The Bulwark Podcast - Miles Taylor: Imagining a Trump 2.0

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Plans are already being drawn up for Trump's revenge plans in a second term, including special counsels to investigate Trump's enemies, a "Sue the Blue" DOJ targeting Democrats, and judicial gerrymandering. Plus, Trump's incestuous Ivanka fantasies. Miles Taylor joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Blowback/Miles-Taylor/9781668015988 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. 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 6th. 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 2018. It was titled, I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration. He followed that up with the book, A Warning, in 2019, and then unmasked himself in October 2020. 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 you hear any of the background noise, that's the texture of being in New York. Right. I mean, it is real. You know, we are occasionally accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, and it occurs to me reading through your book that the problem is not that we have Trump derangement syndrome. And it occurs to me reading through your book that the problem is not that we have Trump derangement syndrome, which I'm willing to fess 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 2.0 would be like. And I want to get to that in a moment, including some of the dazzling anecdotes you have from Trump 1.0. But let's just talk about the reaction to the news of the potential indictment related to January 6th. And I guess

the big question was, would Trump ever be held accountable for 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 U.S. 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 10th, 11th, or maybe dozenth time that we've predicted Trump's potential political downfall because of something like this. 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 we will continue on seeing the intense politicizing of the justice system. And you're already seeing 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 Ron DeSantis. I mean, Ron DeSantis' only shot to win this nomination is somehow for Donald Trump to collapse, right? And for that to happen, Republican voters are going to 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 Ron DeSantis 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 extra. 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. Jean Carroll, the judge actually used the word rape today. And yet Republicans are going, yeah, we're going to go all in on this guy once again next year.

Well, and folks like you and me, Charlie, we're 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 got to give credit to Chris Christie and Will Hurd 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 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 the country believe in provably false conspiracy theories. They believe in great replacement. They believe in QAnon. They believe in the stolen election lie. These are provably false conspiracy theories. They believe in great replacement. They believe in 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 that's one of the dangers that I flag in blowback. 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 going to try to outdo him and carry forward his thwarted policies. 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. Clearly, it does not look like the Republican Party is going to hold him accountable for this or the Republican political base. But separately, you know, there is the question about 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 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 Republicans.

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 where 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 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 will be able to hold this man accountable,

given 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 are going to tie it up so much that that case won't be resolved until 2025 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 he flagged there, Charlie, is the voters themselves. And what's really worrying to me is right now, 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 2016. And 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 before on this podcast about, you know, what were you thinking when you went to work for Donald Trump? I'm going to put that in the past because clearly you and others

believe that you needed to have grownups in the room. You needed to have people who would stop things from happening that otherwise would have been worse. If it hadn't been for rational, reasonable staffers, then you would have the Stephen Millers of the world making all the decisions and deciding who to kill, et cetera. I guess the real question is, in Trump 2.0, how will the administration be different? Because I'm guessing that the people who deluded themselves into believing that they could be the grownups and make a difference in Trump 1.0 would not make the mistake again, or would they? I mean, who would be, who would staff a Trump White House in 2025?

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 going to 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 think that's really the concern, Charlie, is, you know, there was someone in this book, a very senior figure in Trump's orbit. He surrounded himself with the first time. What do you think? 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 ex-Bush administration officials who are moderates who are advising the president and executing his policies. It will be ideologues. It will be campaign aides and political loyalists.

I think that's a really big concern. I mean, look, when it comes to some backwater department, an 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 Stephen Miller to go run one of those agencies or a Rick Grinnell, 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 alacrity. 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 Lieutenant Steve Bannon says in a second term, it will be the storm troopers and the assassins that they bring into government. And that's not a way I've heard any American president or his team ever talked about operating the executive branch of the federal government. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bullwork 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. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around. Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. 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 centuries worth of experience,

and then bringing in the kinds of people that you are describing. And I don't think there'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 going to confirm these people? Is there any reason to believe that a Republican Senate in 2025 would be a guardrail against this kind of an administration? No, I really don't think there is, Charlie. And you mentioned the justice system, and that's one of the areas that came up most often in my interviews for blowback is scores of ex-administration officials warned that a Trump 2.0, again, whether it's Donald Trump or a 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. gave me for the book is a top Justice Department official under Trump said the watchwords of DOJ in a second term will be, quote, sue the blue. In other words, sue Democratic politicians,

sue blue states, sue left-leaning organizations, actually weaponize the Justice Department against rivals. And that's immensely disturbing. And we will see them waging that legal warfare all across the country. Even when I 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 actually wanted to impeach 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 ideas 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 1.0. You have some rather extraordinary anecdotes, including Stephen 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 Stephen Miller is this sort of sadistic homunculus, 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 of years ago who were talking on this podcast about exactly that, that in the Trump administration, the cruelty was the point. And the president talked 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 border wall have spikes on top so that they would slice their arms if they tried to climb it. He talked in grotesque detail about how he wanted to see them bleeding so that their fellow migrants wouldn't climb up the wall. He wanted to electrify the wall.

