Ex-Trump official makes explosive claim DHS secretly prepared for nuclear war under Trump

Former Trump administration official turned whistleblower Miles Taylor revealed startling details Friday about the dangers he says Donald Trump posed during his first White House term, revealing that the Department of Homeland Security quietly prepared for the real possibility of nuclear war.

Speaking at Zeteo’s “One Year of Trump” live event at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., Taylor – a former DHS chief of staff who anonymously authored a 2018 New York Times op-ed about resistance from within – said internal fears quickly turned to concrete plans inside DHS.

“We were worried that the President of the United States could actually get us into a nuclear war,” Taylor said, recalling Trump’s infamous 2017 “fire and fury” threats against North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Taylor said some inside the first Trump administration initially assumed there was a strategy behind the bold rhetoric. “You might have thought there was some three-dimensional chess happening,” he said. “Behind the scenes, there was no strategy happening.”

He went on to describe a moment in early 2018 when then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis pulled him aside after a meeting. “He said, ‘You all need to be prepared like we are going to war,’” Taylor recalled.

What came next, Taylor added, was unprecedented.

“For the first time in the history of the Department of Homeland Security, we started to do exercises to prepare for the possibility that the president was going to get us into a nuclear war,” the former high-level official said Friday.

“That should scare the hell out of you,” Taylor told the audience. “That your government didn’t have enough control of its foreign policy that its homeland security policy had to anticipate that."