Taylor: How Trump Has Left American Vulnerable to a Terrorist Attack by Iran
The Trump Administration appears to have done no “defensive” planning for war and spent a year shifting counterterrorism personnel to domestic immigration enforcement, putting the nation at risk.
By Miles Taylor Defiance.News
(Editor’s note: Miles Taylor is former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who served during Donald Trump’s first term and gained national attention as the anonymous author of a 2018 New York Times op-ed, headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” and the book “A Warning,” which forecast serious problems if he was re-elected. -jr).
I’m going to tell you what keeps me up at night. At least last night. I woke up around 2 a.m. thinking about the ways the Trump administration has left us vulnerable to an Iran-backed terrorist attack.
I used to be responsible for counterterrorism operations at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And the way I’ve watched the White House and DHS fumble the preparation for war is beyond a dereliction of duty. It’s borderline criminal.
Let me put it more bluntly: the president just took us to war with another country — and didn’t prepare to defend us here at home. In fact, he’s taken actions that make us far less prepared than we should be, including firing frontline counterterrorism officers or reassigning them to attack protesters in Minnesota.
Here are the first five reasons that came to mind last night (as I woke up stress-cycling through the foolish mistakes the Trump team has made) that could get Americans killed:
1. DHS doesn’t appear to have done any defensive planning for war.
Anyone who has partial cognition knows that a U.S. war with Iran — whether airstrikes, naval confrontations, or targeted assassinations of its leadership — carries an immediate and predictable consequence. You hit someone, they hit back. In this case, we should be expecting Iranian-directed or Iranian-inspired attacks on American soil. We might have already seen one in Austin, Texas.
History is unambiguous on this point. After the 2020 killing of Iran’s top special forces commander Qasem Soleimani, U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran was actively plotting revenge against American officials and infrastructure. As I wrote about earlier, Iran then went forward with plots to kill Trump himself, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and others. This should have been the most obvious possible wake-up call that authorities should prepare for even deadlier retaliation if we attack Iran again.
And yet, by all available accounts, DHS — the agency with primary responsibility for protecting the American people from exactly this kind of threat — was not really consulted before the administration went to war with Iran. There is no public evidence of any meaningful interagency preparations. No indication that DHS, the FBI, or the intelligence community were brought in to war-game the domestic security consequences of military escalation.
What’s worse, the people whose job it is to answer the question “what happens here at home if we do this?” were apparently not in the room at all when the bombs started flying. You can literally see in the pictures of Trump’s “Mar-a-Lago” Situation Room and the White House Situation Room that DHS and FBI senior leaders were absent. For some reason the Treasury Secretary was there, but where was the Secretary of Homeland Security or the FBI Director?
This is not a procedural complaint or a political critique. It’s a serious warning. Wars do not stay overseas. They come back to haunt you at home. And if you’re not ready, then you’re tempting fate to take the lives of your own people.
2. Thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts, and officials have been moved to “immigration” enforcement.
You probably couldn’t have picked a worse year for this to happen.
Since returning to office, the White House and DHS have been working to surge personnel toward immigration enforcement — and away from other missions, including foreign terror threats. Across DHS, counterterrorism agents and analysts have been reassigned from their core mission and sent to places like Minnesota and California as part of Trump’s deportation crackdown. Field agents who were once tracking terrorism threat streams have been redirected to help support immigration raids, or worse, to confront American protesters.
Indeed, Border Patrol Tactical Units (BORTAC) — the elite DHS counterterrorism teams — have been conspicuous on U.S. city streets going after citizens, rather than hunting down Iranian operatives.
The tradeoff here is direct and concrete. Every hour a counterterrorism agent spends on deportations is an hour not spent on locating and removing potential assassins, bombers, and plotters here within our borders. Tips go unfollowed and suspicious patterns go unexamined. The reassignments may generate headlines about deportation numbers to please Stephen Miller, but they do not make America safer from the threat of mass casualty attacks by foreign adversaries.
DHS was built in the wake of September 11 to ensure that no bureaucratic gap would again allow a catastrophic attack to proceed undetected. The current administration is recreating exactly those gaps — this time deliberately, as a matter of policy — while simultaneously escalating tensions with one of the world’s most capable state sponsors of terrorism.
3. The administration says the number-one terror threat to America is… “Antifa.”
If you want to understand just how disconnected the Trump team is from the actual threat environment, consider what officials told Congress just three months ago.
