Ex-Staffer Reveals Trump's 'Stupid' Solution to the Border Crisis That Was 'More Idiotic Than Fiction'
Miles Taylor, the former Donald Trump administration official who famously criticized Trump in a 2018 The New York Times op-ed under the pen name Anonymous, gave an insight into yet more of the former president’s ludicrous and dangerous ideas during his term along with some other egregious moments including his comments about his daughter, Ivanka. Taylor has released a new book titled Blowback: A Warning To Save Democracy From The Next Trump and, in it, breaks down exactly what Trump’s brief but metamorphic presidency looked like and what risk re-electing Trump, or any of his supporters, could pose.
Trump’s hardline anti-immigration policies dominated both his presidential campaign and his term through the implementation of a physical wall at the southern border, a travel ban that primarily targeted Islamic or Muslim-majority countries and a “zero tolerance” policy that led thousands of children to be separated from their parents.
Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, said anti-immigration policies were Trump’s “favorite subject” in their briefings and claimed he would often run through his “list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies.” One such idea was presented by Trump on March 7, 2019 after he “out of nowhere” complained that Texas ranchers were using doors in his border wall to take their cattle to graze in Rio Grande.
“No doors. I don’t want doors,” Taylor recalls Trump saying. “How crazy is this? There are doors in the border wall? It’s stupid. They can just walk up, open the door, and thousands of [illegals] rush in.” According to Taylor. Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, told Trump that this wasn’t true but Trump “didn’t care.” Trump allegedly ordered, “Just buy the land. I know more about land than any other human on Earth. Let’s do it, okay?” Then came Trump’s alleged idea that Taylor says was “so incandescently stupid I couldn’t laugh.”
“Give the ranchers ladders. 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,” Trump suggested, according to Taylor. Taylor claims Trump would make frequent derogatory comments calling Mexico a “hellhole” and labeled migrants “robbers and rapists.” Taylor quotes Trump as saying: “Have I said that yet? Because it is. It’s a hellhole, and no one f—–g wants that place. Forty thousand murders. Can you believe it? Sheesh.”
Speaking on his book, Taylor told Newsweek that “when it comes to Trump, the truth is always vastly more idiotic than the fiction. 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.”
Before you go, click here to see every time Ivanka Trump has tried to distance herself from the Trump family: