Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, has been causing quite a stir with her new memoir, in which she recounts how, during her time in the Trump administration, other top officials lobbied her to help them undermine the president.
In "With All Due Respect," Haley writes that Rex Tillerson, then the secretary of state, and John Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, considered some of President Donald Trump's policies so harebrained that they ignored his directives and began recruiting other aides to derail his agenda.
"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 writes. "Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president's decisions was because, if he didn't, people would die."
Haley makes clear that what disturbed her was Tillerson's and Kelly's arrogance. "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 went further in an interview with Norah O'Donnell of CBS News that aired Sunday, lecturing her former colleagues on how they should have handled such disputes. "Instead of saying that to me, they should have been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan," she said. "It should have been, go tell the president what your differences are and quit if you don't like what he's doing. 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."
Rather than being upset that top aides were conspiring to undermine Trump, she really should be more concerned that we have a president whom top aides saw as a threat to the country.
It's tempting to dismiss Haley - who is thought to harbor presidential ambitions - as an opportunist trying to sound high-minded while still remaining in the good graces of Trump and, more important, of the Republican voters who adore him. In recent interviews, she has struggled to at once criticize and rationalize some of Trump's more outrageous behavior.
Haley has also staked out a dubious defense of the president in the impeachment investigation. "So, do I think it's not good practice to talk to foreign governments about investigating Americans? Yes," she told The Washington Post. "Do I think the president did something that warrants impeachment? No, because the aid flowed. And, in turn, the Ukrainians didn't follow up with the investigation."
As Haley sees it, the president may have tried to subvert national security for his own political end, but he failed, so where's the harm?
On one key point, however, Haley is correct: If Tillerson and Kelly believed that Trump posed a serious threat to the national interest, they should have refused to continue enabling him, resigned and gone public with their concerns.
It's not as if Haley is the first person to tell of Trump aides working to contain their boss. In 2017, Trump asked Tillerson to help drop a criminal investigation of a Turkish Iranian gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer. Tillerson refused to interfere with a criminal probe and immediately conveyed his concerns to Kelly, according to multiple news reports.
Then there's Anonymous, the White House insider who wrote an op-ed essay for The Times in September 2018, followed by a book to be released this month, positioning the author as part of a noble "resistance" within the administration. Gary Edson, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, recently noted in The Atlantic that "by prioritizing their political agenda over the danger Trump poses, the members of the putative resistance within the administration put party and personal gain before principle and country."
If members of the Trump administration need a role model in courage, they don't need to listen to Haley. They can look to the administration officials stepping forward to testify before Congress in the impeachment investigation. People like Bill Taylor and Alexander Vindman have put their reputations, careers and personal safety on the line to bring Trump's misbehavior out of the shadows.
They are precisely the kind of truth tellers that Haley should be praising.
The New York Times