Oh yeah? You shut up!

 

Trump wanted his own personal mercenary army like Putin's Wagner force: Ex-Homeland Security aide

Sarah K. Burris
July 5, 2023, 12:08 PM ET



Donald Trump with members of the U.S. military (Photo via AFP)


Former Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor is releasing his second book, "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump" – and startling excerpts are already dropping.

In a piece in RealClear News Wednesday, Taylor describes Donald Trump's desperation to have his own personal military group, an idea inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Less well known is the ex-president’s envy of private armies, like Putin’s wayward Wagner Group," wrote Taylor. "The former president once sought his own mercenaries and might do so again if he wins back the White House."

He explained that conversations with colleagues in the administration revealed a genuine fear about this Trump "force" becoming a reality.

The idea was first suggested in the summer of 2017, Taylor wrote. Trump wanted troops out of Afghanistan without any withdrawal plan or process. Ironically, a recent State Department report on the Afghanistan withdrawal revealed that there was no plan put in place by Trump for the withdrawal he set for Aug. 30, 2021.

Taylor said that he was still at DHS, fearful that Trump was pulling out too fast, which would allow "terrorists to reconstitute and plot against the United States. Trump, on the other hand, seemed most worried about money. He said he was tired of spending it abroad and wanted to focus on domestic political priorities."

There were several options given to Trump, but the one that he crafted himself was to privatize the war with Trump's own mercenary force. Instead of Putin's Wagner Group, it would be Erik Prince's Blackwater, which offers troops for hire.

"I explained that this was a horrible idea for many reasons, not least of which was that a Trump-controlled mercenary group would circumvent public scrutiny, erode checks and balances around the use of force, and undermine confidence in the American military," said Taylor. "But it wasn’t a mere whim. News of the discussions leaked that top White House advisors had apparently consulted with Erik Prince directly."

He went on to say that there was a "thick briefing memo" that Trump got and it far "exceeded the man's attention span." Taylor feared it increased the likelihood that Trump would go with the mercenaries.

He was forced to take the 50-to-60--page book and put it into one or two pages "in the president's voice" so he could understand it.

"So overnight in my office, I crafted a basic Wikipedia-level primer about why America was in Afghanistan and what was at stake, all in the Trumpian vernacular," Taylor wrote. "The title of the unclassified version felt like a parody: 'Afghanistan: How to Put America First—And Win!' If we pulled out of the country too fast, I wrote, we would be mocked as 'losers' by terrorists. If we wanted to be 'winners,' we needed to fight smarter and harder, then cut a 'great deal' to hand over security to the Afghans. I made no mention of deploying a private army to finish the job."

Trump ultimately agreed, wanting to be "a winner." But a year after that, the mercenary plan came back when Trump wanted to act to overthrow the regime in Venezuela. Trump wanted a 5,000-man team.

Taylor wrote that the top adviser on the National Security Council (NSC) had to write up a memo explaining why that can't happen. For a second time, Trump decided against the "Trump Wagners."

As Trump gains traction in the Republican primary, Taylor said it has become a very real concern that such an idea could return in a second Trump administration.

“Next time we won’t be so lucky,” Taylor quoted a person familiar with the 2017 and 2018 discussions. “We’ll have a military run by mercenaries.”

Trump appears intent on having greater control over the military, Taylor said, and believes that the title of "commander in chief" is all too literal. To him, they were "his" military. He often referred to them as "my generals" and "my military," he said.

"Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump" will be released July 18.


https://www.rawstory.com/trump-mercenary-force-like-putins/

 

Trump wanted to tap aides’ phones to stem leaks, former official says

146
Nick Robertson
Fri, July 7, 2023 at 8:51 PM MDT




Former President Trump wanted to wiretap his aides’ phones in order to pursue potential leakers, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) aide alleged in an upcoming book, reviewed by NBC.

Miles Taylor, a senior aide to former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, also claimed that aides had concerns about the way the former president handled classified materials.

Trump has long decried those who leak information to the press as “traitors.” He’s also called for criminal charges against those who leaked information out of his administration.

Taylor recounts in his book an instance when then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders warned the former national security adviser John Bolton that Trump had shown classified information about Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder to a reporter in an interview.


He alleged Bolton “breathed a sigh of relief” when told there were no cameras in the room to capture the documents.

