President Donald Trump told officials from the Department of Homeland Security to get their marching orders by listening to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs “every night,” former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor told Anderson Cooper on Friday.
Dobbs, an effusive supporter of Trump, was basically the “shadow chief of staff” for the department, Taylor said in the CNN interview.
“The president would call us and ... he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.
“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late-night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done ... at the border ... the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” he added.
Taylor said he didn’t have time to watch Dobbs while the 250,000-person DHS was “trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to this country.”
“We can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis,” Taylor said.
Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff to former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He has blasted the Trump administration and is endorsing Democrat Joe Biden for president. He accused Trump in a blistering Washington Post op-ed of sacrificing national security for his personal benefit.
Taylor said earlier this week that Trump once asked if America could swap Puerto Rico for Greenland and that he frequently made disparaging comments about the Puerto Rican people.
Trump has responded to Taylor’s criticisms by saying he’s a ”disgruntled employee” and a “real stiff” whom he has “never heard of.”
Check out what Taylor had to say to Cooper in the video clip up top.
