Miles Taylor: Previewing A Trump 2.0

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is the day after we learned that Donald Trump got the formal target letter saying that he is going to be indicted for his role in the attempted coup of January sixth. So joining us today, Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, you might remember that he was the anonymous writer of the New York times op ed in twenty eighteen with was titled I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration. He followed that up with the book a warning in twenty nineteen and then unmasked himself on October twenty twenty.

He is now the author of the brand new book Blowback. A warning to save democracy from the next Trump, and he joins us from a street in New York City. Well, I mean, this feels like it’s cinema Verite, Miles.

Yeah. Well, if if you hear any of the background noise, that’s the texture of being in New York. Right.

I mean, it it is real. You know, we are occasionally accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. And and it occurs to me reading through your book that that the problem is not that we have Trump derangement syndrome, which which I’m I’m willing to fast up to. Is that we don’t have enough of it? I mean, I’m not easily scared.

But you lay out in the book exactly what Trump two point o would be like, and I wanna get to that in a moment including some of the dazzling anecdotes you have from Trump one point o. But let’s just talk about the reaction to the news of the potential indictment related to January six. And I guess the big question was, would Trump ever be held accountable for what what happened. So what is your reaction now to the fact that we are apparently days away from Jack Smith dropping the big one on Donald Trump. Is Donald Trump ever going to be held accountable for this?

Well, you know, Charlie, I think an indictment in this case was almost inevitable. It’s really clear to the layman that the ex president did something that was in contravention of the US constitution and fomenting an insurrection against the United States. So in my view, it’s always been inevitable. But I think what’s really disconcerting is it may not have an impact. And I was just saying this this morning to some folks earlier, some great political analysts who are huddling and having a conversation about this is it feels like maybe the tenth, eleventh, or maybe a dozen time that we’ve predicted, you know, Trump’s potential political downfall because of something like this, And and I worry that despite the gravity of the charges and the disqualifying nature, if he’s convicted, that it may not have an impact.

And that, you know, we will continue on seeing the intense politicizing of the justice system. And you’re already seen inklings of that. I mean, his opponent one of his opponents, Ron DeSantis in the race, who you would think would seize on this information to try to push Trump out of the way, instead went on television and said, you know, I’m worried that the justice system is being weaponized.

Very low energy I thought from Miranda Santos. That mean, wearing DeSantis’s only shot to win this nomination is somehow for Donald Trump to collapse. Right? And for that to happen, Republican voters are gonna have to say, this is just too far. I mean, it’s one thing to be indicted in New York.

It’s another thing to be indicted down in Florida. Oh, but, you know, I mean, there has to be some line, right, that they will say that this is too much. And yet, guys like Rhonda Sanders are not willing to say this is going too far. That, in fact, this is a serious commentary on his unfitness for office because, I mean, think about this now, Miles. You know, within a few weeks, this twice impeached defeated ex president is going to face four separate criminal indictments, and the republican party is looking at him going, yeah.

We’re fine with that. Let’s, you know, lash ourselves to this mass once again. Really, rather extreme. And by the way, I didn’t even mention, you know, these felony convictions for, you know, tax fraud in New York for the Trump organization. And the federal jury finding the ex president had raped and defamed e Gene Terrell that the judge actually used the word rape today.

And yet, Republicans are going, yeah, we’re gonna go all in on Skye once again next year.

Well, and I you know, folks like you and me, Charlie, were really hopeful that potentially, the one thing that would end his political career would be opposition. It wouldn’t be the courts, it wouldn’t be a congress, both of which have seemed incapable of holding him to account, but it would be political opponents in the primary process for the presidency, but even that, again, doesn’t appear to be holding him to account. And, you know, a few people, you know, I gotta give credit to Chris Christie and Will Saletan, and A few others have seized on this

— Asa Hutchinson. —

asa Hutchinson, but those guys are in the single digits in the polls, and it’s in important that they dissent from within the party that they attack Trump, but it doesn’t seem to be having traction, which I think Charlie is one of the best indicators we have of how radicalized the GOP base has become. And I don’t say that lightly. I mean, I say that as a lifelong conservative and I mean it very specifically. And what do I mean by a radicalized base? Well, if you look at the polling and poll after poll, the majority of Republicans in these in the country, believe in provably false conspiracy theories.

