In a wide-ranging interview with CBS News anchor Nora O’Donnell, the Trump Administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, revealed that several key members of President Donald Trump’s White House staff tried to pressure her to “save the country” by challenging Trump.
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Haley claimed according to Fox News, were working on a “resistance” group within the White House and tried to recruit her as a front-line member.
Haley told O’Donnell that the pair “confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country” and that “Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president’s decisions was because, if he didn’t, people would die.”
Haley first revealed the conversations in her new book, “With All Due Respect.” She elaborated on the secret conversations in her interview with O’Donnell, which aired during a segment on CBS Sunday Morning.
“[I]nstead of saying that to me, they should’ve been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan,” Haley told O’Donnell, making it clear that she much preferred confronting the president outright than organizing behind his back.
“It should’ve been, ‘Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don’t like what he’s doing,’” Haley told O’Donnell. “But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive.”
Haley’s book outlines a number of clashes she had with Trump’s White House Chief of Staff and the president’s former Secretary of State, including an incident that centered around her decision to withdraw the United States’ support from a United Nations body that supported Palestinians and gave material support to organizations that supported terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Tillerson and Kelly opposed the move, Haley wrote, according to CNN. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, helped Haley get the decision approved.
“I was so shocked I didn’t say anything going home because I just couldn’t get my arms around the fact that here you have two key people in an administration undermining the President,” Haley told the Washington Post in an interview about her book.
In her book, Haley portrays herself as a strong voice of reason in an otherwise chaotic White House, even opposing the President when the need arose. In “With All Due Respect,” Haley recalls confronting Trump over his initial cozy relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and dressing down the President over his “moral equivalence” between leftist protesters and white nationalists in the wake of a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one leftist protester dead.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has often been cited as a future Republican presidential candidate and a potential replacement for current Vice President Mike Pence, if President Donald Trump wins re-election and serves a second term. Several former members of the GOP have pressed Haley to challenge Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, but Haley seems content to begin laying the foundation for a future run.