“We were all disturbed by the lapse in protocol and poor protection of classified information,” Taylor writes.

Bolton however told NBC he does not recall the exchange.

Taylor is a known critic of Trump, and he penned an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times criticizing Trump’s character in 2018.

“I witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals,” he wrote.

A spokesman for Trump denounced the upcoming book, calling Taylor a “lying sack of s–t.”

“His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper,” spokesman Steven Cheung said.

The remarks come as Trump is facing a criminal indictment for his handling of classified documents after he left the White House. He was charged with 37 counts in relation to the mishandling of records at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, as well as his efforts to block the government from recovering the documents.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-state-lawmakers-try-change-184006595.html

 

Wow, where have you been the last 8 years, Trump is lower than a foul mouthed truck driver...

But hey, I know you're just following the advice of your high school drama coach...

"Project!"

 

DHS officials 'terrified' that Trump 'seemed to welcome nuclear conflict' with North Korea: new book

Travis Gettys
July 10, 2023, 9:48 AM ET



U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un Reuters


Homeland Security officials feared Donald Trump might trigger a nuclear attack from North Korea, according to a new book.

Miles Taylor, a former DHS official under Trump, revealed in his new book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, that agency officials took the unprecedented step of meeting to discuss the possibility and plan a response, according to excerpts published by Politico.

“We convened every top leader in DHS to discuss the brewing crisis,” Taylor wrote in the book, which is due out July 18. “Experts walked through various scenarios of a nuclear strike on the U.S. homeland, dusted off response plans, and outlined best-case scenarios which nevertheless sounded horrifically grim. I cannot provide the details, but I walked out of those meetings genuinely worried about the safety of the country. In my view, the department was unprepared for the type of nuclear conflict Trump might foment.”

Chris Krebs, a top DHS official at the time who was later fired by Trump after stating the 2020 election was historically secure, confirmed that officials believed there was a "non-zero chance" the former president would provoke a nuclear attack, and Taylor wrote that officials were concerned by his recklessness.

IN OTHER NEWS: Food Channel's Guy Fieri faces furious blowback after photo with Trump

“In the national security world, anything having to do with nuclear weapons is handled with extreme sensitivity — well planned, carefully scripted — yet we didn’t know what Trump might say at any given moment,” Taylor wrote. “One day, he threatened North Korea ‘with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.’ He almost seemed to welcome a nuclear conflict, which terrified us.”

Taylor said the high-level meetings were serious and unlike any others held by agency officials.

“This is the first time to my knowledge that DHS thought there was the possibility, however remote, of Trump actually starting a war and us having to prepare for the nuclear fallout in the homeland,” Taylor told Politico.


https://www.rawstory.com/miles-taylor-trump-2662255791/

 

New Woodward tape: Trump told young son COVID was 'very bad' and should have been revealed 'months earlier'

Sarah K. Burris
July 11, 2023, 6:52 PM ET



Donald Trump speaks to the press in the James Brady Press Briefing Room. (Shutterstock.com)


New tapes from Bob Woodward's conversations with Donald Trump reveal what the former president was telling his own family behind the scenes.

Previously, recordings showed that Trump always wanted to play down the pandemic because, "I don't want to create a panic."

In newly revealed recordings shared by MSNBC's Ari Melber, Trump also told Woodward what he was telling his youngest son behind closed doors.

"So you told Barron, you said, 'It's bad, it's bad.' And then —" Woodward said.

"No, I said, it's a very bad thing, but we're going to straighten it out," Trump claimed.

"Did he have any other questions about, like, how are you going to..." Woodward said.

"He said, how did it happen? I said, it came out of China, Barron. Pure and simple. It came out of China. And it should've been stopped," Trump relayed.

"And to be honest with you, Barron, they should've let it be known it was a problem two months earlier. And we wouldn't — the world would not — we would have 141 countries have it now. And I said, the world wouldn't have a problem. We could've stopped it easily."

In a later tape with Woodward from July 2020, Trump told him that he knew about the disaster as early as Jan. 2020. He continued to downplay it until the election in November.

See the clip of the audio tape in the video below or at the link here.



