains perpetually curious that Trump shows more respect to Putin than Tillerson or Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Other potential side-effects for the news cycle: the Tillerson story may overshadow Tuesday night’s House special election in Pennsylvania, where a Trump-backed Republican appears on course for defeat, as well as the dismissal of White House aide John McEntee and allegations of Trump having had an extramarital affair with pornographic actor Stormy Daniels. Whether these were on the president’s mind when he hit send on his tweet is, of course, anyone’s guess.