Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor publicly warned President Donald Trump on Tuesday that he is just the “opening salvo” of former administration officials who will be coming forward with their own testimonies in the coming weeks to ensure Trump is not re-elected in November.
“The President hasn’t heard the last of us,” Taylor told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Tuesday morning when asked if there was more to come. “In fact, me speaking out yesterday, you can think of it as an opening salvo.”
Taylor said that in the coming weeks, the President can expect to hear from other ex-administration officials who can speak firsthand to “the same testimonies that I gave which is that he’s ill-equipped to hold the office that he has, and that a second term would be more dangerous than a first term.”
.@ABC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor speaks out on breaking with Pres. Trump and endorsing Joe Biden. https://t.co/io8dW4sq7E pic.twitter.com/hBZsncaZz5
— Good Morning America (@GMA) August 18, 2020
Good Morning America reported that Taylor became the highest-ranking former administration official to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden after publicly airing his criticism of President Trump in a video released Monday by Republican Voters Against Trump.
In the video, Taylor accused Trump of repeatedly exploiting the Department of Homeland Security to advance his own political agenda.
Following the the video’s release during the ABC interview on Tuesday, Taylor said working in Trump’s White House was like playing “whack-a-mole with bad presidential decisions.” He cited family separation policy at the Mexico border and the President’s callous attitude toward relief assistance following wildfires in California as the key reasons for his departure fro the Trump administration.
“Every single month I served in that administration, after we’ve ended family separation, the President would come to us and say, not only he wanted to reinstate it,” Taylor said. “He wanted to double down and implement a deliberate policy of ripping any kid apart from their parents that showed up at the border, any kid at the border.”
Although Taylor has said he left the administration on his own terms, the President’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner sought to discredit Taylor by suggesting during a CNN interview on Monday that the former administration official “wasn’t up for the task.”
Trump also without addressing the assertions made by Taylor dismissed the former White House official as a “DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE” who is “said to be a real ‘stiff.'”
Correction: This post originally misidentified the name of the group Republican Voters Against Trump.
