Orange Meltdown, Con't

FOX Business host Lou Dobbs was the functional head of the entire Department of Homeland Security, and if that surprises you in any way, understand that this is how Trump operates and has operated for years: the most qualified experts are always the people on TV who say Trump is right.

President Donald Trump told officials from the Department of Homeland Security to get their marching orders by listening to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs “every night,” former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor told Anderson Cooper on Friday.

Dobbs, an effusive supporter of Trump, was basically the “shadow chief of staff” for the department, Taylor said in the CNN interview.

“The president would call us and ... he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.

“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late-night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done ... at the border ... the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” he added.

Taylor said he didn’t have time to watch Dobbs while the 250,000-person DHS was “trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to this country.”

“We can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis,” Taylor said.

Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff to former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He has blasted the Trump administration and is endorsing Democrat Joe Biden for president. He accused Trump in a blistering Washington Post op-ed of sacrificing national security for his personal benefit.

Taylor said earlier this week that Trump once asked if America could swap Puerto Rico for Greenland and that he frequently made disparaging comments about the Puerto Rican people.

Lou Dobbs is running DHS, Tucker Carlson runs State, Jeanine Pirro runs the DOJ, and Stuart Varney runs Treasury. The reality TV star in the Oval Office has TV pundits running the country and has for years.

No wonder then that Republicans, led by former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, are finally saying Trump needs to go.

More than two-dozen former Republican U.S. lawmakers, including former Senator Jeff Flake, endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president on Monday, the first day of the Republican National Convention, in the latest rebuke of President Donald Trump by members of his own party.

The 27 former members of Congress joined a “Republicans for Biden” initiative organized by the Biden campaign to encourage Republican support for the Democrat, the Biden campaign said. They cited Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course” as reasons for the move, according to a Biden campaign statement.

Flake, whose opposition to Trump led the Arizona Republican to retire from the Senate in 2018, was due to speak to reporters later on Monday about his decision to endorse Biden.

The former lawmakers represent only the latest Republican group to endorse Democratic presidential nominee and oppose Trump in the Nov. 3 election, illustrating how the Republican president has alienated members of his own party.

Last week, 73 former Republican national security officials, including former chiefs of the FBI and CIA, endorsed Biden while calling Trump corrupt and unfit to serve.

The opposition groups object to Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies abroad and his leadership at home, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, according to a Reuters tally, and triggered a severe economic downturn.

The Trump campaign has described the Republican groups campaigning for Biden, such as Republican Voters Against Trump and 43 Alumni for Biden - hundreds of officials who worked for George W. Bush - as “the swamp,” disaffected former officials “trying to take down the duly elected President of the United States.”

Everyone who opposes Dear Leader is a Deep State operative, you know, including all the voters I guess. We have to escape this madness or they're going to kill us all.