Official Washington and much of the national press was in an uproar Monday afternoon following the president's announcement Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex" Alles was being replaced.

Little mentioned in all of the debate over whether Alles was fired – or (as he was claiming late in the afternoon) the director is leaving on his own – is his appointment was virtually forced on Trump in April 2017 by then-Secretary of Homeland Security (and future White House chief of staff) John Kelly.

"At one point, Kelly threatened he would resign unless Trump appointed Alles," Ron Kessler, author of the critically acclaimed book "The Trump White House," told Newsmax.

Trump, in fact, had no intention of appointing Alles, a retired Marine Corps major general and old friend of fellow marine Kelly's. The president's preference was George Mulligan, a veteran agent and chief operating officer of the Secret Service.

Moreover, as Kessler wrote in his book, "[when] he interviewed Alles, Trump was not impressed. Alles volunteered that he knew next to nothing about the Secret Service. Apparently, it was too much trouble to read books and articles about the agency or to check out the Secret Service website before meeting with the president."

Of his two year stint at the helm of the Secret Service, Kessler wrote that its agents "are also unimpressed by Alles and largely ignore him. . . . Apparently, co-opted by Secret Service management, Alles proved to be the exact opposite of what was needed to reform the Secret Service."

In his book, Kessler concluded "nothing has changed within the Secret Service since the party-crashing Salahis went prancing into the White House state dinner back in 2009, or since I broke the Secret Service prostitution scandal in 2012 . . ."

Alles, he wrote flatly, "not only retained that same senior management that produced so many scandals, he has done nothing to change the agency's culture that has led to those scandals and the low morale that results in a shockingly high turnover rate."

Nevertheless, "Gen. Kelly wanted [Alles] in the worst way, and nobody else wanted him," former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Kessler.