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-timeline-recordings/

 

'I was cruising to election': New Bob Woodward tapes reveal Trump blamed COVID for killing rallies

Sarah K. Burris
July 11, 2023, 6:41 PM ET



Bob Woodward and Donald Trump (Photos via screen capture and AFP)


Among new recordings that reporter Bob Woodward is revealing is a tape in which Donald Trump complained he couldn't hold rallies – and that the COVID crisis wasn't measured in deaths but in rallies he was missing out on.

"What is the first person who made you see how serious this was going to be?" asked Woodward in the tape, played on MSNBC's The Beat.

Trump explained: "China, when I saw how many people were dying."

Woodward asked about the conversation Trump had with Xi Jinping Feb. 2020, but Trump corrected him.

"No! No! It was earlier," Trump said. "Look, I did the stop I think in January some time, toward the later part of January, Bob."

"Yeah, I suspect if you say, sir, first mobilization, we're at Manhattan Project level here," said Woodward. Trump said, "No matter what I do, they'll always tell you bad."

Okay, but you know what?" Woodward asked. "I don't care," Trump replied. "I think people want — even people who don't like you, people who are opposed to you — want this country to succeed on this," said Woodward. Trump disagreed, saying people want him to fail and want more people to die so he'd lose the election.

"But there's a lot of really fake news out there, Bob," Trump explained.

By July, when hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, Trump was telling Woodward, "It's flaring up. It's flaring up all over the world, Bob. By the way, all over the world. That was one thing I noticed last week. You know, they talk about this country. All over the world, it's flaring up. But we have it under control."

Woodward later told Ari Melber that he felt like the president was "in denial."

"If we didn't have the virus, I was 10, 12, points up. I was cruising to election," Trump complained.

"Yeah, well, people are worried about the virus," Woodward explained.

"I know that, Bob. But the virus has nothing to do with me," Trump complained. "With COVID, you really can't do rallies — probably airport rallies — but you can't do stadium rallies, you can't do the indoor arena rallies."

"You're running against the virus. Not Joe Biden," Woodward tried to explain.

Trump claimed it was both, really.

See the clips in the video below or at the link here.




https://www.rawstory.com/trump-woodward-recordings-rally-anger/

 

White House officials worried Trump showed reporters classified material while in office, new book recounts

Oliver Contreras
7k

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Peter Nicholas and Diana Paulsen
Fri, July 7, 2023 at 4:57 PM MDT·7 min read


In this article:

• 
  

• 
  

• 
  Donald Trump
  President of the United States from 2017 to 2021

• John F. Kelly
  Former White House Chief of Staff and Former United States Marine Corps General

WASHINGTON — A forthcoming book by an ex-Trump administration aide describes an episode in which officials worried that then-President Donald Trump was cavalier in his handling of classified information while talking to reporters, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.

Miles Taylor, who was a top aide to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, writes about the 2018 episode in a book set to be published this month. As a sitting president at the time, Trump had broad powers to declassify information. Yet the incident Taylor describes suggests that his aides still believed he needed to show more care toward state secrets — an issue that landed him in legal peril after he left office and took sensitive records with him.

Taylor is a prominent critic of Trump. He authored an anonymous op-ed while working at the Department of Homeland Security, in which he said that many senior administration officials were trying to limit Trump’s impulses and frustrate his agenda.

Also in the book, excerpts of which were obtained first by NBC News, Taylor describes having heard about Trump’s interest in “tapping” the phones of White House aides in a bid to stanch press leaks. Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said in an interview with NBC News that Trump had wanted to pursue leakers by tapping phones, but that Kelly pushed back and never carried it out.

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Trump had long been angry over press leaks, as have past presidents of both parties. In his book, “The Briefing,” Sean Spicer wrote that he was “under relentless pressure to find leakers” as press secretary during Trump’s first year in office. Former senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway wrote in her book, “Here’s the Deal,” that in Trump’s view, “leakers were traitors and weaklings.”

Trump was still president when the episode Taylor described unfolded Oct. 18, 2018. Taylor writes that he was in a private meeting in the West Wing with John Bolton, who was then Trump’s national security adviser.

Then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders came into Bolton’s office and described an interview that Trump had given in the Oval Office, according to Taylor’s book, “Blowback.” (It’s common for White House press aides to sit in when the president gives interviews.)

Trump had been talking to the reporters about Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and journalist who was killed that month by Saudi assassins in Turkey.

