Trump Used to Scare Staffers With Fantasies ‘About Wanting to Blow Up Bombs,’ Former Official Says

Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor claimed on Thursday that President Donald Trump used to scare his staffers with fantasies “about wanting to blow up bombs” and “see bombs blown up.”

Reacting on CNN NewsNight to Trump’s announcement that the United States would begin testing nuclear weapons again “immediately,” Taylor recalled:

I will tell you very honestly, Trump in the first term, at least when I was there, fantasized quite openly to advisers about wanting to blow up bombs. It wasn’t more complicated than that, he didn’t have this 3D chess strategy, he wanted to see bombs blown up. That was alarming to people. I’ll tell you, there was a meeting, I remember leaving the White House Situation Room when we’re in this conflict with North Korea. I remember at the time Donald Trump was tweeting at North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, bringing us closer and closer to conflict. Anyone who thought that there was some sophisticated strategy to try to intimidate Kim didn’t know the truth, which was that the president was freestyling. It was scaring his team and the secretary of defense walked out of one of those meetings and turned to us at the Department of Homeland Security and said, “I hope you are preparing for the United States to go to war.” Those are very scary words to hear from the secretary of defense because the president was in a game of brinkmanship that was unplanned, that was putting us very close to it.

He concluded, “So look, knowing that, I’m not excited that the man with his finger on the nuclear button wants to go play practice pressing the nuclear button. We don’t need to, the experts say we don’t need to, and even if our adversaries are detonating nuclear weapons, it’s not a good precedent to set for the United States to resume doing the same.”

Watch above via CNN.

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