Miles Taylor's profile

Former Trump DHS officials launch anti-Trump group

Former Trump DHS officials launch anti-Trump group
Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration who endorsed Joe Biden last week, has started a group of current and former administration officials and other Republican leaders who want to see President Donald Trump defeated in November.

Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann, another former senior DHS official who served in the administration, have started the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR), which will include people who work or have worked for Trump but want to elect Biden and reform the Republican Party.

So far, two current senior administration officials have anonymously signed on to the effort and one of them has preliminary plans to reveal their identity closer to the election and expects to get fired as a result, according to a person familiar with the project who declined to share the names of those two officials. The person also said the group is preparing another “bombshell” to be revealed as soon as Tuesday but didn’t get into any more detail when pressed.

The group is working to get between 20 and 40 former Republican officials, including people who have served in the administration, to sign on to become part of the group. Taylor stepped down last year.

“The President has demonstrated he’s unfit for office. And those of us who witnessed the chaos of his Administration firsthand from the inside are coming together to ensure that Trump is not re-elected,” Taylor said in a statement to POLITICO.

“More importantly, this organization will be planning for a post-Trump Republican Party and working with other groups to repair the GOP and repair our republic. In the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing a range of Republican talent that will be helping drive the effort, as well as new initiates to bring the GOP back to its roots, away from the corruption of Trumpism, and toward a more forward-looking agenda.”
Republican Voters Against Trump, a group founded by former Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, is providing initial funding for REPAIR until it can become its own standalone group. REPAIR also is likely to create ads featuring former Trump officials speaking out about what they saw in the administration but those ads would be run out of other groups.

eendorsement Last week, Taylor, in a series of videos for Kristol’s group, endorsed Biden and slammed Trump’s presidency as “terrifying” and “actively doing damage to our security.” His initial Bidenvideo garnered over 6 million views on Twitter, and Taylor, who’s on leave from Google, also hit the TV news circuit, doing interviews with ABC News, CNN and MSNBC, among others. A shorter version of Taylor’s ad is now appearing on TV, including nationally on Fox News.

One of Taylor's criticisms of Trump is that it was impossible for officials to discuss Russian interference in America's elections with Trump without him thinking you were calling his 2016 election victory into question. On CNN on Sunday, acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf pushed back and said that "bringing up issues, whether it's Russia or whether it's any other issue, with the president has never been a problem for myself."

In a tweet on Sunday, Taylor appeared to send a bat signal for his former colleagues still working for Trump to urge them to get in touch with him for this type of effort, saying: “There are people of conscience still left in the Administration and others who’ve departed. They should come forward to say what we all know to be true, what we all witnessed: Trump is unfit for office — and we cannot allow him to debase and divide us.”

REPAIR’s first big project is called "Publius Reawakened," a series of anonymous pieces on why the current and former Republican officials believe that Trumpism has damaged the party and the nation, focusing on different topics like foreign policy, and how to repair it and get the party on the right track. Publius harkens back to the pseudonym the founders used in the Federalist Papers to persuade Americans to support the new U.S. Constitution.
Former Trump DHS officials launch anti-Trump group
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Former Trump DHS officials launch anti-Trump group

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