Sanders told Bolton that the president had picked up classified documents relating to intelligence on Khashoggi’s death and displayed them, Taylor writes, but that the reporters were unlikely to have been able to read the text.

Bolton gasped at first, but “breathed a sigh of relief” when Sanders told him there had been no cameras in the room, according to the book.

Still, “We were all disturbed by the lapse in protocol and poor protection of classified information,” Taylor writes.

Bolton, in an interview with NBC News, said he did not recall the conversation with Sanders. He did not dispute that it happened. A spokeswoman for Sanders, now the governor of Arkansas, declined to comment.

Asked about Taylor’s book, a Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said: “Miles Taylor is a loser and a lying sack of s--- His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”

During his time in office, some senior aides worried about Trump’s treatment of state secrets. In an interview, Bolton said that when Trump would get briefings, aides would “show him graphics, and that’s where the danger came of him grabbing something and keeping it.”

Asking Trump to return material he’d been given wasn't so easy, Bolton said.

“He’s the president of the United States,” Bolton said. “Are you supposed to say, ‘Mr. President, let’s be clear. We don’t trust you. Give us the document back.’ ”

Trump now faces criminal charges for his handling of classified documents after he left office. An indictment filed in a Florida court last month included a redacted transcript of a 2021 conversation Trump had with a writer, publisher and two of his aides at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump appeared to discuss a sensitive military document that he describes as a “plan of attack” against Iran that had been given to him by a U.S. military official. In an audio recording of that discussion that was separately obtained by NBC News, he says the document includes “secret information.”

“I have a big pile of papers,” Trump says amid sounds of rustling papers. “They presented me this. This is off the record. But they presented me this.”

The indictment states that none of the people meeting with Trump that day had either the security clearances or “need-to-know” about the attack plans.

Trump has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in the case. Last month, he told a Fox News anchor that he did not have a classified document and that he was referring to “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.” He told the news outlet Semafor that he had been holding up papers and engaging in “bravado” but “had no documents.”

As a sitting president, Trump, of course, was entitled to see classified information and empowered to declassify material. There is a process for declassifying information before disclosure. Kelly, his second of four White House chiefs of staff, said in an interview that he put in place procedures meant to safeguard classified material.

Kelly, a retired four-star general, said that he had cautioned Trump “that he should never, ever share classified information with anyone that does not have the proper security clearance, as U.S. national security and lives are put at risk.”

Explaining some of the practices he adopted from his military career, Kelly said that after displaying classified material as part of a briefing, White House aides were supposed to “collect it back in order to secure it properly.”

“We did not leave classified material with him, and the same procedures applied to me and the rest of the staff, as well,” Kelly added.

Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, said in an interview: “I would certainly advise [any] president not to even discuss classified information in front of reporters or someone who doesn’t have a security clearance. You can argue, ‘I have the authority as president of the United States to declassify it,’ but you classify information to protect the nation’s secrets.”

Taylor’s book does not specify which news outlet interviewed Trump when he discussed the Khashoggi killing, but he said in an interview it was on Oct. 18, 2018. A New York Times article published that same day describes an interview that Trump had with the paper in the Oval Office. The lead paragraph said that Trump voiced “confidence in intelligence reports from multiple sources that strongly suggest a high-level Saudi role in Mr. Khashoggi’s assassination.”

The New York Times declined to comment.

Taylor has become one of the most outspoken Trump administration alumni to turn against the former president. His op–ed article appeared in The New York Times in September 2018 under the headline, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” In it, he wrote that Trump “continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” Taylor’s identity remained a mystery until he outed himself in 2020.

Trump savaged the author after the unmasking, calling him “a sleazebag who never worked in the White House” and saying he should be prosecuted.

Taylor, then a Republican, opposed Trump’s re-election that year, appearing in a video supporting Joe Biden’s candidacy and denouncing Trump as “unfocused” and “undisciplined.”



https://www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-officials-worried-trump-225710678.html

 

Well, but if they aren't yammering about Trump the only other thing to talk about is the Biden administration.
And we all know why they don't want to talk about that, eh?

 

Trump pushed 'incandescently stupid' plan to send cattle over his border wall: former staffer

Brad Reed
July 17, 2023, 12:11 PM ET



Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


Former Trump White House staffer Miles Taylor claims in his new book that the former president was willing to go to extreme lengths to make sure that his beloved wall on the U.S.-Mexico border had no doors.