Like, they believe in, you know, great replacement, they believe Qanon, they believe in the stolen election lie. These are provably false conspiracy theories, and that radicalization has meant that most of these candidates are trying to out Trump Trump. And and that’s one of the dangers that I flag and blow back, certainly a second term of Donald Trump would be enormously damaging to our democracy, but it’s not just a second term of Donald Trump. What we are seeing right now is the inertia that almost any of these people who might take his place and be the GOP nominee are gonna try to outdo him and carry forward his thwarted policies, and and that’s what’s really alarming to me.

So let’s just break down this question of whether or not Donald Trump will be held accountable, you know, clearly it it does not look like Republic party’s gonna hold him accountable for this, or the Republican political base. But separately, you know, there is the question whether or not the voters at large will hold him accountable. And more immediately, though, whether or not the justice system is going to hold I mean, at this point, I think that we have to we have to hope that it will be the federal court system that will be the bulwark of the constitution. We can’t count on congress. We can’t count on his fellow publicans.

We can’t count on the nominating process. We have to hope that the judicial system, you know, maintains integrity that we’re now moving into a completely different realm. We’re facts actually matter. And I think we’re going to have a real test, a stress test of I mean, they can try to politicize the judicial system but the question is, will the judicial system, you know, act like we expect it to in in terms of administering justice and holding people accountable for violating the law?

Well, and I hate to be pessimistic about this, but I have relatively low confidence that, frankly, any of the branches of government we’ll be able to hold this man accountable even how expansive his movement is. You know, we start with the executive branch. I mean, people like me, went into the Trump administration with a very naive view that we felt like we could keep him in check from the inside. That failed. The guardrails within the executive branch failed to keep Trump accountable.

Okay. After that, people were very hopeful that the legislative branch would hold Trump accountable. And again, he survived two damning impeachments for which he should have been removed from office and disqualified for running for office again. The legislative branch failed to keep him in check. And now we’re looking at these, again, very serious charges that the judiciary is going to consider But I was just chatting with our friend the other day, Renato Mariotti.

And I asked him, I said, Renato, do you think at least this first case on classified documents will be adjudicated in time, and his prediction was no. He said I think that they’re gonna tie it up so much that that case won’t be resolved until twenty twenty five at the earliest. Well, that’s too late because Donald Trump might be the nominee, and there’s a chance he might be the president. So that last guardrail that you flagged there, Charlie, is the voters themselves. And what’s really worrying to me is, right now, if it if you look at the betting markets, the odds makers have Donald Trump at three times the likelihood of winning the presidency

as he had just before he won it

in twenty sixteen And, you

know, they don’t have a crystal ball,

but that is an indicator that voters believe he has a very realistic shot of returning to the White House. So if that’s the case, then we need to be exceptionally clear eyed about what that means. What does a second term of Maga in the White House mean for this country? And how do we prepare for it?

You and I have talked to before on podcast about, you know, what were you thinking when you went to work for Donald Trump? Unless, I’m gonna I’m gonna put that in in the past because clearly you and others believe that you needed to have grown ups in the room. You needed to have people who would stop things from happening that otherwise would have been worse. If if it hadn’t been, for, you know, rational, reasonable staffers, then you would have the Steven Miller’s of the world making all the decisions and deciding who to kill it, etcetera. I guess the real question is, in Trump two point o, how will the administration be different?

Because I’m guessing that the people who deluded themselves into believing that they could be the grown ups and make a difference in Trump one point o would not make the mistake again or would that mean, who would be Who would staff a Trump White House in twenty twenty five? Who would staff the administrative state? Because he’s made it clear that he wants to blow the whole thing up, that he wants to change the balance of power. But that’s gonna require a whole lot of people who strike me as being very different than the people he surrounded himself with the first time. What do you think?

Well, I I think that’s really the concern Charlie Sykes, you know, there was someone in book, a very senior figure in Trump’s orbit, who said in the second term, it won’t be the John Kelly’s and the Jim Mattis’s that come into the administration. It will be quote, the fucking enablers. And that was probably the most common comment that I heard as I interviewed dozens and dozens of ex trump officials about what to expect in the second term is that it will not be people who are so called rational Republicans. It won’t be explicit administration officials who are moderates who are advising the president and executing his policies, it will be ideologues. It will be campaign aids and political loyalists.

