Trump officials raced to stop him from invoking Insurrection Act in 2019: new book

Donald Trump came “a few sentences away" from deploying the military against migrants as top officials raced to stop him, according to a new book.

White House aides notified Miles Taylor, then chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, that Trump intended to announce at the State of the Union address in February 2019 that he was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops to “forcibly expel” migrants from a caravan traveling toward the southern border, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book published by Politico.

“Until the Trump administration, the proposition had sounded like the plot of a bad fiction novel,” wrote Taylor in his new book, titled “Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump." “But Donald Trump was a few sentences away from making it happen. I was there.”

Trump and other presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, have sent troops to the border to support federal agents, but invocation of the Insurrection Act would be required to deploy the armed services in a law enforcement role on U.S. soil, and Taylor said he and then-DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen spent "hours" begging White House staff and the counsel's officer to stop him.

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“If he invoked the Insurrection Act, it would set a dangerous precedent,” Taylor wrote. “There was no telling where Trump might use it next.”

Taylor said the former president gave Nielsen and him permission to "use the military" to close U.S. ports and "send them back," and Trump raged against the migrant caravans that were covered heavily by Fox News.

“This is f*cking insane,” Trump said during a conversation in the White House’s Map Room. “We can’t let them in.”

Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment, while another former senior DHS official said they didn't recall any planning for the Insurrection Act and called Taylor's claims "fantastical," while a spokesman for Trump profanely denied the claims.

"[Taylor is] a sack of sh*t," said spokesman Stephen Cheung. "His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”