As Newsweek reports, Taylor writes that Trump in 2019 was upset at reports that Texas ranchers were bringing their cattle through openings in the wall so that they could graze at the Rio Grande, on the grounds that this would let "thousands" of undocumented immigrants pour into the country.

Even though then-Department of Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen insisted to the president that this wasn't the case, he demanded that his staff come up with alternative ways for ranchers to be able to access the Rio Grande.

"Give the ranchers ladders," Trump floated at one point. "They can use ladders to get to the other side, but not doors. You could use small fire trucks. Call the local fire stations, and use the ladders on their trucks to help them get over."

IN OTHER NEWS: Santos censure: Dems to put swing-district Republicans on the spot by forcing vote

Taylor recalls thinking that Trump's plan to send cows over the wall via ladders was "incandescently stupid" but he nonetheless managed to avoid laughing in the former president's face.

What's more, writes Taylor, the harebrained cow ladder scheme wasn't even the worst idea Trump had, as he even complained that military servicemembers sent to the border were not allowed to simply mow down immigrants on sight.

"When it comes to Trump, the truth is always vastly more idiotic than the fiction," Taylor claims. "He spent more time coming up with imbecilic ideas at the border than he did focusing on his job. Sometimes the ideas were stupid. Sometimes they were illegal. Often they were both."



https://www.rawstory.com/trumps-border-wall-2662290051/

 

We watched this one in real time and in plain sight. And it was a perfect example of how Trump corrupted the entire federal government and drug the US down to the level of a third world banana republic shit hole country run by a mad king tin horn dictator. Trump makes a really stupid claim about a hurricane hitting Alabama. But instead of simply admitting he was wrong he ends up forging a weather map and then makes everyone including the National Weather Service lie for him under threat of Trump firing them.



How Trump used national emergencies to punish his foes: former staffer

Sarah K. Burris
July 18, 2023, 3:31 AM ET



Screenshot


Former chief of staff to the Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, released his latest book "Blowback: A warning to save democracy from the next Trump" Wednesday – and in it he describes how former boss Donald Trump used national emergencies to hurt his enemies.

Taylor who, under the name Anonymous penned an op-ed entitled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" in the New York Times in September 2018, described how Trump doctored a hurricane forecast to punish those who'd upset him.

In Sept 2019, as Hurricane Dorian – remembered as the "Sharpiegate" storm – barreled towards the country, Trump predicted the storm would hit Alabama hard as a Category 5.

His forecast was wrong, and opposed what meteorologists at the National Weather Service and Hurricane Center were predicting.

"An NWS branch in Alabama quickly corrected the president with a tweet: 'Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.'"

Taylor said that Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, later revealed the "White House" was "angry that the 'Deep State' was countering the president." So Trump doubled down on his claim that Alabama was about to be decimated.

"It created confusion and concern for the 5 million people of the state, who had to figure out what to do or where to go. "Alabama first responders explained again that the state was not in danger," Taylor writes.

Still, Trump wouldn't quit. Before the hurricane made landfall, Trump held an infamous Oval Office press briefing, where he held up a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map on which he'd used a sharpie to draw a path showing how the storm would move – a path that he had invented.

"I spoke to two people present in the White House that day and involved in the meeting," Taylor recalls in the book. "Both confirmed that Trump did, in fact, adjust the forecast himself. The president overruled the government's extreme-weather experts with a Sharpie."

When asked how the Sharpie drawing happened, Trump told reporters, "I don't know."

Trump was ridiculed online and Taylor writes the president grew more furious. He demanded NOAA draft a release saying Trump was correct. "The agency hastily issued an unsigned statement admitting there were earlier 'probabilities' that Alabama might be affected by winds. Incredibly, the statement didn't say anything to emphasize the fact that the state was no longer in danger."

Those hurricane models influence emergency management responses, Gallaudet told Taylor. "It was so reckless and so dangerous for him to politicize it."

Taylor described NWS staff as fearful for their jobs, and Gallaudet thought of quitting.

"I asked the retired admiral what would happen if there was another MAGA presidency," writes Taylor.

"That sh-t will be commonplace," Gallaudet told him. "There will be a mass exodus from science agencies."

