#Trump calls ex-DHS staffer who endorsed Joe Biden a real ‘stiff’

President Trump on Tuesday distanced himself from a former member of his administration who endorsed Joe Biden for president, calling him “disgruntled” and a “stiff.”

“Many thousands of people work for our government. With that said, a former DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE named Miles Taylor, who I do not know (never heard of him), said he left & is on the open arms Fake News circuit. Said to be a real ‘stiff’. They will take anyone against us!,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Taylor, who served as chief of staff for former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, expressed his support for Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, in a video produced by the group Republican Voters Against Trump and an op-ed in the Washington Post.

“What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying. We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue – cyberattack, terrorism threat – he wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities,” Taylor said in the video.

In the Washington Post piece, Taylor accused Trump of governing by “whim, political calculation and self-interest.”

“The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection,” Taylor wrote.

He said the desire to build the southern border wall was part of that effort, as was closing the border between California and Mexico in March 2019 and ordering the agency to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states.

Taylor also claimed that Trump would pepper top DHS officials with “often absurd executive requests” at all times of the day and night.

“One morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh (‘How much would that cost us?’),” he wrote in the op-ed.

Beyond the damage to national security, Taylor blasted Trump for “stoking hatred and division” and faulted his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic threat have been largely wasted. Meanwhile, more than 165,000 Americans have died,” Taylor said.