A Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump is taking money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to pay for television ads glorifying himself infuriated a former high-ranking DHS official from the president's first term.
U.S. Customs routinely runs ads discouraging foreigners from migrating to the U.S. and urging those here illegally to self-deport, the Journal reported, but "the pro-Trump ads center on themes that are broader than the agency's typical focus on immigration." Trump "personally pushed for the ads and has been involved in their creation," the Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor bluntly called the misuse of border cash "theft."
Writing on his Substack, Taylor said the ads had aired more than 2,300 times on local stations alone by Sunday.
"As someone who used to help run DHS, I can say without hesitation this is totally unprecedented and head-spinningly corrupt," he wrote. "Border money is supposed to be spent on the border, not on presidential self-promotion, and certainly not weeks before an election."
Taylor argued Trump's shuffling of government cash echoes his history running Atlantic City casinos into the ground, including Trump Castle, whose commercials once serenaded gamblers with the jingle "You're the king! You're the king of the castle!"
That casino was reportedly "so strapped" for cash that Trump's father sent a lawyer to the casino cage with a $3.35 million check to "buy chips" — a transaction New Jersey regulators later called an illegal loan. The Castle went bankrupt a year later anyway.
Taylor noted such schemes "tend to catch up" with Trump eventually: in 2015, federal regulators fined his Taj Mahal casino $10 million — the largest such penalty ever imposed on a casino at the time — after it admitted to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to report suspicious transactions and keep proper records.
"The only solace I get from all of this is that the story doesn’t end well for crooked casinos," he wrote before concluding, "Each of these schemes leaves a trail. Eventually, the auditor will arrive to count every chip in the king’s castle. That day is coming, and it will be a very bad day for Donald Trump."