This series chronicles prominent Republicans and Trump associates openly critical of the president and, in most cases, urging other Republicans to vote him out.
Click here for parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. This is part eighteen.
Our tally so far is one hundred and one critics. More to come. Today, however, for something different, we have selected observations from just one of Trump’s former associates.
Miles Taylor served as chief of staff to Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen from 2017 to 2019. He is in a strong position to reflect.
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“He was one of the most unfocused and undisciplined senior executives I’ve ever encountered. I came away completely convinced, based on first hand experience, that the president was ill-equipped, and wouldn’t become equipped, to do his job effectively. And what’s worse was actively doing damage to our security.”
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“What we saw, week-in and week-out — and, for me, after two-and-a-half years in that administration — was terrifying. We would go in to try to talk to them about a pressing national security issue: cyber attack, terrorism threat. He [Trump] 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.”
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“Our mission was to tell him what the recommendations we had developed were around keeping kids from being shot in classrooms. A sobering meeting, an important subject. Within minutes of bringing up the subject, the president was instantly distracted, he wanted to talk about the wall. The words he used were: ‘I want my wall to be a beautiful work of art’.”
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“A lot of the time, the things he wanted to do not only were impossible, but in many cases illegal. He didn’t want us to tell him it was illegal anymore because he knew that there were — and these were his words — he knew that he had ‘magical authorities’.”
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“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 California didn’t support him and that, politically, it wasn’t a base for him.”
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“Not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico. Could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor. The president expressed deep animus towards the Puerto Rican people behind the scenes.”
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“I helped run a department of 250,000 hard-working men and women … DHS is the largest law enforcement agency in America. I saw no indication whatsoever, not only of a Q-Anon cabal of sex-traffickers, but I didn’t see a deep state working against the president, I didn’t see any of these things that he regularly reverts to as conspiracy theories. It is not real.”
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“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 border in the first place.”
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“The Department of Homeland Security was put in the impossible position of implementing this policy and trying to do it quickly enough so that children wouldn't be apart from their parents for an unacceptably long period of time while they went through the justice system. This is a textbook example of how policy making went wrong in the Trump administration. And it emanated from the top. The president is responsible for this.”
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“We all know now why he embraced them (the racists at the Charlottesville rally). Because these are people who expressed support for President Trump … This is not a one-time thing. We’re at the point now where this is very, very emblematic of Donald Trump’s character.”
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“There was a period of time where, at first jokingly, we would say that Fox late-night host Lou Hobbs was the sort of ‘shadow chief of staff’ ... The President would call us, and he would say: ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do.’ … This happened on a regular basis.”
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“Me speaking out yesterday, you can think of as an opening salvo ... the president can expect that in the coming weeks and months leading up the election, he is going to hear from more people that served in his administration and he is going to hear more of them give the same testimonies that I gave, which is that he is ill equipped to hold the office that he has and that a second term would be more dangerous than a first term.”
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“People who are still serving in this administration have said to me, ‘Just wait until the second term. It’ll be no holds barred. It’ll be shock-and-awe. We’ll do what we want’.”
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Sources are here, here, here, here and here.
To be continued ...
Readers’ tips in the comments are invited.