New Book Details Trump Idea ‘So Incandescently Stupid’ That Official ‘Couldn't Laugh'
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Donald Trump once came up with a proposal for the U.S.-Mexico border wall ― involving ranchers, their cattle and ladders ― that was “so incandescently stupid I couldn’t laugh,” a former Homeland Security official who was present in the meeting claims in a new book.
Trump was in March 2019 undeterred when he was informed that reports of ranchers in Texas using doors in the wall to take their cattle grazing near the Rio Grande were false, Miles Taylor wrote in “Blowback: A Warning To Save Democracy From the Next Trump,” which Newsweek shared excerpts from on Monday.
Instead, Taylor said the then-president just ordered officials to buy the land, boasting he knew “more about land than any other human on Earth.”
“Give the ranchers ladders. They can use ladders to get to the other side, but not doors. You could use small fire trucks. Call the local fire stations, and use the ladders on their trucks to help them get over,” Trump reportedly continued, apparently not thinking through how the cattle would follow the ranchers.
With Trump “the truth is always vastly more idiotic than the fiction,” Taylor told Newsweek in promoting his upcoming book.
Trump “spent more time coming up with imbecilic ideas at the border than he did focusing on his job. Sometimes the ideas were stupid. Sometimes they were illegal. Often they were both,” added Taylor, who served as the agency’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019.
Taylor in 2020 revealed he’d been the author of an anonymous 2018 opinion piece for The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He is now a vocal critic of the former president and backed President Joe Biden in 2020.
Last year, he quit the Republican Party, claiming it couldn’t be saved.
“The vitriolic rhetoric is inspiring violent radicals, Taylor tweeted at the time.
