Trump sought to withhold California fire aid because of politics, former official says [View all]

Link to tweet

The former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security claims in a political ad released Monday that President Trump tried to withhold disaster relief money for California’s wildfires because voters in the state opposed him politically.

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him,” Miles Taylor, who left the Trump administration in 2019, claims in the ad.

“A lot of the time, the things he wanted to do not only were impossible but, in many cases, illegal,” Taylor said, recalling how Trump “didn’t want” to hear aides inform him that his policies wouldn’t stand up to legal challenges.

“These were his words: He knew that he had ‘magical authorities,’” Taylor said, recalling a phrase he said Trump used to brush off questions from aides.

The Department of Homeland Security oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Taylor doesn’t say which wildfires he is referring to, but the group running the ad confirmed it was the Camp fire of 2018, and Trump toured the devastation in Paradise that year.

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