Source: Mark Wilson / Getty
Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s former chief of staff, told WBT’s Pat McCrory Show with Bo Thompson on Thursday he has resigned as special U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland.
“It’s been a tougher 24 hours for the country,” Mulvaney said.
“Because you can’t be associated with this. You can’t stay. I only had two week left anyway—I get that. All the diplomats are expected to resign on January 20th anyway. But, it’s one official act that I can take as an individual to say what happened yesterday is wrong. It just is and you can’t be associated with it. My guess is there will be more resignations today, tonight and tomorrow as more folks just look themselves in the mirror and say they can’t be associated with this.”
Mulvaney joins Deputy National Security Advisor, Matthew Pottinger, chief of staff for first lady Melania Trump, Stephanie Grisham, and White House deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, who all resigned their posts following riots at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
McCrory asked Mulvaney his thoughts about what happened inside the Trump administration before the unrest and what has changed with the president over the past couple months.
“I think (Trump) changed around election time and a lot of the folks who were willing to tell him stuff he didn’t want to hear, or figured out a way to tell him stuff he didn’t want to hear,” said Mulvaney.
“It’s hard to do for a president of governor—but you have to do it—those folks aren’t there anymore and the folks who are there are just encouraging this. The president always, when I was there, you know, he thinks out loud and ‘Oh, we should be doing X’. And then he would immediately go ‘No, that’s probably not a good idea.’ We would also be there and say ‘Yeah, Mr. President, that’s probably not a good idea. Maybe, we should be doing something else.’
“Now I think he says, ‘We should do X’ and there’s people in the room going ‘Oh Yeah, Mr. President, that’s a great idea. You should do three times X. You should go for that. That’s a great idea. Encourage those people to go down to the Capitol to stop this vote tomorrow. That’s a great idea.’”
He added that Trump was “not the same as he was eight months ago.” And said the entire Trump family are “done” after what happened yesterday.
Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, has served under Trump in four different roles. He started as the director of the Office of Management and Budget and director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before taking over as the President’s Chief of Staff.
Listen to the entire interview with Mick Mulvaney below.