That means younger, less experienced people will be running the top government agencies, with Trump's ideologues filling the gaps. "In a hurricane, for instance, you might have inexperienced political operatives trying to handle the crisis instead of experts," says Taylor.

Taylor also describes how woefully unprepared Trump was when it came to handling national emergencies. Basic facts like the directions that hurricanes spin and that it's different in the northern and southern hemispheres were foreign to Trump.

"Incredible," Trump told Taylor after he'd explained the storm directions. Taylor was focused on getting Trump "to evacuate the Carolinas, where it looked like the storm would make landfall, but the president mused about another potential response."

"You know, I was watching TV, and they interviewed a guy in a parking lot," Taylor quotes Trump saying. "He was wearing a red hat, a MAGA hat, and he said he was going to 'ride it out.' Isn't that something? That's what Trump supporters do. They're tough. They ride it out. I think that's what I'll tell them to do."

Instances of Trump using the government against his enemies were numerous, Taylor said. Former staff revealed that while president, Trump used the Justice Department and the IRS to settle scores.

He also recalled Trump's plan in Oct. 2020 to "fire tens of thousands of career officials using an authority called 'Schedule F,'" which would allow federal employees to be removed without any appeal or recourse. Taylor recalled Mike Pompeo celebrating the idea, as did Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO).

Montel Hawkins, who worked on Trump's National Security Council, told Taylor, "It will be a revenge machine. They will go after careerists that were 'problems' last time. They know who they are. They have a list."

But the worst came from Taylor's behind-the-scenes accounts of what happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit the island in 2017, and Congress sent the U.S. territory billions in aid. Trump wasn't happy about it.

"Trump was more focused on fighting with island leaders than on life-saving emergency response," wrote Taylor.

"The president wanted to withhold money to the territory. He said it was 'dirty and the people were poor,' and he pitched then DHS acting secretary Elaine Duke on selling Puerto Rico to another country or swapping it for somewhere nicer. Specifically, he proposed trading it for Greenland."

The White House denied the story when it broke into the press. At the same time, Trump also denied the number of deaths on the island as a result of the storm.

"I'm sick of all the money being spent down there," Taylor recalls Trump grumbling. "Pull it back."

Specifically, Taylor writes Trump hated San Juan's mayor, Carmen Yulí Cruz. She spent months attacking the response on cable news, and Trump saw her as ungrateful. At the same time, it was a left-leaning voting pool that never supported him, "and he wanted to punish these anti-Trumpers by withholding aid."

Congress passed the aid, so Trump couldn't withdraw it. So, Trump asked if he could slow down the aide. DHS Sec. Kirstjen Nealson said they'd look into it.

"No more than two weeks passed before the president was at it again, looking for ways to mix politics with disaster response. The secretary flew to California in mid-August in response to the Carr Fire, the sixth most destructive wildfire in state history, and briefed the president on the damage and urgent need for a federal response," Taylor continues. "Trump didn't see tragedy. He saw revenge. California's governor Jerry Brown was a vocal critic of the president, and Trump wanted him to feel the pain."

Trump said California wouldn't get FEMA aid.

"The president wouldn't relent," writes Taylor. "When FEMA updated him again, he went on to harangue about how much he hated California Democrats like Jerry Brown and said not to release assistance grants. Afterward, I called the FEMA administrator and told him not to take the president's venting as a direct order. If the White House sent a written directive, then we'd have a problem, but until then, it was just the ravings of an angry man. When Trump later refused to approve a disaster declaration for California — a decision only a president can make — we enlisted the help of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to change Trump's mind."

"Why the f--k did it take me to do this?" Taylor cites McCarthy's complaint. "What's his problem?"

