What we saw week in and week out… was terrifying. We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue: cyber attack, terrorism threat. He wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities. The president wanted to exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.

The California wildfires… on a phone call to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he told FEMA to cut off the money and to no longer give individual assistance to California. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.

A lot of the time the things he wanted to do not only were impossible but, in many cases, illegal. He didn’t want us to tell him it was illegal any more because he knew that there were, and these were his words, he knew that he had magical authorities.

He was one of the most unfocused and undisciplined senior executives I’ve ever encountered. I came away completely convinced, based on firsthand experience, that the president was ill-equipped and wouldn’t become equipped to do his job effectively. And what’s worse was actively doing damage to our security.

People who are still serving in this administration have said to me, “Just wait until the second term. It’ll be no holds barred. It’ll be shock and awe. We’ll do what we want.”

Miles Taylor