former Homeland Security Official Alleges Trump Actions Sparked Nuclear War Fears in 2017
Washington D.C. – In 2017, then-President Donald Trump’s unpredictable rhetoric adn actions surrounding North Korea led senior officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fear he was dangerously close to initiating a nuclear conflict, according to a recent account from former DHS official Miles Taylor. The concerns were so acute that the department rehearsed emergency procedures for a potential nuclear attack on the U.S. mainland – a step Taylor says had never been taken before in the department’s history.
Taylor,who served as Deputy Chief of Staff at DHS during the Trump management,detailed the escalating anxieties in a report originating with Newsweek. The situation stemmed from Trump’s increasingly bellicose statements toward North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong-un, and a perceived lack of control over the president’s potential responses. This revelation adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting a chaotic and unsettling atmosphere within the White House during this period.
According to Taylor, in 2017, Trump led government officials to believe he was prepared to plunge the country into nuclear war. “In the world of national security, anything involving nuclear weapons is treated with extreme caution – everything is planned and engineered in great detail – but we never knew what Trump might say at any given moment. The team was completely rattled,” Taylor said.
Taylor specifically referenced Trump’s declaration that threats from North Korea “would be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power like the world has never seen,” adding, “we knew at the time that he almost seemed to be calling for a nuclear conflict, and that scared us.” Then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly restrained Taylor at the conclusion of a tense Situation Room meeting, instructing him, “‘You have to prepare as if we were going to war.’ Mattis was completely serious. The Department of Homeland Security had to assume that the homeland was in mortal danger.”
Senior leadership at DHS convened to discuss potential scenarios of a nuclear attack on the U.S., reviewing contingency plans and outlining even the most optimistic outcomes as “frighteningly bleak.” taylor stated he left those meetings ”genuinely concerned about the country’s security” and believed the department was unprepared for a nuclear conflict Trump might have initiated.
