President Donald Trump is losing in his military campaign in Iran, former Trump administration Homeland Security staffer Miles Taylor told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Thursday's edition of "Deadline: White House" — and the way he's talking about the conflict gives it away.
This comes as Trump escalates his rhetoric, threatening greater and greater violence in the region.
"Miles, have you seen Trump in a moment like this before, having worked for him in the first term?" asked Wallace.
"Well, we tried to prevent a lot of moments like this, Nicolle," said Taylor, who famously wrote the New York Times "anonymous" op-ed about internal Trump administration "resistance." "I mean, I don't say that facetiously. I mean, there were wars, conflicts, international crises he wanted to foment like this, including in the first term he was considering going to war with Iran. He kept a number of us out of the room, as I was told by the White House chief of staff's office, because we were naysayers, because we were people who were trying to convince him not to. Now, he didn't, but he's there."
In previous interviews, Taylor has made similar claims, even warning Trump took the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war.
"I've never seen him this unraveled, Nicolle," said Taylor. "He almost always, even in a losing situation, tries to find some way to put Donald Trump lipstick on a pig and say, well, look, I won, even when he didn't win. The fact that he is still considering military options is the biggest admission you've gotten from this White House that they know they are not winning, that they have put the United States in a losing position. Unfortunately, almost none of those options you read off, citing Axios reporting, would put the United States, ultimately, in a winning position."
"Remember, Nicolle, we were told that the nuclear program was going to be decimated," said Taylor. "It was implied that the entire Iranian regime would be changed. It was said that Iran wouldn't be able to attack its adversaries in the region. It wouldn't be able to fund its proxies, and the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, and its capabilities militarily would be decimated. None of those have been achieved. Those have not been achieved. And in almost every scenario, it looks like the United States will end up worse off vis-a-vis Iran than it was before."
"And so I'm not surprised to hear that Donald Trump wants to drop more bombs and create spectacle," he added.
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