Donald Trump actually once considered sending his political enemies to Guantanamo Bay, but didn’t in part because it would be too expensive, according to a former Trump administration official.
Ex-DHS official Miles Taylor, known for secretly voicing his Trump criticisms while employed within the administration, appeared on MSNBC’s Alex Witt Reports on Saturday and was discussing Trump’s purported tendency to weaponize the justice system against his “adversaries.”
“A number of folks who worked in the Trump Administration with me and have since spoken out against the ex president, we joke darkly about the fact that in the second term, a number of us will be in orange jumpsuits in Guantanamo Bay,” Taylor said, adding that the joke isn’t entirely outside of the realm of reality.
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“I say that the comment is half facetious, because Donald Trump actually did have a vision, while I was in the administration, to go use the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay to house political prisoners,” he said. “In that case what he wanted to do is use it to move people from the southern border to send a message and put them in the same place where people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, sits behind bars, and send a message.”
He noted that “the only reason Donald Trump didn’t start sending people to Gitmo” is because “he was convinced it would be too expensive, and the facility couldn’t house the number of people he wanted to send there. That was the mindset of the man when he was president of the United States.
