Education Secretary Betsy DeVos presented her resignation in a letter to President Trump on Thursday, saying she would step down on Friday.
“We should highlight and celebrate the many accomplishments of his government on behalf of the American people,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by The New York Times. “Instead, we are left to clean up the mess caused by violent protesters who invaded the US Capitol in an attempt to undermine people’s business.”
“This behavior was unfair to our country,” she added. “There is no doubt about the impact that his rhetoric has had on the situation, and it is the tipping point for me.”
Mrs. DeVos was one of the first cabinet secretaries to condemn the violent crowd on Capitol Hill.
“The peaceful transfer of power is what separates American representative democracy from the banana republics,” DeVos said in a statement. statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday night, hours after the Capitol invasion. “The people’s work must continue.”
Ms. DeVos joins a growing exodus of government officials in the final days of the Trump administration. She is the second cabinet-level authority to step down; Transport secretary Elaine Chao also resigned on Thursday.