Ex-DHS chief warns of Trump’s 'very real' obsession with setting off a nuke

Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous among modern presidents, one ex-DHS chief warned for The i Paper, as he has a "very real" obsession with deploying nuclear weapons against his adversaries.

Miles Taylor previously worked as the chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term, and became famous for penning an anonymous New York Times op-ed about being part of the "Resistance Within the Trump Administration." Since going public, he has emerged as a vocal critic of his former boss, with a particular focus on the national security threat that he poses.

This was the topic of concern on Friday, when he published a new piece for The i Paper expressing grave concerns about the possibility that Trump will do the unthinkable and launch a nuclear weapon before the end of his term. Taylor explained that most nuclear-age presidents have, after becoming deeply familiar with their terrifying power, developed the "disposition to keep such bombs from going off."

Trump, by contrast, has a "perverse and not-so-secret desire" to set one off, something that Taylor predicts he will try to do before leaving office, "even if it’s only a test."

"Trump’s fascination with nuclear weapons is very real," Taylor wrote. "When he wields the threat of dropping a nuke or wiping out an entire civilization, he’s not deploying a negotiating tactic under the cloak of bravado. He’s doing something far more unsettling. He’s being himself."

Based on his first-hand experience, Taylor explained that Trump "brought the United States closer to a nuclear exchange than the world ever realized" during his first term in the White House.

"At one point, his defense chief warned my team to prepare the home front for attack, as if war was imminent," he detailed. "Trump had told advisers he genuinely wanted to strike North Korea with a nuke, so at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we held emergency sessions on strike scenarios against the US homeland, sessions we had never needed to conduct in the department’s history."

Taylor also revealed the time he found the acting DHS secretary "shaken" in an underground "secure facility" following a North Korean missile test. The secretary, he said, "was rattled by the President’s apparent lack of concern," after he called her about border security and deportations after "a nuclear-armed regime had just tested a weapon capable of reaching the American homeland," something that was the direct result of his own tweets egging them on.

Trump "didn't seem to care" about the gravity of nuclear weapons at the time, and things have only gotten worse.

"Which is what makes the present moment so much more dangerous than the first," Taylor continued, "Trump hasn’t mellowed, and his team has only grown more accommodating toward his bluster. Indeed, he’s not absorbed the institutional dread that every prior nuclear-age president, of whatever party, eventually internalised: namely, the understanding that these weapons exist to deter, not to use. Their very possession demands restraint. For Trump, the bomb remains something else. He sees it as impressive, enticing and symbolic of a superpower he can wield over others."

He added: "A president who stumbles by accident into high-stakes nuclear brinksmanship is terrifying, to be sure, but he’s containable — by advisers, procedure and the chain of command. A president who deliberately dismantles the international norms that prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is doing something almost worse. In testing nukes, Trump would be challenging the rest of the world to do the same and making clear that possession of them is a nation’s only true insurance policy against destruction. He’s encouraging proliferation. He’s making future catastrophes more likely, more numerous and harder to prevent long after he has left office."

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