I think that’s a really big concern. I mean, look, when it comes to some backwater department and agency that doesn’t have a lot of impact on the lives of Americans sure. Fine. You can put political operatives in there. But when we’re talking about places like the Department of Defense and the Intelligence community or the Department of Homeland Security, frankly, we can’t afford a Steven Miller to go run one of those agencies or Rick Renell, because these are people who demonstrated an unwillingness to say no to Trump’s illegal or immoral or unethical impulses, and they just will implement them with a lack pretty So I think that’s the big concern.

But you just have to take their words for it, not mine. I mean, Trump’s, you know, loyal lieutenants, Steve Bannon, says, in a second term, it will be the stormtroopers and the assassins that they bring into government. And that’s not a way I’ve heard any American president or his team ever talk about operating the executive branch of the federal government.

Hey, folks. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the bulwark to provide a platform for pro democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day, we remind you folks. You are not the crazy ones.

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What I think is extraordinary is the clarity with which Donald Trump has been laying out this particular agenda saying that I am your retribution, but also making it clear that he would dismantle many of the intelligence agencies that he would strip the department of justice of any sort of independence that he would have wholesale firings throughout the federal government getting rid of, you know, centuries worth of experience and then bringing in the kinds of people that you are describing. And I don’t think he’s any reason to believe that he would not do exactly that. Is there any reason to believe that Republicans say in the Senate? Would tell him no. We’re not gonna confirm these peoples or any reason to believe that a Republican senate in twenty twenty five would be a guardrail against this kind of an administration?

No. I I really don’t think there is Charlie Sykes. And, you know, the you mentioned the justice system And that’s one of the areas that came up most often in my interviews. For blowback, his scores of x administration officials warned that A Trump two point o, again, whether it’s Donald Trump or copycat will hijack the justice system. And that includes moving forward with policies that were thwarted in his first term, such as gutting the FBI, cleansing it of the so called deep state so that they don’t investigate Trump.

And his allies, it means things like appointing special counsels to prosecute rivals. In fact, this was one of the scarier quotes that someone gave me for the book. It’s a Justice Department official under Trump said the watch words of DOJ in a second term will be close to the blue. In other words, sue Democratic politicians, sue blue states, sue left wing organizations, actually weaponized the justice department against rivals. And and and that’s immensely disturbing, and we will see them waging that legal warfare all across the country even when was in the Trump administration, the president would rant in the oval office about wanting to, quote, get rid of the judges.

And what did he mean

by that?

He meant he actually wanted to peach federal judges that voted against him and voted against the administration and you asked Charlie about the senate, this is my worry. Is There was actually a point that few people have talked about during the Trump administration, where after one Oval Office meeting when Trump said, we’ve got to get rid of the judges that he ordered Stephen Miller to draft up a bill and send it to Capitol Hill to get rid of some of these circuit courts like the ninth circuit court of appeals that were voting against him. This actually wasn’t received with shock and horror on Capitol Hill. In fact, there were a number of members of congress who went and did what? They introduced a bill to do it, to try to strip the ninth circuit court of appeals of its authority to get rid of those judges and move it around.

And I actually do worry that we will see what’s called judicial gerrymandering in a second term if Trump has a compliant senate and house. And so that’s a big worry, is they will try to dismantle the court system that they think is opposed to their agenda.

You know, what’s extraordinary about that though is that that’s an unthinkable idea except that one of the things we’ve seen over the last few years is the way unthinkable idea become thinkable and then become policy. And this is why I asked the question about whether or not Republicans in congress would push back against them. And I think it seems really naive to imagine that, you know, he wins this election, they take control what they would be willing to do. So let’s go through some of the details in your book just to remind people some of the things that happened during Trump one point o. You have some rather extraordinary anecdotes, including Steven Miller, inquiring about having drones shoot missiles at migrants in international waters.

I mean, what is with that? I mean, we shouldn’t be shocked that, you know, the cruelty is the point, the brutality is the point. We shouldn’t be shocked that Steven Miller is this sort of sadistic, humanculus, but he was actually discussing, having drones, kill migrants in international waters that happened, Miles?

