In a strong defence of President Donald Trump, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has asserted that nobody in the White House questions the mental stability of the president as claimed in the explosive, newly-released book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
“I know those people in the White House,” Haley said, adding, “These people love their country and respect our president. I have never seen or heard this type of toxic language they (the author and his supporters) are talking about ... No one questions the (mental) stability of the President.”
Haley was responding to a question about author Michael Woolf’s claim that 100 per cent of the people around the President in the White House are concerned about his fitness.
Ridiculing the mental stability talk, Haley offered her own testimonials to President Trump’s stability and strengths, saying: “I work with the president and speak with him multiple times a week…He didn’t become the President by accident.”
And the people around Trump, she said, “put everything they’ve got into their jobs and into respecting and trusting the president,” adding, “If they didn’t they wouldn’t be there.”
Haley then went on to issue a series of posers to Trump’s detractors, commenting, “As much as everyone wants to talk about stability: Was he unstable when he passed the tax reform? Was he unstable when we finally hit back at Syria and said, ‘no more chemical weapons’? Was he unstable when we finally put North Korea on notice?”
“We need to be realistic (about) the fact that every person regardless of race, religion or party who loves this country should support this president. It’s that important,” she said.
As for author Woolf’s claim that his “tell-all” book was based on 200 interviews, she quipped: “I don’t know if these 200 interviews were with Steve Bannon (Trump’s former Chief Strategist) or 200 interviews with himself.”
Asked about Trump’s hint of a turnaround in dealing with North Korea by indicating that he was open to the idea of speaking with Kim Jong-un, Haley asserted, “There is no turnaround. What he (Trump) has basically said is, Yes, there could be a time where we talk to North Korea but a lot of things have to happen before that actually takes place. They have to stop testing. They have to be willing to talk about banning their nuclear weapons.”
Meanwhile, Bannon himself appeared to be out to belatedly mend fences with Trump by trying to walk away from some of the controversial comments attributed to him in the book about the president’s eldest son, Don Trump Jr.
After his earlier description of a meeting with Russians held by senior Trump campaign staffers, including Trump’s son and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, Bannon on Sunday came out with what media outlets called a “semi-apology”, in which he praised Trump Jr. and reiterating his strong support for President Trump’s agenda to “Make America Great Again”.
“Donald Trump Jr. is both a patriot and a good man,” Bannon said in a statement several days after the controversy erupted over his comments to Woolf. The statement, however, was silent on Kushner, with whom Bannon was reported to have a very strained relationship for a long time.