Trump is 'playing roulette with our lives' with new threat: former aide

A former top official at President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, warned on Wednesday that the Republican leader is leaving America vulnerable to a biological terrorist attack — and is therefore "playing roulette with our lives."

"Not-fun fact: Trump decimated the DHS office that protects the U.S. from bio threats, like Russia's plague incident," Taylor posted on X on Wednesday. "Hundreds of staff from the "Office of Countering WMD" have been pushed out, fired, or reassigned in Trump 2.0."

In a report for The I Paper, Taylor argued that Trump is "playing roulette with our lives."

He further described a recent news story that illustrates his point.

"The circumstances surrounding the death of a 28-year-old lab technician at a Russian research institute remain clouded with uncertainty, but one point is clear: Donald Trump is actively dismantling the structures needed to protect the world from a potential future biological incident," Taylor wrote.

After describing the death of Darya Shipilova after she allegedly destroyed a test tube of pneumonic plague bacteria at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Russia, he continued that "not long ago, it was my job to worry about situations like this. As chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security, I designed and stood up the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, one of the biggest reorganisations of the department since it was created after 9/11."

He then described how "Trump has taken apart the government office specifically designed to protect the American people from bio threats of this seriousness. After Elon Musk’s Doge team set its sights on the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, Trump told Congress he didn’t need it anymore, and this spring it was effectively deleted. Hundreds of WMD experts were scattered across DHS, reassigned to other work or pushed out. More than half the staff is now gone. Specialists who spent years learning how to spot a dirty bomb or a bioterror plot are now so hard to locate that lawmakers have asked government auditors to check whether anyone is still doing the job."

He added, "I’ve talked to these people. They couldn’t believe that — or understand why — the White House would want to destroy an office responsible for detecting and stopping the next plague. Situations like the one in Russia are why they existed. But it’s too late. Their operation has already been dismantled."

In his opinion, Taylor wrote that "I can’t overstate how reckless this is."

Taylor has previously blasted Trump for being a sore loser and for being secretly hated by most of the Republicans who work with him.

"When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out," Taylor wrote in September. "And if the past few days are any indicator, his top advisers will be getting phone calls – like we did in his first term – demanding extreme measures. Only this time, he’ll have a more compliant audience... I can tell you what probably happened inside the White House late last night and this morning, because in that first term, I was on the receiving end."

In August, he argued that "It's closer to a prayer than a slogan: I wish he would disappear. The reference is to Donald Trump, of course. Never before have Republicans had to campaign under the banner of such a weak figurehead, nor one so insistent on stapling his toxic brand to the party, whether the party likes it or not."