Taylor warns that the "possibilities for corruption are limitless" in a future Trump administration. "DHS spends billions of dollars every year in federal grants to states for cyber defense, protecting soft targets, breaking up drug networks, and more. DHS has wide discretion to adjust how the money is allocated. During my tenure, we resisted political pressure to manipulate the formulas to favor certain regions over others, but a new MAGA team wouldn't be so reticent."


https://www.rawstory.com/trump-weaponize-emergency-relief/

 

rent free
tax free

 

Love these cartoons.....can't get enough

 

Blowback review: Miles Taylor on the dangers of a second Trump term
65
Charles Kaiser
Sun, July 23, 2023 at 12:00 AM MDT



Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security who catapulted himself to nameless fame in the fall of 2018, when he published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times under this headline: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

Related: ‘Trump can beat Biden’: White House whistleblower Miles Taylor returns with fresh warning

Taylor described himself then as one of many senior officials “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations … To be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed … But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”


The article set off a firestorm, Trump and his allies demanding to know the identity of this “traitor” while some on the left questioned the morality of continuing to work for an administration after you’ve realized it is a clear and present danger to the health of the country.

In his new book, Taylor reveals that debate was as vivid inside him as it was within the rest of the body politic. He has now concluded that anonymity, which he carried into a first book, A Warning, was a mistake, “a gift to authoritarians. They thrive on fear and the suppression of dissent.”

The subtitle of his new book is “A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump”, and there is certainly plenty of that in its 300-plus pages. But there is also lots about Taylor’s “mentally, emotionally and physically” painful “journey to the truth”, which included the break-up of his marriage, bouts of alcoholism and prescription drug abuse.

Even after the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of the US coast guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to “obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”. International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.

The substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US courts”.

Taylor reminds us once again of how completely the Republican party has been corrupted by Maga ideology, with powerful allies of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling for “defunding the FBI” while the Texas senator Ted Cruz wants “a complete house cleaning” at the same agency.

“They will be unconstrained and untethered,” former homeland security general counsel John Mitnick says. “What little restraint was exercised in terms of respecting the rule of law will be gone.”

Like many other George W Bush Republicans, Taylor is weakest when he argues that Trump is an outlier to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people”. This ignores the party’s historic affection for racism and homophobia, which dates at least to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968, or Bush’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a cornerstone of his re-election campaign in 2004. When Taylor casually accuses Barack Obama of backing away “from America’s allies” and “bowing down to its adversaries”, we are reminded the author is indeed an old-fashioned Republican.

But his book is still important because it rings alarm bells about the huge danger of fascism and authoritarianism that would come with Trump’s return to the White House, in a moment when many Washington reporters are silent. This journalistic impotence was evident in two recent stories co-authored by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.

The first, published last month, described Trump’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Joe Biden as part of “a larger movement on the right to gut the FBI, overhaul a justice department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm – which many Republicans view as a facade – that the department should operate independently from the president”.


The second piece by the same trio described Maga plans to eliminate the independence of all federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve board, and laid out Trump’s “plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country’”.


These two articles totaled 4,800 words but included less than a hundred words from anyone questioning the morality or legality of these plans to politicize the justice department and destroy the federal civil service. This single quote, from Kelly, was the only significant balance provided in either piece: “It would be chaotic. It just simply would be chaotic, because [Trump would] continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a non-stop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The Times reporters did not respond to an email asking why they thought a hundred words of opposition to the Maga agenda were sufficient to make their stories balanced.

With that kind of laissez-faire attitude prevailing among too many journalists, books like Taylor’s, which focus on the imminent dangers from a Maga revival, are crucial to a broader effort to rescue American democracy.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/blowback-review-miles-taylor-dangers-060034234.html

 

"Incandescently stupid": Former DHS official says he had to "dumb" down classified memos for Trump
8k
Gabriella Ferrigine
Wed, July 26, 2023 at 8:58 AM MDT



Donald Trump Mark Makela/Getty Images

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, shared how he often had to oversimply national security reports for the former president.

"This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read. We've gotta boil this down into a one-pager in his voice," Taylor told podcast host Brett Meiselas on Tuesday. "And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, 'Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.' And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand," Taylor added. "I mean, I literally said in there, 'You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.' I mean, it was that dumb and that's how you had to talk to him."


MeidasTouch
@MeidasTouch
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"This 50-page memo...is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read." Former Trump DHS Official Miles Taylor reveals how he had to draft national security memos at a first grade reading level so Trump could understand them. https://youtu.be/XobbqIQRT8Q












9:57 AM · Jul 25, 2023


https://www.yahoo.com/news/incandescently-stupid-former-dhs-official-145845005.html

 

How does it work with Biden?
Fingerpaints?
cartoons?
repetitive bullet points?

Whatever it is, it isn't working is it?

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