"Incandescently stupid": Former DHS official says he had to "dumb" down classified memos for Trump

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, shared how he often had to oversimply national security reports for the former president.

"This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read. We've gotta boil this down into a one-pager in his voice," Taylor told podcast host Brett Meiselas on Tuesday. "And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, 'Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.' And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand," Taylor added. "I mean, I literally said in there, 'You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.' I mean, it was that dumb and that's how you had to talk to him."