DHS Secretary Noem and an FBI leader testified under oath in front of the House Homeland Security Committee that their biggest terrorist worry inside the U.S. Homeland was “Antifa.” That’s right. Not Iranian IRGC operatives. Not ISIS or al Qaeda agents infiltrating the country. But left-leaning Americans they’ve deemed to be “Antifa,” even though Trump’s lieutenants couldn’t even figure out how to describe the danger when they were pressed.
Read the exchange when Representative Bennie Thompson pressed the FBI to explain the so-called “immediate violent threat” from Antifa:
“FBI official Michael Glasheen: When you look at the data right now…right now, what I see from my position, is [Antifa] is the most immediate violent threat we are facing on the domestic side.
Rep. Bennie Thompson: So where is Antifa headquartered?
[long uncomfortable silence]
Glasheen: What we’re doing right now —
Rep. Thompson: Uh-uh. Where in the United States does Antifa exist?
Glasheen: We are building out the infrastructure right now.
Rep. Thompson: So what does that mean? We’re trying to get information. You said Antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?
Glasheen: Well, that’s very fluid…
Rep. Thompson: I asked one question, sir. I just want you to tell us — if you said Antifa is the NUMBER ONE domestic terrorist organization operating in the United States, I just need to know where they are … how many people have you identified with the FBI that Antifa is made of.
Glasheen: Well, the investigations are active…
[hesitates]
Rep. Thompson: Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove. I know you wouldn’t do that… But you did.”
This would be pretty funny if the stakes were not so high.
Trust me, this isn’t an issue of “threat prioritization.” This is what happens when political actors at the top — like Trump and his White House aides — demand that national security agencies redirect their resources toward the U.S. political opposition instead of against real threats. And it has happened. It is happening. Lifelong counterterrorism officials are trotting up to Capitol Hill, like Mr. Glasheen, and thoroughly embarrassing themselves by spewing drivel about “Antifa” operatives, while actual terrorists work to penetrate our country and kill our people.
Having spent the better part of twenty years doing counterterrorism work, I can tell you unconditionally: a protester in a bunny suit with a boom box is not a threat to your life. But Iranian operatives are real. They actually exist. They are trained and patient and deployed around the world. And they are hellbent now on striking the United States. By fixating on a phantom menace while dismantling the agencies responsible for going after the real ones, the Trump administration is making it far likelier that Iranian terrorists will succeed.
4. The FBI has been firing agents who monitor Iranian threats.
If you need another indicator that DHS and the FBI were out of the loop on Iran war planning — or just completely out to lunch — look no further than the news story Politico broke this week:
“Kash Patel gutted FBI counterintelligence team tasked with tracking Iranian threats days before US strikes, sources say
Just days before the United States launched a major military operation in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
They were ousted for a simple reason: Each was involved in the investigation of President Donald Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
As a result, Patel hamstrung the Washington, DC-based FBI counterintelligence unit, known as CI-12, which handles cases ranging from mishandling of classified documents to tracking foreign spies operating on US soil.”
Let that sink in.
At the precise moment when Iran has the greatest motivation in years to strike American targets, the FBI has fired the people who knew the most about how Iran operates inside this country.
Their institutional knowledge — the networks they’d mapped, the sources they’d cultivated, the patterns they understood — walked out the door with them. That knowledge does not regenerate quickly. It takes years to build. And it is gone.
Talk about a self-inflicted wound on American national security, delivered in the service of one man’s political grievances.
5. The president took America to war before getting DHS funded.
Perhaps most damning of all is that the president of the United States launched a war before making sure his Department of Homeland Security was back up and running. Remember: last month, Republicans failed to strike a deal to fund DHS and have left most of it in an emergency, shutdown state of operations.
Trump officials can rant and rave all they want about “the Democrats” on Capitol Hill holding up legislation, but the fact remains the Republicans control the White House, U.S. House, and Senate. And if Trump knew he was going to launch strikes against Iran, he should have made damn sure he found a way to cut a deal on Capitol Hill to get DHS funded.
But that clearly wasn’t a priority.
Instead, the president dug in his heels and refused to accede to demands that DHS stop violating the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights of American citizens — among others — and was content to let the Department’s budget lapse. All except for CBP and ICE. You see, the immigration agencies still have money, and for Donald Trump, if immigration enforcement continues, he doesn’t care if the rest of DHS is crippled. Even if foreign terrorists are trying to attack the United States.
