Former UN envoy says Trump's advisers undermined him to 'save country'
WASHINGTON: Two top advisers to President Donald Trump ignored or undermined him because "they were trying to save the country", former United Nations (UN) ambassador Nikki Haley writes in a new book.
She says both then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House chief of staff John Kelly sought her help in undercutting or working around Mr Trump but she refused, according to the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the book, With All Due Respect, ahead of its release today.
"Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the President, they weren't being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country," she 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."
She said Mr Tillerson told her people would die if Mr Trump was not restrained.
Mrs Haley, a former Governor of South Carolina, left the UN job at the end of last year on good terms with Mr Trump.
Mr Kelly left the White House a few weeks after Mrs Haley, reportedly barely on speaking terms with Mr Trump; the President had fired Mr Tillerson - on Twitter - in March last year.
SUPPORTING TRUMP
In the book, Mrs Haley supports many of Mr Trump's foreign policy decisions that others in the administration opposed, including the unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement, as well as the decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
But Mrs Haley also pointed to several disagreements with the President: over his embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met in Helsinki in 2017, and over Mr Trump's "moral equivalence" in suggesting there were good people on "both sides" after the deadly white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia.
While she did not always agree with Mr Trump, Mrs Haley said people like Mr Kelly and Mr Tillerson had an obligation either to carry out his agenda or, if they could not do so, to quit.
Mrs Haley's memoir is being released a week before another, more critical book by a White House insider.
A Warning is said to be written by an anonymous author described only as "a senior official in the Trump administration".
The Post, which also obtained an advance copy of that book, said it "paints a chilling portrait of the President as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation".
But early reviews say the book does not break much new ground about the President. - AFP
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