Former Trump Secretary of State Says Jared and Ivanka Were in Cahoots to Shiv Mike Pence

One of the objectively funniest moments of the period between 2016 and 2020 was when departing UN ambassador Nikki Haley used her 2018 resignation announcement to tell reporters: “Jared [Kushner] is such a hidden genius that no one understands.” If you missed it in real time, you really must take a moment to watch and listen as the words come out of her mouth:

At the time, Kushner’s career highlights included paying $1.8 billion for an aging Midtown skyscraper on the eve of the financial crisis; passing a crank call from a comedian pretending to be a Democratic senator onto his father-in-law, the president; and was registered to vote as a woman. Since then, his achievements have been convincing Donald Trump to fuel the longest government shutdown in history; reportedly shrugging his shoulders at the coronavirus because it was initially only hurting blue states; and cutting “the doctors” out of the federal response to the pandemic.

In other words, no one understood what Haley was talking about. Had she recently fallen and suffered a head injury? Did she know that, behind the scenes, Kushner’s Saudi ass-kissing and murder-excusing would pay off in the form of a $2 billion check? Was there another explanation for her deeply flattering and wholly unsubstantiated comment? A new book by one of her former administration colleagues suggests as much!

Per The Guardian:

In a new memoir peppered with broadsides at potential rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, accuses Nikki Haley of plotting with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to be named vice-president, even while she served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Describing his own anger when Haley secured a personal Oval Office meeting with Trump without checking with him, Pompeo writes that Haley in fact “played” Trump’s then chief of staff, John Kelly, and instead of meeting the president alone, was accompanied by Trump’s daughter and her husband, both senior advisers.

“As best Kelly could tell,” Pompeo writes, “they were presenting a possible ‘Haley for vice-president’ option. I can’t confirm this, but [Kelly] was certain he had been played, and he was not happy about it. Clearly, this visit did not reflect a team effort but undermined our work for America.”

It’s not clear if Jared and Ivanka were hoping to swap Haley for then VP Mike Pence before Trump’s first term was done, or if they wanted to do so for a second one. (On Thursday, Haley called Pompeo’s assertions “lies and gossip to sell a book.”) As The Guardian notes, Pompeo’s claim is bolstered by contemporaneous reporting that Trump was looking to dump Pence for Haley on a 2020 ticket, which the then president felt the need to deny. In June 2021, Jared and Ivanka reportedly spent a weekend with Haley at her Kiawah, South Carolina, home. A month later, my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported that Jared Kushner’s parents had hosted a private lunch at their Jersey Shore house for friends to meet Haley, where Kushner‘s father, Charles, predicted that Haley would be “the first woman president.”