Well, I’m glad you phrased it that way. On the cruelty is the point, Charlie because I think it was you and I a couple years ago who were talking on podcast about exactly that, that in the Trump administration, the cruelty was the point. And the president talks frequently, the ex president talked frequently about wanting to send a message to migrants, frankly, to scare them from coming across the border, and that included things like making the the border walls have spikes on top so that they would slice their arms, if they tried to climb it, he talked and grotesque detail about how he wanted to see them bleeding so that their fellow migrants wouldn’t climb up the walls. He wanted to allow to justify the wall. He wanted to gas migrants at the border.

He talked about shooting them in the legs to stop them. And so it it wasn’t even a surprise in a sense to hear a Stephen Miller sit there and talk to a senior military officer on a flight back to Washington, DC right across from me about whether it was possible to re task armed predator drones from the Middle East, from counter terrorism operations, and bring them back and put them in the Gulf of Mexico, to try to shoot migrant votes. Now again, we’re talking about normally unarmed innocent men, women, and children who take these votes on a dangerous journey to try to come into the United States to live a better life, and we’re talking about killing civilians to send a message. I mean, this isn’t just wrong. That’s murder.

But these are again, the types of policies that you won’t have those senior military officers that’ll be able to push back in a second go around because Trump is going to systematically try to take control of the armed forces of the United States in a way that there isn’t dissent. And that and Charlie, that was one of the other very scary things I heard while interviewing folks for this book is the plans that were on the shelf to create a so called mercenary force that would report directly to the president. So think — What?

—

Wagner Group like Putin had in Russia. And I saw piece of this while I was in the administration. When we were debating about what to do next on Afghanistan, one of the things that we found out the president was doing unbeknownst to his senior national security officials was having quiet conversations with people like Eric Prince, the controversial founder of Blackwater, about creating his own mercenary force to go deploy in Afghanistan instead of US troops. After I left the administration, I’m told by people who served on Trump’s National Security Council, that that zombie policy came back to life, and he was very eager to stand up his own mercenary team that he could send around the world. But their concern was that in the second term, those would be mercenaries he could dispatch within the United States as his own domestic security forces.

And there’s a a guy named Tom Warwick, who was a top counterterrorism official under Trump who called this a junior Gestapo. And this is, again, someone who was one of Trump’s counterterrorism officials said, if that happened, it would be a junior Gestapo.

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Just wanna stick with this sort of cruelty and brutality. Why these things didn’t happen? I mean, I talked about, you know, people who deluded themselves into thinking that they could make a difference. In fact, the reality is that in many of these meetings, there were grown ups. We saw this with January six where there were lawyers sitting in the room telling Donald Trump, no.

You can’t do this. You can’t seize voting machines. At various points, the craziest ideas were shot down, were pushed back against. So it is worth remembering that these ideas were out there were being pushed, but they were stopped because of the personnel. The point of your book, seems to be, do not count on those ideas being stopped in a second term.

Again, I think sometimes we have a failure of imagination that despite everything that’s happened, despite all of the shifts, despite the I would say the if acceleration of the craziness and the brutality that we’re seeing and the anti democratic authoritarianism that we still have a failure to imagine exactly what a restored Donald Trump would be like and the kinds of people that he would be surrounded by.

We really do. And and and I’ll tell you Charlie Sykes you know this because we know each other. I hate being involved in politics. I just electoral politics is never what I wanna to do. I wanted to stay in national security.

So, frankly, this is the last thing I wanna be talking about, but he hasn’t gone away. And the threat hasn’t gone away. And people do need to picture in a very clear eyed way what a second term looks like. So when I set out to write about this book, look, I didn’t wanna write a Trump retrospect No one gives a shit about another Trump memoir and what happened and these, you know, self aggrandizing books, like, you know, people don’t need to read that. What they need to be focused on.

Is really what it will look like if we make this civic mistake again. And I call it civic suicidal ideation. It’s like as a democracy, we’re considering ending it all and doing it to ourselves. And part of that is has to be the recognition that as you note, In a second term, the guardrails will be gone. And I am guilty of being one of the people who propagated that notion.

