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A former senior Trump administration official has endorsed Joe Biden for president.
In a campaign video released by the group Republican Voters Against Trump, Miles Taylor, who served as Chief of Staff to Kirstjen Nielsen, the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, calls President Trump, “one of the most unfocused and undisciplined senior executives I’ve ever encountered.”
“We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue — cyberattack, terrorism threat — he wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities,” he said. “The President wanted to exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes.”
“On a phone call with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told FEMA to cut off the money and to no longer give individual assistance to California. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him, and that politically, it wasn’t a base for him,” said Taylor.
He does not specify when the call happened or whether it did ultimately impact FEMA’s assistance to California, although Taylor served for two and a half years from 2017-2019.
Trump has repeatedly clashed with Democratic leaders in California over the state's liberal politics, although Gov. Newsom has largely maintained a cordial relationship with the White House.