TRUMP: The Truth Shall Set You...Free

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired today just hours after he called the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a nerve agent in the U.K. "a really egregious act" that appears to have "clearly" come from Russia. Apparently angered, Trump fired him via Twitter.

Of course, it wasn't the only disagreement between Trump and the former Exxon oil baron he appointed to head the State Department after his election. But perhaps that was the coups de grâce. Calling Trump a "fucking moron" last September didn't help, and neither did his disagreement with the President on the Iran nuclear deal among other policy issues.

But the fact is that Trump simply hates inconvenient truths.

Consider the case of Steve Goldstein, under secretary of public affairs at the State Department, who was fired by the White House just hours after Tillerson was sacked. Goldstein had publicly contradicted the White House account of how Tillerson was fired, saying the Secretary had been notified in a Tweet by President Trump this morning and then in a phone call three hours later, although the White House said Trump asked Tillerson to resign on Friday.

Goldstein opened his mouth. Gone.

Then there's James Schwab, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman in the San Francisco Division, who resigned last week because he couldn't "bear the burden" of spreading untruths on behalf of the Trump administration.

Schwab said his decision was prompted by false statements made by ICE on Feb. 27 and then repeated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Those statements criticized Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf for her decision to warn city residents of an imminent ICE raid that would target about 1,000 people.

ICE Deputy Director Thomas D. Hoam said that warning helped "864 criminal aliens and public safety threats" to evade capture. Sessions then condemned the mayor, a Democrat, and said she had helped hundreds to escape.

Schwab told news outlets that those statements were wrong and misleading, saying ICE would never have picked up so many people and that to say they all were dangerous criminals and were not arrested because of the mayor's action was "just wrong."

“I just couldn’t bear the burden — continuing on as a representative of the agency and charged with upholding integrity, knowing that information was false,” Schwab told CNN.

Of course those are just three recent examples. Bottom line is this: if you work for Trump, you had better spew the Trump line or your'e gone.