- Five senior Trump officials threatened to quit ahead of the 2018 midterms, per a new book.
- Trump's chief of staff and three cabinet secretaries wanted to resign en masse.
Five senior Trump administration officials, including three cabinet secretaries, threatened to quit en masse ahead of the 2018 midterms, according to a forthcoming book.
The previously-unreported near-mutiny is detailed in New York Times' Peter Baker and New Yorker's Susan Glasser's upcoming book "The Divider," which Insider obtained ahead of its September 20 publication.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was at her breaking point by the fall of 2018, which saw the bruising confirmation battle over Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She herself had spent much of the year facing public backlash in response to the Trump administration's controversial immigration policies, and private admonishment and pressure from Trump to be even more aggressive.
Trump, the authors wrote, was "once again once again, on the warpath, worried about losing control of Congress and eager to appeal to his anti-immigrant base" as the midterms approached, increasingly obsessed with reports of a caravan coming to the United States from Honduras and pressuring Nielsen to take drastic actions like shutting down the US's southern border, which she rebuffed.
In a series of messages sent through the encrypted app Signal, according to the book, Nielsen informed her chief of staff, Miles Taylor, that five of the most senior officials in the administration were on the verge of resigning as a group.
White House chief of staff John Kelly was eyeing the exits. And Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, she wrote, were "wanting to go with Kelly" and call it quits.
"Alas," Taylor said, "then we have some planning to do."
"Yeah," Nielsen said, according to the book, adding, "Okay for the first time I am actually scared for the country. The insanity has been loosed."
The near-pre-midterms massacre never came to pass. Kelly, Dunford, Zinke, and Mattis all left in January 2019. Nielsen quit the administration in April 2019. And DeVos stayed in the cabinet for almost the entirety of Trump's term, quitting the cabinet over the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol along with former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Taylor, for his part, was later revealed to be the author of an anonymous September 2018 New York Times op-ed detailing a quiet "resistance" of reasonable Republicans within the Trump administration. His piece roiled the White House and made waves throughout Washington, DC.
Taylor, after leaving the administration in September 2019 for a position at Google, later authored the book "A Warning," which he published as "Anonymous" before revealing his identity and serving a stint as a CNN contributor.