U.S. President Donald Trump with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. February 28, 2026. The White House/REUTERS
A former top Trump Department of Homeland Security official is warning that he fears the president could get the U.S. into a nuclear war for which it is not prepared — because he saw the president’s response in his first term, when fears ran high after North Korea launched a missile that could have reached the U.S.
“Few Americans realize how close the president took us to the brink of nuclear war in his first term before aides talked him down,” writes Miles Taylor, the DHS chief of staff during Trump’s first term. “What the public didn’t know at the time — and until years later — was that the president’s team was worried he might start a nuclear war.”
“Today, there’s no one prepared to stop him,” warns Taylor, who writes that Trump “has an eerie fascination with nukes.”
“My fear about this man has always been about his finger on the nuclear button. That’s usually just symbolism when we talk about the presidency. The ‘nuclear button’ is a stand-in for the concept of presidential power and the risks of instability,” says Taylor. “When we’re talking about Trump, it’s not a metaphor.”
During Trump’s first year in office, “the United States came closer to a nuclear conflict than most people realize,” Taylor says. He chastised the president for his “mishandling” of a confrontation with North Korea that “was so serious” that the team at DHS “was forced to do real-life, defensive planning for the possibility of a nuclear strike against the homeland — a situation DHS had never been in since its creation.”
Detailing the events that day, Taylor notes that “North Korea had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile,” its “most powerful weapon yet — the first North Korean missile capable of hitting anywhere in the world, including Washington, D.C.”
As the crisis grew, Trump called acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke.
“But Trump wasn’t calling to ask about the missile — or even whether his defensive team at DHS was ready to protect the homeland against such a strike had it been the real thing,” Taylor writes. In an “angry” phone call, Trump “wanted to talk about deportations.”
“As Elaine recounted the call to me, her eyes began to well up. A nuclear-capable missile had just ripped through the skies over the Pacific, and the president of the United States was oblivious. All he cared about was getting foreigners off his land.”
DHS had to prepare for the “genuine possibility” that Trump “might stumble us into a nuclear confrontation with North Korea.”
Taylor detailed Trump’s “angry tweets,” in which he “threatened North Korea with ‘fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.’ National security officials woke up to these messages on their phones. Stunned. The president almost seemed to welcome the prospect of a global conflagration.”
As the months wore on, whenever DHS “got alerts that the North Koreans were preparing a missile launch, those of us working inside the administration worried it could be the real thing,” says Taylor, “or that the president might say something so stupid that he’d manifest it… or that he would be too distracted to care.”
Now, Trump has not changed, but what has is that “everything that kept him in check” is gone.
Taylor recounts how last year, Trump took to Truth Social to declare that, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
“That process will begin immediately,” Trump wrote.
“As the president barrels forward with the Iran war, I’m getting the same sense of dread that I had then,” Taylor warns.
Summing up his concerns, he says that, “Regardless of what happens with the Iran war, I want you to remember this. I want you to remember what we’ve learned about how Donald Trump sees his gravest responsibilities as commander-in-chief, how he was gamified war, and how he has flirted with nuclear catastrophe.”
“It is, perhaps, the most urgent reason for Americans to demand the other branches of government do more to keep him in check. Our president is unstable, and there are no longer sensible people around him to send up a flare if he’s ready to do something deadly.”