Nikki Haley Claims Rex Tillerson and John Kelly Wanted to Undermine Trump
It's been more than a year since Nikki Haley resigned as Donald Trump's ambassador to the United Nations. Compared to most alumni of the Trump administration, her tenure was relatively unembarrassing, with only one real instance of other cabinet members trying to throw her under the bus. She performed admirably as a Trump crony, telling Fox News that when the audience at the UN laughed when Trump claimed he accomplished more than any other U.S. president, they were actually laughing with him, and she tried to heap praise on Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, the president's nepotism hires.
Now, as she likely prepares for a presidential run in 2024, Haley has written a book on her time in the White House, called With All Due Respect. The Washington Post acquired an advance copy, and while Haley reportedly has little stern criticism for Trump in it, she does take aim at two of his former staffers: former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former Homeland Security secretary–slash–former chief of staff John Kelly. Haley claims that the two were working to undermine Trump from inside the administration and that they tried to enlist her help. Per The Washington Post:
"Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country," Haley wrote. "It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing," Haley wrote of the views the two men held. Tillerson also told her that people would die if Trump was unchecked, Haley wrote.
That sounds quite close to another insider account of the administration. In a 2018 anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, an unnamed member of the administration claimed that "many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office." The anonymous writer described Trump's leadership style as "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective."
Neither Tillerson nor Kelly gave comment to the Post regarding Haley's claims, but the speculation that "people would die if Trump was unchecked" has proven true multiple times. The president's decision to abruptly pull troops out of northern Syria has laid the groundwork for Turkey to commit genocide against the Kurdish population that had allied with the U.S. to fight ISIS. And at least 24 people have died in the border camps the Trump administration has created across the south.
Haley's account could do a lot to keep her in the president's good graces—or at the very least keep her from becoming reviled by his base should she in fact run for president later. Trump is obsessed with the idea that there's a "Deep State" conspiracy against him, that lifelong political operatives are committed to sabotaging his presidency. He may not have his own appointees in mind when he makes these claims, but Haley's accusations against Tillerson and Kelly no doubt sound like vindication to Trump and his base.
On March 15, when a white supremacist livestreamed his mass shootings of a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a country with one of the world's lowest gun homicide rates was stunned to silence. But only momentarily. The deaths of 51 New Zealanders, mostly Muslim immigrants, would not be met with a tepid countermeasure but a swift, clear response. Sean Flynn reports from Christchurch about the day of the massacre—and the days that followed.
Originally Appeared on GQ
