President Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced foreign interference in U.S. elections, but one of his former first-term staffers says the president's actual position was more selective — and that a single episode in 2018 made the truth "click" for him.

Miles Taylor served at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during Trump's first term, rising to chief of before leaving in 2019. He first gained national recognition as the anonymous author of a September 2018 New York Times op-ed describing an internal White House resistance to Trump's worst impulses, and has since become a vocal critic who frequently draws on insights from his firsthand experience inside the administration.

In his latest piece for The i Paper, Taylor writes that he belonged to another resistance group within the first Trump administration — one that worked to prepare for a similar assault on the 2018 midterms. The stakes at the time were considerable: the 2018 midterms were the first nationwide federal elections after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential race, and DHS had designated election infrastructure as critical infrastructure the year before. His warning comes as Trump once again attacks the integrity of U.S. elections and has mused about taking over the midterm voting process, with the next federal midterm elections scheduled for November 2026.

"I take the threat seriously, because I used to work for man. And I saw the earliest signs of how he likes to influence elections," Taylor wrote. "In August 2018, I brought together the heads of the FBI, the intelligence community and my own department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), at the White House podium to warn Russia not to interfere in that year's midterms. We were concerned they might try to meddle again."

That warning was delivered during an August 2018 White House briefing. According to Taylor, Trump called the appearance "terrible" and pressed to find out whether anyone had pressured the officials to issue it. Despite the legitimate warnings about Russian meddling, Trump later targeted a different country altogether.

"Weeks later at the United Nations, he publicly accused China of trying to interfere in the midterms, but he said nothing about the country his team had actually told him was a threat: Russia," Taylor recounted. Trump leveled that accusation against Beijing in a September 2018 address before the U.N. General Assembly.

In light of that discrepancy, Taylor says Trump's true intentions around foreign election meddling became clear to him.

"That's when it clicked for me. Trump didn't seem to mind foreign interference in American elections, if it was helpful to him," he wrote. "The Russians had backed him in 2016, and he did not seem to mind their interference in 2018. What I suspect irked him was that nations like China could use propaganda to undercut him personally, or his hand-picked candidates."

He added: "Back then, I thought the selective enforcement was outrageous. We shouldn't let any foreign nation hack our democracy, whether or not they were aligned with the President's political interests. Of course, it got far worse in 2020. Trump fanned the flames of baseless 'voter fraud' claims after he lost, and for the first time in the history of the United States, a President attempted to prevent the transfer of power."

This article is based on reporting published by Alternet.