- Senior Trump administration officials considered urging the president to commit a mistake so bad it would force him to resign, according to an anonymous White House official in a new book “A Warning.”
- According to the book, in 2017 aides considered encouraging Trump to follow through on threats to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was at the the time leading a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
- “If aides helped him follow his instincts, they speculated, it would lead to his downfall,” the anonymous author wrote in an extract of the book published by CNN.
- The author also alleged attempts by top officials to thwart the president’s worst decisions.
- The White House has described the book as a “fiction,” and the author as a “gutless coward, who doesn’t have the spine to put his or her name to their shameful lies.”
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Senior Trump administration officials considered goading the president to commit a mistake so bad it would force him to resign, according to a new book by an anonymous Trump administration official.
In the book, entitled “A Warning,” the author claims to expose attempts by senior officials to thwart the president.
In extracts of the book published by CNN, the author describes discussing with a senior administration official Trump’s threats to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the official’s investigation into allegations of Russian interference – before the probe’s conclusion in March 2019.
“As one said, the President’s inclinations are so bad that perhaps we should ‘give him enough rope’ to entangle his own presidency,” the author writes, according to CNN.
"The advisor suggested letting him fire the special counsel and Justice Department leadership. He seemed eager enough to do it. If aides helped him follow his instincts, they speculated, it would lead to his downfall."
The author reportedly describes the scheme as "disturbing on its face," and says that officials should not encourage the president to do the wrong thing.
Details in the book have reportedly been left deliberately vague, for the author to obscure his or her identity, so its unknown what the specific incident the author is referring to.
However, according to a January 2018 story in The New York Times Trump in 2017 ordered then White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire Mueller, only backing down when the attorney threatened to resign over the order.
In a New York Times op-ed last year, the author claimed that senior administration staff were battling to contain the president's worst impulses.
The book contains a series of shocking claims, alleging that Trump's early morning tweets would spark chaos in the White House, comparing the situation to being "like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard."
It also includes claims that administration officials considered resigning en masse, and that Trump put on a Hispanic accent to mock migrants from Latin America attempting to get into the US.
The White House has described the book as a work of "fiction."
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told CNN: "The book as written presents a portrait that is the exact opposite of what the President actually is."
"If this person has in fact been inside White House meetings, or has any access to the President, he is acting like a spy. This person is a gutless coward, who doesn't have the spine to put his or her name to their shameful lies," Grisham said.