President Donald Trump hosts leaders of the Central Asian nations at the White House on Nov. 6, 2025 (REUTERS)
President Donald Trump’s former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff admitted that Trump’s people were already preparing plans of action for nuclear war in Trump’s first term. And that was back when Trump had reasonably sane staff.
“I will never forget walking out of a meeting in early 2018, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis pulls me to the side. This is near the White House Situation Room. And he says, ‘you all’ — as in the Department of Homeland Security — ‘need to be prepared like we are going to war.’” recalled Security chief-turned-whistleblower Miles Taylor. “That's one of those moments you can't prepare for. Because you assume … that the president had some other plan.”
At the time Trump was cultivating a brewing tension with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but Taylor said the world did not realize how close it came to a war between two nuclear rivals.
Tayler spoke at a Zeteo live event in DC, pointing out that “for the first time in the history of the Department of Homeland Security, we started to do exercises to prepare for the possibility that the president was going to get us into a nuclear war.”
“I assembled the senior leaders across the department over a multi-month period to figure out how we would respond if that happens,” Taylor told the audience. “… That should scare the hell out of you that your government didn't have enough control of its foreign policy, that its homeland security policy had to anticipate that we would get you into a position that we had to prepare for a nuclear recovery.”
After Taylor’s multi-month planning session and exercises, he admitted to the audience that the Trump administration was still not prepared.
“I went to the White House. I met with my former boss, John Kelly, who was then White House Chief of Staff, and I did not have good news to give him about the results of that planning. That worries me, and it worries me now, because you are seeing the full recklessness of a Trump foreign policy.
Taylor reminded the audience and Zeteo host Asawin Suebsaeng that these were the days of Trump’s first administration, when Trump still bothered to surround himself with intelligent and learned professional of foreign policy. These days, he warns, Trump surrounds himself with yes-men—and few yes-men come with the added advantage of intelligence and constraint.
“Now you are seeing a Trump foreign policy without the so-called adults in the room,” said Taylor, while encouraging current Trump officials to go public with Trump's new irrational threats before they become reality.
See the video at this link.
