In her new memoir With All Due Respect, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley writes that two one-time top officials within the Trump administration tried to undermine the president, The Associated Press reports.
In the book, out Tuesday, Haley claims that during a private meeting with then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, the men told her they were resisting President Trump's policy decisions. The officials felt they "weren't being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country," she writes. "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. ... Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president's decisions was because, if he didn't, people would die."
Haley said that she was "shocked" by what she heard, and thought they should have spoken to Trump about their concerns. "To undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing," she writes. "And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive."
Tillerson and Kelly both left the administration in 2018. In response to the book, Kelly told CBS News on Sunday that "if by resistance and stalling, she means putting a staff process in place ... to ensure [Trump] knew all the pros and cons of what policy decision he might be contemplating so he could make an informed decision, then guilty as charged."