Miles Taylor was the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and has recently been giving a series of jaw-dropping video interviews with mind-boggling inside information about the goings on inside the Trump White House. Throughout all that I’ve seen, he’s been clear, coherent, and has calmly answered all of the follow-up questions, even the ones that are so strange and absurd he can’t help laughing about them.
While it’s possible to make up almost anything, it would take a wild imagination to make up a White House as completely dysfunctional and insane as the one we apparently have with Toddler Rump in command.
There are so many insane but apparently truthful statements in this video that I’m not going to quote them all, but here is a sampling of the issues covered with some quotes, to whet your appetites to watch the full ten and a half minutes. I’ll also include time marks, for those who want to jump right to the bits that most interest them.
At about the 1 minute and 20 mark, CNN host Anderson Cooper asks Miles about Trump’s take on Q-Anon, and quotes Trump saying “They say nice things about me.” The gist of this section is that this is the lens that Trump uses in thinking about anyone and everyone. He likes the white-supremacist folks (calling them “very fine people”) because they said nice things about him. He’s okay with the Q-Anon folks for the same reason. As Miles puts it:
“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, and the Q-Anon episode is just one more example in a long line of episodes.”
This gives us one reason why Trump is fond of murderous dictators like Kim Jong Il: he knew how to flatter Trump’s ego with fantasy “love letters”, whereas the current leaders of all the countries we’ve been allies with for decades made no attempt to flatter Trump with empty praise. Murderous dictators tend to be more on the lookout for gullible egomaniacs they can easily manipulate, and they know how to do it.
Another actual (although re-arranged and shortened for brevity) question from Anderson Cooper:
“You worked at the Department of Homeland Security, is Trump actually fighting against this alleged cabal of sex-trafficking, Satan-worshipping people who drink the blood of children?”
Now that’s a question you don’t hear everyday. Honest, I’m not making this up!
This is what’s so surreal, Anderson. We’re talking about this, and real Americans believe it because the President says it. That’s why words matter, and that’s why his use of words is extremely irresponsible. The answer is no.
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.
And we should recognize that when the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, is overtaken by these carnival barkers, that it’s probably going to have deleterious consequences for our nation’s security. It had a huge impact on morale in our department, and throughout the Federal Government.
Next up, starting at about 4:15 minutes in, Anderson asks Miles about the issue of separating migrant families. Here’s part of Miles’ response:
“At the very beginning of the Administration, the White House pushed DHS, when John Kelly was secretary, to institute a policy of ripping kids apart from their parents at the border. It didn’t matter whether they showed up at a port of entry or crossed illegally, they said, let’s rip them apart, and that will scare migrants so that they don’t show up at the border…
The DHS was put in the impossible position of implementing this [slightly less evil] 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…
Finally, rightfully, we convinced the President to sign an executive order that summer, ending the policy, but … almost every single month… the President said he wanted to re-institute the policy, and go further, and revert back to that version they’d proposed in year one, that sickening version of “Let’s just rip them apart,” to scare migrants from coming to the border.
That was one of the reasons that I ended up leaving this administration.”
If this had come out before about Trump himself being behind and in favor of ripping kids away from their parents, then I’d forgotten about it, perhaps because these years have been mind-numbingly chaotic and crazy. Regardless of that, having a fresh reminder that Trump himself is actually this cruel and heartless in dealing with innocent children is a good motivator for our GOTV efforts.
At about the 6:40 mark, Anderson asks what was going on behind the scenes with the “Bus and dump” proposal of rounding up immigrants and dumping them in democratic sanctuary cities. Miles responds:
“...I was the one who personally went back to the White House, to the Chief of Staff’s office… and I said listen, we think this is illegal. You need to let the President know this is not legal.
The president called us again and said: “You need to do this.”
…There’s a litany of examples of him embracing and trying to pursue illegal behavior.
At about the 8:15 mark, Anderson asks miles about a Fox News Host being a defacto chief of staff. Miles comments:
“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” of the Trump Administration.
Why did we say that? Because 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.
In other words, we have first-hand confirmation from an eyewitness that Trump takes whatever lies or conspiracy theories are being peddled on Faux news and wants to instantly turn them into policies, without even bothering to consider them or verify their factuality. He’s not only a misguided nincompoop, he’s also lazy about it!
This explains a lot, and this is far worse than I’d ever imagined!
The last question in the video is about school children getting shot in class rooms, starting at about 9:30. Here’s what Miles had to say about it:
This is an example of the President not being able to focus on things that are very important.
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. Go make it a work of art, and here’s how to design it.”
This says a lot about his priorities, this says a lot about his indiscipline.
I personally feel thankful that Miles Taylor is doing this, and before the election, despite the personal danger he’s putting himself in. I hope more insiders will have the guts to join in also, with their own testimonies.
What a lunatic, f-ing moron we have in the White House!
And what a motivator to get out the vote!