I mean, when I put out the anonymous op ed, when I put out of the original book, I said, you know, look, there’s these people who are keeping the president in check I used to this term the axis of adults early in the administration. I told Kim dosier in a piece in the first few weeks of the administration. There was an axis of adults keeping the president in check and I was wrong. We were completely wrong because Trump systematically got rid of those people and staff the administration with loyalists. So they certainly will not be there as you say in a second go around, and we need to be clear eyed that a group of unelected bureaucrats will not protect us from Trump two point o.

Talk to me about this doomsday book. You wrote about this, you know, that officials worried about Trump or or one of his loyalists getting access to this manual that’s supposedly only used in national emergencies. And in this book excerpt that you had in Vanity Fair, you explained that This book contains the president’s break glass options for keeping the country running, you know, in in case of a of a war. But, I mean, it would include things like the power to detain people, flipping an internet kill switch, taking over social media, suspending Americans from traveling, Again, these powers exist. Right?

I mean, they’re there. And if he’s sitting in a room and there are no grown ups, there is no excessive of grown ups, So talk to him about this doomsday book and how realistic that sort of scary scenario is.

Well, two things surprised me, Charlie Sykes, the anecdote itself, which I hadn’t heard of and and blew my mind, and I’ll get into it in a second. But two, was that the government allowed me to talk about it. You know, you have to put these books through what’s called free publication review to make sure there’s not classified information in there. And these passages were approved for public release. And what they detail is the fact that, yes, there are plans as you would hope as an American for the president to be able to protect the country in the most catastrophic scenarios, a nuclear attack on the United States, an armed war, an invasion, the president has to have extraordinary powers to save the country in moments like that.

Well, as I was told by the National Security Council officials who protected and safeguarded, this highly classified book is that they became worried during the administration that Donald Trump, if he had become aware of those powers might consider using them for nefarious purposes. And as we got closer to the election, Officials were worried he was gonna use those powers to try to cement a coup. And we actually got closer to that than almost anyone realized What was revealed to me and is in this book is that there was an effort to place one of Trump’s biggest political loyalists in a job on the National Security Council. Her name is Christina Bob. And she used to work at the One American News Bulwark.

She’s a Trump lawyer, and she also helped him try to overturn the election. Well, they tried to install her in the job that would have had her oversee direct responsibility of the doomsday book. Now they didn’t know that at the time. Because very few of the people who staff the White House in the personnel office know anything about the doomsday book. But we came within potentially weeks or days of that person, a Trump loyalist who helped him overturn the election, having access to the most extraordinary powers of the presidency.

And the officials that I spoke to said they had immense worry that then she would take that book to the president and say, here’s your playbook for Cementina Coo. Now luckily, they fought really hard to prevent Christina Bob from being appointed into that position. But, I mean, that’s how close we were. That’s how close we were. And in a second go around, Trump and his allies know that those powers exist, and I have no doubt that on day one, they will order that the book be brought to the Oval Office that they can think about how to use those powers.

I mean, this is the stuff of b movies, Charlie. Like, we would have never thought we were talking about this a few years ago. But I mean, we’re talking about lifetime national security officials who are nonpartisan who were flagging these concerns behind the scenes in the lead up to a presidential election.

Okay, on a much less serious note but a much creepier one? I continue to be amazed by this the All The Project that we’re getting from the right about. You know, everybody that disagrees with them as a groomer and you’re attacking the innocence of of children. You have this. I’m sorry, creepy anecdote about Trump’s comments about his own daughter’s breasts, her backside, and what it would be like to have sex with her.

And John Kelly had to remind him once that Ivanka was his daughter. I mean, What is that?

And it’s not like this was Scuttlebutt, Charlie, or some rumor. I mean, the White House chief of staff informed me that this was happening. And I actually hesitated about whether to include anecdotes like that in the book. Because first, there’s so grotesque. Two, you know, I wanna focus on the danger of a second Trump term.

But I’ve got to think that if there’s anything that will get through to Trump’s most hardcore supporters to convince them he’s a deficient moral character and doesn’t deserve the job. They’ve gotta draw the line at incest. Right? I mean, I can and that’s why I ultimately included it is you’ve gotta think that maybe they’ll stick with him to the end, but that I don’t know. Can they still support the guy if he has these incestuous fantasies?