He wanted to gas migrants at the border. He talked about shooting them in the legs to stop them. And so 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, D.C., right across from me about whether it was possible to retask armed predator drones from the Middle East from counterterrorism operations and bring them back and put them in the Gulf of Mexico to try to shoot migrant boats. Now, again, we're talking about normally unarmed, innocent men, women, and children who take these boats 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 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 Wagner Group, like Putin had in Russia. And I saw a 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. He was very eager to stand up his own mercenary team that he could send around the world. But their concern was that in a second term, those would be mercenaries he could dispatch within the United States as his own domestic security forces. And there's a guy named Tom Warren, 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. I just want to stick with this sort of cruelty and brutality. Why these things didn't happen? I mean, I talked about 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 grownups. We saw this with January 6th, where there are 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 acceleration of the craziness and the brutality that we're seeing in 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 I'll tell you, Charlie, and you know this because we know each other. I hate being involved in politics. I just electoral politics is never what I wanted to do. I wanted to stay in national security. So frankly, this is the last thing I want to 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 want to write a Trump retrospective. 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 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 an original book, I said, you know, look, there's these people who are keeping the president in check. I used this

term, the axis of adults, early in the administration. I told Kim Dozier 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 staffed 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 2.0. Talk to me about this Doomsday book. You wrote about this, you know, that officials worried about Trump or one of his loyalists getting access to this instruction manual that's supposedly only used in national emergencies. And in this book excerpt that you had in Vanity Fair,

you explain that this book contains the president you had in Vanity Fair, you explain that this book contains the president's break glass options for keeping the country running, you know, in case 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 grownups, there's no access of grownups, you know, so talk to him about this doomsday book and how realistic that sort of scary scenario is. Well, two things surprised me, Charlie. One, the anecdote itself, which I hadn't heard of 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. 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 going to use those powers to try to cement a coup. And we actually got closer to that than almost anyone realizes. 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 Bobb, and she used to work at the One American News Network. 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 and 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 cementing a coup. 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 so 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, all the projection that we're getting from the right about everybody that disagrees with them as a groomer and attacking the innocence 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, they're so grotesque. Two, you know, I want to 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 got to draw the line at incest, right? I mean, and that's why I ultimately included it, is you've got to 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 as well. It's just locker room talk. 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, 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 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. There's other pointies that are saying things like this. So what was your specific breaking point? Was there one moment where you said, OK, this is bad, this is bad? And then you went, I'm sorry, I cannot do this anymore. I'm going to write this piece. What was the trigger for you with all of this stuff going on, with all the things you saw and you heard?

What was that moment where you said, F it, I'm out? Yeah, well, I'll confess to the fact that for the first year, I thought our philosophy was working. As bad as the first year of 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 yes but we're keeping him in check 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 2018. 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 staff across the United States in honor of John McCain raised back up. And it's actually the job of the 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 fuck it 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 going to be a journal entry. And then without thinking about it, I flipped it to the Times and I said, someone's got to say this because no one in the administration from within was saying how bad it was and someone needed to. Because if the president's own cabinet was having whispered conversations about the 25th 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 and did. See, one of the extraordinary things about the Trump first term are the number of people who worked with him, who were in the room, who are now saying similar things to what you are saying, including even Bill Barr, who were 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, his former national security advisor, 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 outspokenness 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, in painting a picture of how close we came in 2020 to Trump winning. But 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 ex-administration officials. We had a lot of former Republican elected leaders come out in 2020 and enough air cover to vote for Biden and to switch sides. 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 think they're all going back to the tribe. 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. 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. 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 once I did come forward and unmask 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 Christie's.

We need more Will Hurds and Asa Hutchinson's 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 in 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 now he's his biggest cheerleader. We need people like that to stop lying to their voters and actually say in 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 they can't back off now, right? I mean, they've just invested too much. So they're on for 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 he was still in Congress. And Adam and I were talking, 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, that Jerry Seinfeld used to tell 30 years ago. He would open these sets and say, you know, polls show that of the top 10 fears Americans 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 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 6th 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 is a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration. You also have a new podcast, The Whistleblowers, Inside the Trump Administration. Miles, 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 for 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. Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.