I don’t want to scare folks. But given the above, I can say with certainty that the United States is not ready for what may be coming.
Many of the people responsible for getting us ready have either been fired, reassigned, or were never asked to prepare for war in the first place. And the people they report to — Donald Trump and his aides — don’t seem to care.
So when U.S. networks get shut down by a cyber offensive or there are bodies in the streets after a terrorist attack, you will know exactly who to blame. You won’t have to look very far, either. The real culprit spends all day on social media — and apparently none of it trying to protect you.
Miles Taylor is the founder of DEFIANCE.org, established to provide “urgent reporting on threats to America from within.” Subscribe at DEFIANCE.org or on Substack.
New Yorker cartoon by Brendan Looper.
The Midnight Resistance Strikes Again
Miles Taylor is back.
If the name sounds familiar, it should. He is the former Department of Homeland Security staffer who revealed himself as the anonymous author of the New York Times op-ed claiming he was part of a secret “resistance” operating inside the Trump administration.
Yes, you read that correctly. A senior government official publicly admitted that while drawing a taxpayer salary he was quietly working to undermine the elected president of the United States from inside the government. In most professions that would be called getting fired. In Washington it apparently launches a media career.
Taylor’s latest essay is a dramatic warning that Donald Trump has left America defenseless against Iranian terrorism. According to Taylor he woke up at two in the morning in a cold sweat worrying that the Trump administration has done no planning for retaliation.
That is how the article begins. Not with intelligence. Not with evidence. With a nightmare.
Apparently national security analysis now begins the same way ghost stories do. “I woke up in the middle of the night and something terrible might happen.”
This is the modern resistance playbook. Write a column based on anxiety. Sprinkle in speculation. Add the word Trump enough times to ensure search engines notice. Then declare the republic is one hour away from collapse.
Let us walk through Taylor’s warnings.
First, he claims the administration launched military operations against Iran without preparing the homeland for retaliation. This is an interesting claim from someone who no longer works in government and has no access to classified planning. Apparently Taylor’s argument is that because he personally cannot see secret war planning it must not exist. By that logic submarines must also be fictional because we cannot see them either.
Second, he complains that counterterrorism personnel are being reassigned to immigration enforcement. This is the point where the essay collapses under its own weight. Border security is national security. Terrorists do not magically appear inside the United States. They enter through borders, visa systems, airports, and asylum pipelines. The idea that immigration enforcement somehow weakens counterterrorism is like claiming locking the front door makes your house less safe.
Third, Taylor mocks the idea that violent left wing extremist groups could pose a threat. Americans might find that surprising considering that in recent years we watched federal courthouses attacked, police stations burned, and city centers destroyed during coordinated riots. Apparently those events were invisible to Mr. Taylor. Perhaps he slept through them as well.
Fourth, he warns that removing a handful of FBI personnel has crippled the nation’s ability to track Iranian threats. The FBI employs tens of thousands of agents and analysts across dozens of field offices. Claiming the entire counterintelligence system collapses because a dozen people were reassigned is like claiming the U.S. Navy sinks if one captain retires. But exaggeration is the fuel that keeps resistance commentary alive.
Finally, Taylor argues that Department of Homeland Security funding disputes prove the nation is defenseless. Congress controls federal spending and budget standoffs have occurred under every administration for decades. Yet in Taylor’s telling this routine Washington dysfunction becomes proof that disaster is imminent.
There is a pattern here. Take something ordinary, describe it as catastrophic, attach Trump’s name to the headline, and repeat.
What makes Taylor’s warnings especially ironic is his own origin story. He proudly revealed that he was working as a kind of undercover resistance figure inside the administration while collecting a government paycheck. In plain English he was part of the bureaucracy voters were repeatedly told needed reform, what many people refer to as the swamp.
When that system is challenged the people inside it do what bureaucracies always do. They protest, they leak, they write books, and they publish op-eds predicting the end of civilization. Washington has turned this into a cottage industry.
For nearly a decade we have been told that every Trump decision will trigger catastrophe. The economy would collapse. Alliances would crumble. Democracy would end. The republic would fall.
Instead what keeps happening is that the latest apocalyptic prediction quietly fades away and another one takes its place.
Which brings us back to Miles Taylor waking up at two in the morning worrying about the future of the United States. Perhaps the real lesson here is not about national security at all. Perhaps it is about insomnia.
Because if the resistance movement ever discovers a good night’s sleep, the entire op-ed industry might collapse overnight.