Just locker room talk. Right? I mean

Yeah. Right? That’s what they call it. Well, it’s just locker room talk. And who among us has ever had locker room talk?

About one of their siblings or their daughter or a family member in a sexual way. I mean, this is a very sick man, and that’s what Kelly’s comment to me was at the time. He said, quote, Miles, he is a very, very evil man.

He used the word evil to you.

Evil. Evil. And John Kelly is someone who served in war zones, and he and Jim Mattis, you know, actually met terrorists in war zones. Because when they would you know, capture these folks. Sometimes they would go speak to these prisoners.

And and that’s something both Mattis and Kelly had said before is, look, that they’ve met face to face. With terrorists and that this guy, Donald Trump, was more evil than some of those folks that they have encountered. And these aren’t his political opponents Arizona pointies that are saying things like this.

So what was your specific breaking point? Was there one moment where you said, okay, this is bad is bad. And then you went I’m sorry. I cannot do this anymore. I’m gonna write this piece.

What was the trigger for you with all of this stuff going on with all the things that you saw and you heard, what was that moment where you said, f it, I’m out.

It well, I’ll confess to the fact that for the first year, I thought our philosophy was working as bad as the first year the Trump administration was. Some of the worst ideas, like, pulling out of NATO and shooting people at the border and just these crazy ideas, they got quietly put back in the box. And so I thought, okay. I mean, this is working. Is he is he a very deranged unstable man yet?

But we’re keeping him in check. Okay. By year two, that was false. And as we saw things like family separation, come into effect a preventable humanitarian catastrophe. It was clear that saying no wasn’t working, but the straw that actually broke the camel’s back for me was much more personal.

And it was a mentor of mine and someone I’d worked with on Capitol Hill, John McCain, passed away in twenty eighteen. And I was on a work trip dealing with very sensitive intelligence issues overseas, and I get a phone call from John Kelly’s office to warn me that the president is preparing to call us to tell us he wants the flags that are lowered to half staff across the United States in honor of John McCain raised back up. And it’s actually the job of department of homeland security to tell federal buildings to lower the flag when we’re honoring a fallen statesman. And they warned me they said he’s going to call you and say to raise the flags back up because he’s furious that we’re honoring John McCain. And honestly, that was my fucking moment, Charlie, is there should have been a lot of other breaking points, but but it was a good man’s grave being stomped on by a very bad one.

And I got up in that moment, and I just started writing on my computer what I thought was gonna be a journal entry. And and then without thinking about it, I flipped it to the times and I said, someone’s gotta save us. Because no one in the administration from within was saying how bad it was someone needed to. Because if the president’s own cabinet was having whispered conversations about the twenty fifth amendment and his removal, It’s at that point that it’s no longer a private conversation. The American voters need to know that his immediate lieutenants think he’s potentially so unstable that he has to be replaced and that’s what I went forward into.

See, one of the extraordinary things about the Trump first term is are the number of people Bulwark with him who are in the room who are now saying similar things to what you are saying, including even Bill Barr, you know, who is saying, you know, how separated from reality he has become his, you know, former national security adviser, his chief of staff, These are people who were appointed by Trump who sat there, who watched him, and have, you know, in varying degrees of about spoken this, have have gone public with their concerns. And yet, among Republican voters, it really doesn’t seem to have moved the needle. You know, the one thing I would have thought would have been that when you have loyalists from within the White House coming forward and saying, this is what we saw, this is how dangerous it is, that that would be what would make a difference. So two questions. Why haven’t more people said it?

And number two, why do you think it hasn’t had an effect among Republican voters?

Well, I do think and you’ve been really, really expert at this Charlie Sykes painting a picture of how close we came in twenty twenty to Trump winning. But I did I do think it affected some people. I think concerned conservatives around the country were dying for someone to give them an excuse to not vote for Trump. And we were lucky that we had a lot of people like you. We had a lot of that big administration officials.

We have a lot of former Republican elected leaders come out in twenty twenty and say do not vote for this guy. And I think it provided Republican voters just enough air cover to vote for Biden and to switch sides. And and that made the difference in several key swing states. I mean, as you know as well as anyone, we came down to a couple of a few thousand votes in key swing states, including Republicans that flipped over. This next go around.

