Blowback by Miles Taylor

Author:Miles Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

On the way home from my truncated January wedding in Latin America, I hoped to find normalcy back at the office. Little had changed while I was away. The government remained shuttered, and the situation at DHS was dire.

We held emergency meetings at the White House. The secretary and I used the looming deadline of missed paychecks to force Trump’s hand, raising the visual specter of DHS families standing in food lines—something the president knew would be deeply harmful to his re-election. He finally blinked.

Congress passed a budget without the billions in border funds Trump had demanded. The president had nothing to show for the debacle except for thirty-five days of political wreckage and an exhausted federal workforce.

Up to that point, I thought I’d seen the nation’s chief executive unglued. But after he lost the showdown with Congress, his remaining reservations (if any) were gone. In the three months that followed, China could have launched a nuclear strike on the United States, and Trump wouldn’t have cared. Everything was about the southern border.

The best way to describe the mayhem of that period is merely to recount Trump’s words and actions, which proved—once and for all—that quitting the administration was the only appropriate option.

On a January flight down South, the president demanded that we involve him in negotiations with contractors over the border wall.

“Two things matter to me,” he said, leaning back in the chair in his Air Force One office. “Price and beauty. I want it to be cheap, and I want it to be fucking beautiful.”

It was legally problematic for a president to engage directly in bidding wars with federal contractors. His involvement could ruin the entire selection process. I explained this to Trump, who ignored me, waving his hand for silence so he could unmute a Fox News segment about himself. He smiled back at his own smiling face on the television.

A week or so later, the president called the secretary with a different order. He wanted to “bus and dump” all illegal aliens picked up at the border into Democratic cities. He wanted to punish those localities for protecting undocumented immigrants by trying to stir up mayhem. Trump later told us he wanted to send the worst ones—the “murderers, rapists, and criminals”—into the cities to create even more instability.

I consulted our lawyers, who reached the obvious conclusion that this would probably be illegal for any number of reasons. I put several of Trump’s aides on an email and told them our position. None of them responded.

The next week, Trump called again to submit more instructions about the design of the border wall (which had long since been designed). In a rambling conversation, he told us to paint the wall “matte black”—he didn’t want it shiny—and complained that the contractors building it were “filthy fucking rich, having lunch with each other every week and deciding how they are going to divvy it all up.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

We muted him for most of the rant.

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