Ex-DHS official: I’ve personally heard Trump’s 'almost obsessive attraction' to war crimes

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed headlined "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." The author described his efforts to "preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses."

In 2020, former U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Miles Taylor revealed that he was the one who wrote that op-ed. Taylor is a conservative, but after working closely with Trump during his first presidency, he didn't hesitate to support Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and the next Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, in 2024. And Taylor isn't shy about laying out reasons why he believes Trump is so destructive to the United States.

Trump recently threatened to bomb Iran "back to the Stone Age where they belong," echoing rhetoric that the late U.S. Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay used during the Vietnam War. The president's defenders are dismissing the comments as Trump merely being rhetoric, but Taylor, in an article published by the U.K.-based i Paper on April 3, warns that violent rhetoric from Trump needs to be taken seriously.

"This week, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure and desalination plants — the facilities that keep civilian populations alive," the Never Trump conservative explains. "When critics pointed out that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international law, the White House waved them off. The president, his spokesmen assured us, was engaging in tough diplomacy. But the man wasn't bluffing. He's got an almost obsessive attraction to the idea of maiming civilians. I know. I've personally heard him propose the most inhumane acts."

Taylor continues, "There's a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realizing that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That's the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Trump's first term."

Taylor recalls that during his first presidency, Trump not only wanted to keep Central American migrants out of the U.S. — he wanted to see them "eliminated."

"Trump proposed violence," Taylor notes. "More specifically, he wanted to use the threat of physical harm and death to deter them…. For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry…. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed."

Trump, the former DHS official warns, isn't shy about proposing acts that are considered war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.

"If he wants to bomb power plants and clean-water facilities, seemingly to punish the Iranians as a way to get leverage over the regime, it's obviously immoral," Taylor explains. "But there's also a term in international law for deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to inflict suffering on a population. That word is 'war crime.' And if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp…. My successors in the second Trump Aadministration are apparently unwilling to restrain the president."

Taylor continues, "So America's allies in Britain and beyond should take note. If they care about what's happening, they should speak up. But if they're willing to submit the future of the western world to the conscience of Donald Trump, then I would advise them to begin writing its obituary."