Miles Taylor, who served for two and a half years as the DHS Chief of Staff in the Trump administration, wrote a blistering op-ed published in the Washington Post AND recorded a video ad for RVAT (Republican Voters Against Trump). Both are sending shockwaves through social media and the political world.
In his op-ed he says that after serving at the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, he cannot vote for Donald Trump. He describes Donald Trump exactly as we feared he is: Stupid, vengeful, cocky, unwilling to learn, inattentive and dangerous. Taylor describes Trump as a man who governs "by whim, political calculation and self-interest."
He tells the story of a man who has harnessed the Department of Homeland Security for his own personal gain - particularly in respect to political gain. He "insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico." Not surprising, as this was one of the central themes of his first campaign - "Build The Wall!". When faced with an impending government shutdown, Trump remained focused on the wall - mainly the color.
One of the more disturbing aspects of both the video and the op-ed were instances where Trump used his personal views or his hatred of states that or countries that he didn't feel adequately supported him as a reason to shut off federal support. Taylor said:
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 U.S. affairs.
Even worse, Donald Trump has damaged our country in ways that involve hatred and divisiveness, something we all know, but it is interesting to hear it from someone who worked at the Department of Homeland Security.
In the RVAT video, Taylor gets even more blunt.
He explains further how Trump withheld FEMA funding following the California wildfires because the state did not support him for President. This is criminal. He is not the President for just the states that voted for him! Taylor said:
Even more grotesque is how much worse Trump wanted the child separation policy to be. Taylor said:
It'll be interesting to see how quickly Trump tweets about Taylor, calling him a "disaster" or a "coffee boy." You know it's coming.