A former Trump administration official is claiming that if a mass exodus of key administration officials had happened, it may have convinced Melania Trump to divorce the then-president.

That’s what Miles Taylor, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief of staff between 2017 and 2019 told Newsweek. Taylor gained notoriety after it was discovered that he was the author of the anonymous essay titled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, which was published in the New York Times in 2018.

Now Taylor has written the tell-all book Blowback, and in one passage notes that multiple bigwig administration officials held behind-the-scenes conversations about everyone resigning simultaneously in the fall of 2018 because they were unhappy about the Trump administration’s border policy.

And one rather shocking name came up: First Lady Melania Trump,” Taylor writes. “I didn’t press for further details, but one attendee asserted that FLOTUS would actually consider leaving her husband if enough key officials quit.”

Taylor makes note of the terrible things Trump wanted to do — turn away all asylum seekers, weighing the possibility of throwing tear gas at migrants at border crossings “to make people feel like their skin was on fire,” and even shooting migrants crossing illegally into the U.S. All of this was part of the family separation policy.

This is barbaric but Trump is obviously a virulent racist and it’s gratifying to know there were many in his administration who didn’t support this.

“I made my position clear,” Taylor writes. “A mass resignation would be a powerful statement about Trump’s behavior. It would be impossible for Republicans—and the country—to look away if Trump’s top lieutenants left in a blaze of glory.”

Taylor told his colleagues such a scene would be “the second burning of the White House.” The first time occurred when the British literally incinerated the building during the War of 1812.

Taylor, also an ex-George W. Bush administration official, discussed the situation with then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen about leaving.

And apparently, these weren’t the only Trump administration officials who were thinking of leaving, Taylor writes. Former officials Defense Secretary James Mattis, Intelligence Director Dan Coats, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke were also thinking of departing Dodge.

In a phone interview with Newsweek Thursday, Taylor said he admittedly didn’t interact with Melania Trump often and didn’t really have any deep insight into her marriage with the former president, other than what others inside the White House told him.

“I found it very interesting at the time that someone had suggested that they had spoken to Melania and felt like there was a chance she would leave her husband if there was the right moment,” Taylor told Newsweek. “I don’t personally know what undergirds their relationship.”

“There were a lot of suggestions behind the scenes in the administration, not just outward commentary, but in the administration that there was some sort of contractual obligation Melania had to Trump—and when he got elected there was a renegotiation.”

Taylor would not say which official made the comment.

“[The mass resignation] ultimately fell apart and I was very disappointed because I thought it was a prime opportunity,” Taylor said. “We could make a statement for a huge chunk of the president’s cabinet to resign together and say, ‘This guy is not stable.'”

“By declining to do that, you know, a lot of those folks were like, well, let’s just wait a little longer. What happened in the weeks and months after that was Trump just started firing a bunch of those people.”

This leads me to think that perhaps Trump got wind of this. Who knows?

Over time, their good intentions fell apart. Kelly was out by December 2018. Coats was out of his position by August 2019, and DeVos resigned prior to the end of Trump’s term, citing the January 6 insurrection as her reason for leaving. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who replaced Neilsen when she left in April 2019, also resigned after January 6.

There were other reasons the mass exit didn’t come to fruition, but chief among them was perhaps the fact that Nielsen told fellow administration that Trump ghoul/aide Stephen Miller was posed to replace everyone with DHS officials described as “far-right extremists who would do whatever the president wanted,” Taylor writes in Blowback.

Miller is one creepy individual and it’s easy to see he could have done this with little problem since he’s known to hang around white supremacists and other unpleasant, nasty people.

It’s sad that these officials didn’t pull this off, and while a lot of people were offended by Melania’s “I don’t really care, do u?” jacket, and she supported her husband’s birtherism claims about former President Barack Obama, maybe she’s not the hardhearted racist some of us think she is.

But because she’s so private we’ll never really know.

One positive thing did happen, however. Jared and Ivanka Kushner were able to reign in her father—sometimes anyway.

Jared, Taylor writes, could be a pain in the neck sometimes, because he often butted in where he wasn’t needed, but nevertheless, there were times when he brought Trump to heel.

“…I will say that he was very often a leveling force against Trump’s worst inclinations. If Trump was about to do something phenomenally stupid, and you couldn’t stop it, a lot of the time, not always, you could count on Jared and Ivanka to step in and try to talk their father down. And I give them credit for that,” he writes.

Taylor worked on immigration in 2018 and was familiar with DHS conversations, and he specifically referred to the cruel family separation policy.

“It ended up being Jared and Ivanka who were really instrumental in helping to convince Trump to side with us,” Taylor said. That ultimately led to an executive order that discontinued this awful policy.

Jared and Ivanka are not particularly good people but I’m glad to hear they succeeded here.

Maybe they have a shred of decency after all.