President Donald Trump made what some critics called a thinly veiled threat over the weekend to Ohio voters, one that security expert Miles Taylor described as both “desperate” and destined to “blow up in his face.”
Speaking at his rally in Ohio on Saturday, Trump said he would be less inclined to approve federal funding requests from Democratic elected officials, and outright said he would not “help” Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton should she defeat her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Writing in an analysis published on his Substack Monday, Taylor, who served as a senior Homeland Security official under the first Trump administration, likened Trump’s warning to “a robber pulling aside his jacket to show you the pistol in his waistband.” He argued Trump’s remarks signaled that the president had reached “total desperation stage,” and also shared his two key takeaways.
“First, it’s a disgusting and blatantly unconstitutional weaponization of presidential power. Trump is using your taxpayer dollars as a carrot-and-stick to get you to vote for his candidates,” Taylor wrote. “Second, it’s going to blow up in his face.”
Taylor argued that, as Trump repeatedly hits new polling lows, the president’s “threat” to “take even more money” from voters was destined to anger “anyone who wasn’t already pissed off.” Voters’ anger, Taylor predicted, would manifest itself “like a pile of fireworks lit by a blowtorch” in the midterms, which would set off an unprecedented wave of legal inquiries into the Trump administration in a new Democratic-controlled Congress.
“Threatening the very people who hired you is a pretty bad management strategy and even stupider politics,” Taylor wrote. “This weekend, Donald Trump proved that he doesn’t need an opponent. If left to his own corrupt devices, he will defeat himself, again and again.”