Donald Trump once floated a plan for ranchers to use ladders to get their cattle over the border wall, according to a new book by Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official who famously criticized Trump in an op-ed under the pen name Anonymous.
Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, made immigration a focus of his 2016 campaign for president. He followed through with hard-line anti-immigration policies, including building a physical wall at the southern border, a travel ban mostly affecting Muslim-majority countries and a "zero tolerance" policy that separated children from their parents.
Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, has warned that a second Trump administration, or a MAGA successor, will be even worse.
As president, Trump would steer briefings to his "favorite subject" and run through his "list of cruelly imaginative immigration policies," Taylor writes in his upcoming book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump, an extract of which was obtained exclusively by Newsweek.
In his book, Taylor recalls that in a March 7, 2019, meeting, Trump "out of nowhere" complained that ranchers in Texas were being allowed to open doors in the border wall to allow their cattle to reach the Rio Grande.
"No doors. I don't want doors," Trump said, according to Taylor. "How crazy is this? There are doors in the border wall? It's stupid. They can just walk up, open the door, and thousands of [illegals] rush in."
Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, told Trump that this wasn't true, Taylor writes. But Trump "didn't care" and ordered them to acquire any land where ranchers had access to the Rio Grande.
"Just buy the land. I know more about land than any other human on Earth. Let's do it, okay?" Taylor quotes Trump as saying.
"Give the ranchers ladders. They can use ladders to get to the other side, but not doors. You could use small fire trucks. Call the local fire stations, and use the ladders on their trucks to help them get over."
The plan was "so incandescently stupid I couldn't laugh," Taylor remembers thinking at the time.
He said Trump went on to say that the plan was needed because Mexico "is a hellhole."
"Have I said that yet? Because it is," Trump said, according to Taylor. "It's a hellhole, and no one f****** wants that place. Forty thousand murders. Can you believe it? Sheesh."
Taylor writes that Trump's "border obsession was consuming him." He often made derogatory references to migrants—including calling them "robbers and rapists"—and was furious when his ideas were not implemented.
Taylor recalls Trump complaining in a meeting on March 28, 2019, that the troops he had sent to patrol the border were ineffective and needed to use deadly force.
"But we can't do that," Trump said ruefully, according to Taylor, before noting that the Pentagon had told him to stop talking about "shooting migrants."
Taylor told Newsweek that "when it comes to Trump, the truth is always vastly more idiotic than the fiction. He spent more time coming up with imbecilic ideas at the border than he did focusing on his job. Sometimes the ideas were stupid. Sometimes they were illegal. Often they were both."
Newsweek has contacted a spokesperson for Trump for comment via email.
In 2018, Taylor criticized Trump in a New York Times, op-ed, which was headlined "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" and had Anonymous as the byline.
In 2020, he revealed that he was the author as he campaigned against Trump's reelection. He is now a member of the centrist Forward Party.
Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump is being released Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.
