Former Trump Homeland Security official endorses Biden: He 'will protect the country'

A former top official at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump on Monday endorsed presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, saying both in a video and in an op-ed published in the Washington Post that another four years of Trump would be “terrifying” and “unthinkable.”

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at Homeland Security before leaving in 2019, described some of Trump’s actions in office, including regularly dismissing intelligence on potential threats to the United States because they didn’t interest him, and said Trump “wanted to exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.”

Taylor that Trump purposely wanted to separate children from their parents at the border “so that adults would be deterred from coming to the border for fear of losing their children.”

Taylor also said that Trump wanted to pull relief aid from Californians as an act of revenge: “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 the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.”

He added that Trump would pull Homeland Security aides away from legitimate tasks to carry out “inappropriate and often absurd executive requests,” including “a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him” or to “sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh.”

Taylor, who said he’s not a Democrat, concluded that he’s “confident that Joe Biden will protect the country.”

The endorsement comes on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, at which a handful of Republicans will endorse Biden for president.

Speakers on Monday night include former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the GOP nomination in 2016; former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 2010; and former Rep. Susan Molinari, a Republican from Staten Island, New York.

Colin Powell, the retired general and secretary of state under President George W. Bush, has also endorsed Biden.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.