President Donald Trump sits ringside at UFC 327 in Miami.
On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump will deliver a prime-time address in which he’s expected to push his thoroughly debunked 2020 election denial lies. According to one former Trump official, however, Trump’s claims are not only nonsense, but his national address will backfire when the president comes off as a “sore loser.”
This is according to security expert Miles Taylor, who served under President George W. Bush then in the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, famously leaking about the latter administration in an anonymously written New York Times piece entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Taylor appeared on MSNOW Thursday morning to provide his thoughts on Trump’s pending address.
According to Taylor, the address will likely serve up “bad leftovers” of Trump’s typical election conspiracy theories, like that China interfered in the 2020 election.
“Here's the thing,” said Taylor. “They did. We already know about that. We also know that the Iranians tried to interfere, and the Russians tried to interfere. We know that because the American intelligence community, five years ago, declassified a report that said, here are all the foreign threat actors that tried to muck around in the 2020 election. What was really important is that the intelligence community said none of them managed to access sensitive systems. They didn't change votes. They may have tried to muck around. They may have used social media. They may have tried to get voter information. But they didn't change the outcome of 2020.”
Taylor guessed that Trump and his team are “hoping that we've forgotten about that and that they can dredge up the underlying intelligence reports that led to those conclusions, and that may be by cherry picking those reports and releasing them, they can convince people that it was worse than it was, and that somehow Donald Trump had the election stolen from him.”
He went on to explain that not only did he help build the election security architecture for Trump, noting, “I can tell you with great confidence that those elections that we protected during his presidency were the most free and fair and secure in modern American history,” but that they didn’t do it at the president’s behest. Rather, “we did it despite Donald Trump. He did not seem to want us to protect elections against foreign interference.”
“I mean that very sincerely,” Taylor elaborated. “The president seemed very averse to our efforts to protect elections. He groaned about it. He did not want to take briefings about it. And now he wants to claim that someone hacked our elections and stole them from him.”
Taylor then asserted that the president’s address later in the evening — in which it has been reported he will promote his election lies and declare the elections of Georgia’s Democratic senators illegitimate — will backfire for two reasons.
“From a national security standpoint,” he said, “by going out there and declassifying information that the CIA and other agencies apparently want to keep secret, you may expose sources and methods. You may put our country in danger by putting that information out there. But also, you are emboldening our adversaries. You are showing them that they don't have to hack into our voting machines to upend our politics. All they have to do is reach their hand into our country, and they can destabilize the political system. If you go out there and inflate their efforts as something bigger than they were, Mr. President, you are doing their job for them.”
“But if you don't care about that,” Taylor continued, “if that's fine with you, then I'll tell you politically why this is bad for you. Because if you make this case tonight that a country did something that they didn't actually do, that they stole an election from you that wasn't stolen, even your own supporters will think you look like a loser. They will think you look like a sore loser. And in politics, no one wants to associate with a loser. So if you're worried about the vibes in the MAGA movement, the worst thing you can do is what you're preparing to do tonight. Mr. President. I wouldn't do it.”