UN Ambassador Nikki Haley has dismissed “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff’s hints that she’s having an affair with Donald Trump as “disgusting” and “highly offensive.”
While Wolff has admitted he can’t prove the affair, he said last week on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that readers should pay close attention to a section near the end of the book that hints at an affair between her and Trump.
“It is absolutely not true,” Haley said on POLITICO’s Women Rule podcast. “It is highly offensive, and it is disgusting. It amazes me what people will do and the lies they will say for money and power… I have literally been on Air Force One once and there were several people in the room when I was there. He says that I’ve been talking a lot with the president in the Oval about my political future. I’ve never talked once to the president about my future and I am never alone with him.”
On “Real Time With Bill Maher” Friday, Wolff said a passage near the end of his book hints at the affair.
“Now that I’ve told you, when you hit that paragraph you’re going to say bingo,” Wolff told Maher. At first cagey, he said it was something he is “absolutely sure of, but was so incendiary that I just didn’t have the ultimate proof.”
Wolff hinted that the passage was near the book. Careful readers identified a section where he wrote:
By October, however, many on the president’s staff took particular notice of one of the few remaining Trump opportunists: Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador. Haley — ‘as ambitious as Lucifer,” in the characterization of one member of the senior staff — had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best, a single term, and that she, with requisite submission, could be his heir apparent. Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka, and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers.
The book said that Trump “had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a political future.”
Wolff cited one “senior Trumper” who said the problem with Trump mentoring Haley “is that she is so much smarter than him.”
Haley also served as the 116th governor of South Carolina and was the state’s first female governor. She campaigned for Marco Rubio and then supported Ted Cruz, and was one of Trump’s earliest Republican critics. When she gave the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union address, she seemed to criticize Trump when she said: “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices.” Trump responded by calling her “weak” on immigration.
Still, she opted to join Trump’s administration when offered the UN job.
Wolff has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.
You can listen to Haley’s full interview here: