A former White House insider revealed that President Donald Trump ignored a "serious" threat in 2018 to fixate on China.
During an interview on the Court of History podcast, Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, detailed Trump's dismissal of the threat. Taylor said that it happened during a 2018 intelligence briefing on the threat posed by Russia.
"You should have seen our jaws hit the floor in September of 2018, when we had briefed Trump on all the threats to our elections," Taylor said, describing a scene from the first Trump administration. "The only one he seemed to key in on is, 'Wait, the Chinese might not support me. I'm going to go call them out instead of calling out the other threat actors, ' we said, who might meddle."
At that time, Russia was the "vastly more serious threat" to U.S. election security, Taylor said. That's what Taylor and other security officials had tried to tell Trump, who was more interested in support from the Chinese, which was "very revealing," Taylor said.
"He did not have an interest in threatening our adversaries. Why? Because he viewed our adversaries as our allies. That's why he didn't want to deter them," Taylor said. "The only exception to that is China because he saw that the Chinese might try to interfere to hurt him, and so he called it out at the United Nations."
Taylor recalled the episode in the context of Trump's recent speech where he accused China of election meddling, noting, "Unfortunately, time and again, as the administration wore on, the president did not have an interest in election security."
Taylor's comments came after Trump delivered a national address in which he accused China of election interference in the 2020 presidential election. Trump also announced during the speech that his administration would increase pressure on states to revise their voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterms.