Donald Trump is using his deployments of federal forces to U.S. cities as a political weapon to tighten his grip on Democratic strongholds, according to a former aide who served in the president’s first term.
Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official, said on MSNBC’s The Weekend Sunday that Trump’s use of the military in Washington, D.C., has little to do with crime or immigration.
“I would say it’s even bigger than that,” he said. “And I think immigration is going to be used as the Trojan horse to make all of this happen. I mean, well, it’s like a Russian doll of Trojan horses to mix a whole bunch of metaphors.”
“But for Donald Trump, it’s about neither of those things,” he went on. “It’s about power and leverage. And that sounds abstract. That sounds conspiratorial. But everything that he does by his own explication is about how do you get the leverage to do the next thing you want.”
Trump has claimed that crime was “out of control,” despite police data showing that violent crime in Washington dropped to a three-decade low last year.
Taylor argued that the president is deploying a classic authoritarian tactic: take control of armed forces and coerce local authorities.
“You control the guys with the guns,” he said. “And especially if that’s in Democratic cities, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s immigration or whether it’s federal housing law or whether it’s student loans or whether it’s universities. If he controls force in that territory, he has the leverage to go get all of those things done.”
Taylor added: “If he controls force in that territory, he has the leverage to go get all of those things done, to coerce those localities and states to do what he wants. That is ultimately the goal here.”
He pointed to federal deployments in Los Angeles this summer as an example. The administration billed them as temporary immigration-related operations, but Taylor said they “ballooned far greater” since then.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Taylor is no stranger to criticizing the president. In 2018, he authored the New York Times op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He later wrote a book warning of Trump’s re-election. Trump has since seized on Taylor’s act of “resistance,” even ordering the Justice Department to investigate him.
Trump has doubled down on his talking points in pushing his campaign against crime in Washington, D.C., saying on Truth Social on Wednesday night that “The White House is in charge.”
He announced his decision to federalize D.C. police during a Monday press conference. In one of his many lengthy social media rants on the topic, he said: “If D.C. were a State, it would have the highest Homicide Rate of any State in America.”
But in a Friday reversal, the Trump administration said the D.C. police chief would remain in charge after city officials sued to block Trump’s attempted takeover of the force.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the district’s police to work with federal immigration authorities, regardless of city laws.
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