\n\n“Less than a year into Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, top homeland security officials were so alarmed about escalating tensions with North Korea that they held multiple meetings to prepare for a nuclear attack on American soil, according to a forthcoming book by Miles Taylor, who was a top official in the department at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an excerpt of the book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump<\/em> that was shared with POLITICO, Taylor describes acute concerns in the Trump administration in 2017 after North Korean missile tests \u2014 including one while then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump responded to the missile tests with increasingly bellicose rhetoric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the national security world, anything having to do with nuclear weapons is handled with extreme sensitivity \u2014 well planned, carefully scripted \u2014 yet we didn\u2019t know what Trump might say at any given moment,\u201d writes Taylor, who was intelligence and counter-threats counselor to the secretary of homeland security at the time. \u201cOne day, he threatened North Korea \u2018with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.\u2019 He almost seemed to welcome a nuclear conflict, which terrified us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taylor said then-Defense Secretary James Mattis cornered him one day after a Situation Room meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2018You all need to prepare like we\u2019re going to war,\u2019 he warned. Mattis was serious. DHS should assume the homeland was in mortal danger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Department of Homeland Security took a step it had never taken before, according to Taylor, who is best known for writing an anonymous op-ed<\/a> in The New York Times in 2018 describing a \u201cquiet resistance\u201d in the Trump administration \u201cof people choosing to put country first.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe convened every top leader in DHS to discuss the brewing crisis,\u201d he writes in the new book, which is set for release on July 18. \u201cExperts walked through various scenarios of a nuclear strike on the U.S. homeland, dusted off response plans, and outlined best-case scenarios which nevertheless sounded horrifically grim. I cannot provide the details, but I walked out of those meetings genuinely worried about the safety of the country. In my view, the department was unprepared for the type of nuclear conflict Trump might foment.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n