I I think they’re all going back to the trial. Those concerned conservatives, if you look at the polls and the crosstabs, they don’t vote for Biden again. They don’t want to, and they’re going back to the tribe. So how can we convince them to defect again and oppose someone like a Trump, we’ve got to have other people who are in the party now take that stand. And I write in the book something that’s deeply ironic coming from me, which is I think that the biggest threat to our democracy right now is anonymity.

Mhmm.

And I learned that through a very long and hard experience, anonymously leveling my criticisms at first Yes. It got the message out there in a bigger way, but what it did was it told people, yeah, you don’t have to attach your name to these criticisms. And it fed into this notion that you could snipe behind the scenes instead of owning those comments in public. And and once I did come forward in unmasked myself to campaign against the ex president, I realized a whole bunch of my colleagues then came forward after that. It gave them the air cover to say, oh, other people are doing that too.

And it’s my deepest regret that I didn’t come forward sooner to try to give more people that air cover. Why is that relevant now? Because we need more Chris Christis, we need more WillHurds and ASSA Hutchins to come forward and lower that price of dissent. Make it less costly to other Republicans to say what they always say to you and me and private Charlie, which is that they think Trump’s a danger and they hope he goes away. But, you know, they’re sanguine about it and they think, well, he’ll just fade from the scene.

No. He won’t fade from the scene unless they show the courage to go out there and say publicly what they say to us in private. I mean, the speaker of the house of representatives, Kevin McCarthy, is someone who I used to sit in meetings with who used to dump on Donald Trump, and and now he’s his biggest cheerleader. We need people like that to stop lying to their voters and actually say public, what they say in private.

Is it just cowardice or is it something else? Because I’m kind of tired of the well, they’re just afraid. It seems as if there’s something else going on there. You know, what is it? The sunken cost, the power of rationalization, the fact that they have gone so far.

They’ve sliced off so much of their souls that can’t back off now. Right? I mean, they’ve they’ve just invested too much, so they’re on for the the dark descent no matter where it leads them.

Well, you’re so right. And that is the really lucid diagnosis. And it took me a while to come to that conclusion because I was of the view that the biggest reason a lot of my former colleagues and mentors weren’t coming forward, is that they were scared of physical reprisals and attacks. They’d seen the death threats a lot of us got when they came forward. They’d seen the vitriol.

And I had a conversation with Adam Kinzinger about this while he was still in Congress. And Adam and I were talking, and I said, Adam, is this why they’re not coming forward? Is it the death threats that you’re getting? Are they scared for the safety of their families and Adam said, well, yeah. They’re scared for the safety of their families, but there’s something deeper.

He said, they are more afraid of getting kicked out of the tribe than they are of death. And that really resonated with me and actually made me think of a joke Charlie Sykes that Jerry Seinfeld used to tell thirty years ago, he would open these sets and say, you know, polls show that of the top ten fears American have, their number one fear is public speaking, and their number two fear is death. So they would rather be in the coffin than delivering the eulogy. And nothing applies better to elected Republicans today than that. They would rather be caught dead.

Than speaking out against the tribe because they’re so afraid of exactly what you say. They’re afraid of this club that they’ve built their whole lives around. Telling them they’re no longer members of the club. And it and if that isn’t cowardice, I know what is. And the only way you can get through to people like that is to show them It’s okay to leave that club because there’s a better club and it’s called democracy that they can still be a part of and that they can still defend if they make the right choice.

And it is never too late to do the right thing. And we even saw people, you know, at the very end of the Trump administration come forward after January six and say enough is enough. And yeah, do I wish they’d come forward sooner? I do. Do I wish I’d come forward sooner?

I do. But I welcome those people with open arms because they are the ones that are going to be able to speak to Republicans who might be able to consider one more time coalescing with the Democrats to try to defeat these autocrats?

The book is blowback a warning to save democracy from The Next Trump Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at department of homeland security during the first Trump administration. You also have a new podcast, the whistleblower’s inside the Trump administration mile Congratulations on the book and thank you so much for joining us on the podcast again today.

Charlie, you’re a patriot. I’m such a big fan as you know, and I’m really, really grateful what you do. So thanks for giving us moral air cover for those of us who came out a little later than you you helped pave the way. So thank you.

Thank you. And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we will do this all over again. Bohrk podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason

Brown

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