Before being fired from his post in March 2018, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered quitting his post, according to Fiona Hill.
A Monday report from the New Yorker detailed the experiences of Hill, former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council, during her time in the White House. She told the publication that on one occasion, McMaster stormed out of the Oval Office and muttered the words, “F— this” after President Trump “spoke disrespectfully” to French President Emmanuel Macron.
Gen. John Kelly, who at the time was the White House chief of staff, pleaded with McMaster not to quit after the incident.
“Trump seemed to relish the fact that he could be rude to a decorated military leader with impunity,” the New Yorker reported.
Reports from inside the White House over the years have painted the picture of an administration full of officials ready to quit.
Former national security adviser John Bolton claimed in his forthcoming book that toward the end of his tenure, both he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were prepared to resign. When word began to circulate that Sen. Rand Paul was working to have the president meet with Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Bolton “prepared at home a typed copy of my two-sentence resignation letter, handwritten in June, to bring in at a moment’s notice.”
“I was ready,” he wrote in The Room Where It Happened, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
As the meeting became almost inevitable, Bolton said that Pompeo made a similar promise to resign.
“I’m with you,” Pompeo said, which was not the first time the secretary of state expressed his willingness to do so, according to Bolton.
Back in October 2017, reports surfaced that then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, all agreed to resign from their positions if one of them was fired by Trump.
In November 2019, Hill testified before Congress in the impeachment proceedings against Trump.
