Miles Taylor, who worked at the Department of Homeland Security until last year, says he’s voting for Joe Biden.
Lydia O’Connor / The Huffington Post
(August 17, 2020) — The former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security shared a brutal testimony Monday about his time working under President Donald Trump, describing him as a man who prioritizes personal revenge over national security.
Miles Taylor, who served in the role from 2017 to 2019, recounted Trump’s “terrifying” behavior in a video for the group Republican Voters Against Trump and in an op-ed for The Washington Post, and said he’s voting for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
“We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue ― a cyberattack, terrorism threat,” Taylor said in the video. “He wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities. The president wanted to exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.”
Taylor recalled some of the most vindictive or self-serving demands Trump made to the DHS.
“The California wildfires,” he raised as an example. “On a phone call with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he told FEMA to cut off the money, and to no longer give individual assistance to California. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him, and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.”
Taylor also said Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border was born out of a desire to punish them.
“He said he wanted to restart ‘zero tolerance’ and separate families. He said he wanted to go further and have a deliberate policy of ripping children away from their parents to show those parents that they shouldn’t come to the door in the first place,” Taylor said. When the DHS would tell Trump his ideas may be illegal, Taylor continued, the president would boast that he had “magical authorities.”
The White House did not immediately return HuffPost’s requests for comment on the allegations from Taylor, who is now one of the highest-ranking former Trump officials to endorse former Vice President Biden in his campaign to unseat Trump.
At Homeland Security, I Saw Firsthand How Dangerous Trump Is for America
Miles Taylor / The Washington Post
(August 17, 2020) — After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration, I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.
Like many Americans, I had hoped that Donald Trump, once in office, would soberly accept the burdens of the presidency — foremost among them the duty to keep America safe. But he did not rise to the challenge. Instead, the president has governed by whim, political calculation and self-interest.
I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand.
The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the US border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.
Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.
The decision-making process was itself broken: Trump would abruptly endorse policy proposals with little or no consideration, by him or his advisers, of possible knock-on effects. That was the case in 2018 when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced, at the White House’s urging, a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally. The agencies involved were unprepared to implement the policy, causing a disastrous backlog of detentions that ultimately left migrant parents and their children separated.
Incredibly, after this ill-conceived operation was rightly halted, in the following months the president repeatedly exhorted DHS officials to restart it and to implement a more deliberate policy of pulling migrant families apart en masse, so that adults would be deterred from coming to the border for fear of losing their children. The president was visibly furious on multiple occasions when my boss, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, refused.
Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with genuine security threats by the chore of responding to these inappropriate and often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night. One morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh (“How much would that cost us?”). Meanwhile, Trump showed vanishingly little interest in subjects of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic terrorism and malicious foreign interference in US affairs.
How can you run a huge organization under those conditions? You can’t. At DHS, daily management of its 250,000 employeessuffered because of these frequent follies, putting the safety of Americans at risk.
The president has similarly undermined US security abroad. His own former national security adviser John Bolton made the case so convincingly with his recent book and public accounts that there is little to add, other than to say that Bolton got it right. Because the commander in chief has diminished America’s influence overseas, today the nation has fewer friends and stronger enemies than when Trump took office.
Trump has also damaged the country in countless ways that don’t directly involve national security but, by stoking hatred and division, make Americans profoundly less safe.
The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have died.
It is more than a little ironic that Trump is campaigning for a second term as a law-and-order president. His first term has been dangerously chaotic. Four more years of this are unthinkable.
Miles Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff.
Read more:
• Jennifer Rubin: Miles Taylor is putting other Trump insiders to shame
• Greg Sargent: Trump’s authoritarian crackdown is so bad that even some in the GOP are blasting it
• Chuck Park: I can no longer justify being a part of Trump’s ‘Complacent State.’ So I’m resigning.
• The Post’s View: A State Department official issues a principled rebuke of Trump by resigning
• Norma Torres: End the Department of Homeland Security
• Richard A. Clarke: Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes
