A former senior Homeland Security (DHS) official is warning Americans about President Donald Trump's upcoming address on Thursday, drawing on firsthand experience from the first Trump administration to predict what the president intends to discuss.
“The White House hastily manufactured a Big Lie in 2020 that the election was stolen from Trump, but in the frenzied aftermath, it couldn’t really find a culprit,” wrote Miles Taylor, who served in both the Trump and Bush administrations, in an analysis published Tuesday on his Substack.
“So after years of searching desperately for a thief, Trump and team have decided to invent one. Get ready for the Bigger Lie.”
The Trump administration has already teased that the president’s Thursday address would reveal election "irregularities," and further reporting suggested the address would likely relitigate the results of the 2020 election, which Trump has long claimed, falsely and without evidence, was “stolen.”
Given his history working within the Trump administration on “election protection” at DHS, Taylor said he knew exactly the “well of information” Trump would be “drawing from” because he “helped dig it.”
“The president appears poised to make it sound like a foreign adversary, specifically China, took away the White House from him by helping Joe Biden win,” Taylor wrote. “If the Big Lie was bad, this will be even Bigger because now he might name the actual boogeyman that has eluded him, over years of delusional claims about an unfair loss.”
Taylor argued that the very intelligence he expects Trump to invoke – intelligence Taylor helped compile roughly eight years ago – actually contradicts any claim of Chinese election interference.
“The intelligence community already revealed that China might have had a preference for hurting Trump, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence they succeeded in shifting public opinion, let alone changing any votes,” Taylor wrote.
“If this evidence were real, Trump himself had the power to declassify all of it before leaving office in January 2021. He didn’t… because it doesn’t say what he’ll claim it says… and the proof doesn’t exist.”
