With all due contempt
Former US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley alleges that two of President Trump’s senior advisers tried to recruit her to secretly undermine the administration from the inside.
That’s Business Insider’s way of wording it.
In her explosive new memoir, Haley claims former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly attempted to bring her in to subvert the president, according to The Washington Post which obtained the book prior to its release.
Haley refused their attempts to convince her to “save the country,” noting Tillerson and Kelly were suspicious of and threatened by her relationship with the president. During her time in the administration, Haley demonstrated an “obligation to carry out [Trump’s] wishes since he was the one elected by voters,” wrote Washington Post reporter Anne Gearan.
See these are all different things. Undermining the administration is not the same as subverting the president is not the same as saving the country.
Also, it’s not true that Trump is the one elected by voters. He’s the one elected by the (grotesquely lopsided) Electoral College. The voters elected Clinton by more than three million. It’s accurate to say he was elected, it’s not accurate to say he was elected by voters.
“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 in “With All Due Respect.”
Kelly and Tillerson are not great themselves, in fact Kelly is downright rotten, but they’re not the headlong disaster that Trump is.
I’d need to know more about what they asked her to do.
Haley’s staking out her ground for 2024 as a Trump loyalist.
So after all the denials that there was any talk of invoking the 25th amendment, Haley confirms there was a “save the country from Trump” movement within the administration, which is at least in the same ballpark.
Hopefully in 1 year and 2 months we’ll be done with this. Democrats, don’t blow it.
I’m not predicting this, or taking anything for granted, or “jinxing” it or whatever, but there is at least a possibility that Trump loses the next election fairly badly. In which case it will be amusing to see all the GOP officials who are defending every ridiculous thing he does now turn on a dime and give him the George W. Bush treatment. “Who — Trump? Oh, he was never a Real Conservative to begin with. But enough about him, let’s get on with the impeachment hearings over President Warren’s blatant Emolument Clause violation when her cousin’s college roommate accepted a speaking fee at a foreign university.”
I heard the interview with Haley on NPR on the way into work today. It was… unedifying. In no small part because the interviewer pirouetted around the subject of the current impeachment hearings so fast her toe was smoking.