WASHINGTON: Another Trump aide, also a Sikh, could get fired for entirely different reasons. Michael Wolff's controversial new book says President Trump appointee Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to UN, considers herself in line for the White House Oval Office, and is seen in Trump's circle as ambitious and much smarter than Trump.
A top Trump aide worried that Haley is so much smarter than Trump, while others jumped in to protect Trumpism from the influence of the moderate-leaning Republican, Wolff writes in Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House, a book that the US President trashed while his lawyers tried to suppress on Friday.
According to excerpts in the New York Times, Wolff says Haley decided by October 2017 that "Trump's tenure would last, at best, a single term." and thought she could be his heir apparent —something the president's inner circle saw as a danger given her relatively moderate views. Being seen as a challenge to Trump is sufficient for anyone to get fired by the mercurial President.
During her first year in the White House, Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was born Nimrata Randhawa to Sikh parents, befriended Ivanka Trump to be brought into the family circle, says Wolff. She was also groomed by the president in a "notable amount of private time" on Air Force One, he claims.
Trump appointed Haley as his UN envoy after initially considering her for secretary of state, a prospect that the President's "chief strategist" Steve Bannon feared so much that he later pushed CIA director Mike Pompeo for secretary of state if Rex Tillerson were to resign. "This was all part of the next stage of Trumpism — to protect it from Trump," Wolff writes.Meanwhile, Trump himself has rubbished the book, saying he authorised "zero access to White House for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book," while maintaining he actually turned Wolff down many times.
"Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don't exist. Look at this guy's past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!" Trump tweeted in an apparent reference to his former adviser Steve Bannon's cooperation with Wolff in the book.
"Well, now that collusion with Russia is proving to be a total hoax and the only collusion is with Hillary Clinton and the FBI/Russia, the Fake News Media (Mainstream) and this phony new book are hitting out at every new front imaginable. They should try winning an election. Sad!" Trump tweeted a few hours later.