Donald Trump made sexual comments about his daughter Ivanka to aides working in his administration, a former Department of Homeland Security official reportedly claims in an upcoming book.
Miles Taylor, a DHS chief of staff under Trump, described the alleged remarks from the former president as part of a wider pattern of sexism and inappropriate behaviour toward women in his administration, according to Newsweek, which obtained an excerpt from the book.
“Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,” Taylor wrote, recalling an alleged exchange with Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff between 2017 and 2019.
“Afterward, Kelly retold that story to me in visible disgust. Trump, he said, was ‘a very, very evil man’.”
Taylor said he also witnessed Trump’s sexist behaviour in meetings with Kirstjen Nielsen, who was secretary of homeland security from 2017 to 2019.
He said Trump would refer to Nielsen as “sweetie” and “honey” and critique the way she was dressed.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Taylor left the Republican Party last year, saying the institution is “poisoning” Americans’ minds and “going after the foundations of democracy itself”.
He said in 2020 that he was voting for Joe Biden, publicly accusing Trump of trying to “exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda”. He has also admitted to authoring an anonymous 2018 op-ed in The New York Times, where he claimed he was part of a group of staffers working against Trump from inside his own administration.
His book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump is set for release on July 18.
Trump has repeatedly been accused of sexual misconduct in the workplace and beyond. Earlier this year, after a Manhattan jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s, several women from his administration came forward to allege the former president behaved inappropriately toward women in the White House.
He famously boasted that he could grab women “by the pussy” in a 2005 exchange caught on tape, claiming that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything”.
He also has a troubling record of making sexualised comments about Ivanka Trump. He’s described her as “voluptuous”, said he might date her if she wasn’t his daughter, and once told radio host Howard Stern it was OK to call her a “piece of ass”.
In 1999, when Ivanka was 17 years old, Trump joked that he’d promised his daughter he’d never date a girl younger than her, but that “as she grows older, the field is getting very limited”.