Other than Sean Spicer, who’s spent his post-White House years defending Donald Trump when not dancing like an elderly canary being sucked into a vacuum hose attachment, how many ex-Trump staffers have rushed into the fray to support the guy?
“Yay, evil!”
Where are the detailed books and articles about Trump’s attention to detail and poise under pressure? Every positive reminiscence of the Trump years sounds like a Kim Jong-Il hagiography ghost-written by dazed harp seals who’ve been taught to type with their assholes.
Meanwhile, pretty much every memoir about Trump’s management style that doesn’t sound like a hostage script reminds me of the bear attack scene from The Revenant.
And here we go again.
Miles Taylor, who worked in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security for two years, including as its chief of staff, just eviscerated Trump and buried him under the forest floor for later snacking.
First and foremost, warns Taylor, Trump has made us all much less safe — and not just because of his deranged response to the coronavirus.
The Washington Post:
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.
You don’t say. If only approximately 66 million of us had seen that coming.
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 several times.
Trump? Partisan? Come on! That doesn’t sound like him at all.
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.
Well, yeah. This is the guy who spent gobs of time looking at fabric swatches while his real estate empire crumbled around him. Sound familiar?
Oh, and you’ll be happy to know that one of Trump’s most evil initiatives — family separation — was as ill considered and poorly conceived as it was cruel.
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.
...
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.
And what does Taylor think of the prospect of four more years of Trump? Having seen Trump’s unique brand of blundering malevolence up close, he may be even more horrified than the rest of us about the possibility.
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.
Well, yeah. Then again, the past four years have been unthinkable, but here we are.
BONUS! Here’s video testimony from Taylor (h/t Magnifico):
He doesn’t sounds like a coffee boy to me, that’s for sure.
“This guy is a natural. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry." — Bette Midler on Aldous J. Pennyfarthing, via Twitter. Find out what made dear Bette break up. Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump and its boffo sequels Dear Pr*sident A**clown and Dear F*cking Moron by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing are now available for a song! And you can now preorder the final (please, God) book in the series, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump. Click those links!
