The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump by Miles Taylor

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump by Miles Taylor https://amzn.to/3DzEVWn The author behind the “eye-popping” (CNN) #1 New York Times bestseller A Warning presents an urgent look at how our deeply divided nation is setting the stage for “The Next Trump.” Donald Trump will be president again, whether he is on the ballot or not. That is because Trumpism is overtaking the Republican Party and will mount a vigorous comeback, potentially in the hands of a savvier successor—The Next Trump. This prophecy will come true, according to Miles Taylor, if we do not learn the lessons of the recent past. With the 2024 election approaching, the formerly “Anonymous” official is back with bombshell revelations and a sobering national forecast. Through interviews with dozens of ex-Trump aides and government leaders, Taylor predicts what could happen inside “Trump 2.0,” the White House of a more competent and more formidable copycat. What sounds like a political thriller—from shadowy presidential powers and CIA betrayals to angry henchmen and assassination plots—is instead America’s political reality, as Taylor uses untold stories to shed light on the ex-President’s unfulfilled plans, the dark forces haunting our civic lives, and how we can thwart the rise of extremism in the United States. Blowback is also a surprisingly emotional and self-critical portrait of a dissenter, whose own unmasking provides a vivid warning about what happens when we hide the truth from others and, most importantly, ourselves. About the Author Miles Taylor is a national security expert who works in Washington, DC. Taylor previously served as chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he published an “Anonymous” essay in The New York Times, blowing the whistle on presidential misconduct. He later published the #1 national bestseller A Warning, revealed himself to be the author, and launched a campaign of ex-officials to oppose Donald Trump’s reelection. He’s worked as an advisor in the George W. Bush administration, on Capitol Hill, as a CNN contributor, and is the cofounder of a DC-based charter school and multiple democracy-reform groups. Taylor received his MPhil in international relations from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and BA from Indiana University as a Harry S. Truman scholar.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you coming by. Thanks for being here. As always, we have the most brilliant minds vosh show.com welcome to the big show my family and friends we certainly appreciate you coming by thanks for being here as always we have the most brilliant minds on the show

the the best authors the newest hottest books that are coming out and uh just things that make you smarter sexier hotter brilliant or intelligent and none of them come from me as the host it's always our guests i'm just the idiot with the questions over here so we have an amazing gentleman on the show i think you're going to be blown away by some of the things you're going to be shared and uh he has a story in history in our recent politics uh you may have heard of him uh we'll just refer to him anonymous until we drag him in the show but his latest book is out it's called blowback a warning to save democracy from the next trump miles taylor, formerly known as Anonymous, is on the show with us today.

If you recall, several years ago, there was a New York Times article that came out, and it was written by someone called Anonymous. There should be like a bigger sound bite there. Anonymous. And some echo or something. I don't know. Just imagine it happened uh it was september 5th 2018 and he threw uh i think the press the white house into a giant conundrum of who did it or who done it or who is it and uh i think at one point they were they were talking about doing lie

detector tests in the white house and everything else so uh he escaped detection for some time, and then he eventually wrote his other book, A Warning by Anonymous, the full book that expanded from the New York Times thing. And then he finally decided to reveal himself to everyone as Miles Taylor. He joins us today, and you can order his book wherever fine books are sold.

That's always important to order them. And let me tell you a little bit about mr miles davis assuming i can find his bio there we go uh the book just came out july 18th 2023 as well uh miles taylor is a national security expert who works in washington dc he previously served as the chief of staff at the u.s department of homeland security where he published the anonymous essay in The New York Times blowing the whistle on presidential misconduct. Wait, there was some presidential misconduct that went on recently or last couple of presidencies, whatever. He later published the number one best national bestseller, A Warning, and revealed himself to be the author. And he launched a campaign of ex-officials to oppose

donald trump's re-election and it worked you got the last laugh on that well you got one of them he has another shot at uh he worked as an advisor in the george w bush administration on capitol hill as a cnn contributor and is the co-founder of a dc-based charter school and multiple democracy reform groups he received received his MPhil. Is that how you pronounce it? Or is it MPH? Master of Philosophy. Yeah, MPhil. Geez, wow.

The show just went up a notch or two. Yeah, I'm the master, Chris. You are. That's why we have guests, because I'm the idiot. So he received those international donations at Oxford University. We just had someone from Oxford on the other day. As a Marshall Scholar and BA from Indiana University. As a Harry S. Truman Scholar.

My brain clearly left for Friday over the weekend. Welcome to the show, Miles. How are you? Great to be with you. Thanks for having me, Chris. And I'll see you later. That was a great show. There you go.

It was a wonderful show. So welcome. give us your dot com so if you could find you on the interwebs please yeah well the only place they can find me is uh well actually i'm on all the things now instagram and threads and twitter all the same thank goodness at miles taylor usa so uh you know come follow along this wild, um, and it has been a wild ride, Chris. I mean, you know, look, I'll say as far as anonymous is concerned, um, I think there's probably a reason Bruce Wayne never took off the mask because, you know, uh, he, he didn't want to disappoint people. And I think that's one of the, you know, there's somewhere down on the list of things that happened after I revealed myself, maybe it's 22 or 23 on the list but you ended up fine you end up finding out that everyone thought it was someone else

than it actually ends up being i think that's the reality when someone takes the mask off well i mean bruce wayne's kind of cool you know oh bruce wayne's real cool i mean so i'm i i'm no bruce wayne i mean he should have a little more self-confidence. He takes the mask off and he's like this very attractive billionaire that everyone loves. I can't claim either of those things. It's why I do more podcasts. As long as you don't say you're like Superman because Clark Kent was kind of a nerd. I'll tell you something that's kind of funny is when I look on Amazon and I see your book Anonymous, it says follow this author and his name is anonymous but it has your picture

beside anonymous so i thought that was kind of funny it that obviously wasn't the case exactly exactly but since now they've thrown your picture on there that would have been a that would have been a really bad way to keep the mask on and so you know here's his face but we won't give you a name it's like bernstein and woodward and they're like here's a photo of deep throat oh shit so uh what motivated you want to write this latest book blowback what's going on in the world is there something happening that we should know about yeah well uh it's a good question chris i will tell you very honestly i didn't want to write this book at the get-go in fact i I wanted to be done with politics. In fact,

I never intended to go into politics at all. I'd never worked on a political campaign in my life. And I went into government to work on public policy and national security after 9-11. And that was what I wanted to do for my whole career. I'm a lifelong conservative. I wanted to be within the Republican side, work for Republican presidents, protect the country against bad guys. That's what I wanted to do. But witnessing Donald Trump up close and, you know, ending the administration as his chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, I saw a lot of him behind the scenes. I was really alarmed by what I saw. And he wanted to do things often that were immoral or unethical and frequently illegal. And I felt like I needed to sound the

alarm about that. Now, you know, since coming forward, I very naively hoped and thought we would just move beyond the Trump era, and that my party would go back to how it was during the Bush years. And, you know, we small government conservatives would be in the same battles we'd always been against Democrats, but Trump hasn't gone away. And in fact, he remains in a commanding lead in the presidential primaries. And I felt like it was really important to paint a picture for people of what it will look like if he becomes president again, whether you love him or whether you hate him, to paint a picture for people of what it will look like if he becomes president again, whether you love him or whether you hate him, to paint that picture so that we can make a smart choice

before we decide who's going to be the next president of the United States. And the portrait came out to be pretty grim, Chris. Really? Because the first time it worked out so well. Yeah, I know most people had a blast. Well, and I'll tell you, look, I arrogantly thought I knew how bad it would be in a second term. Hell, I'd already written one book about it called A Warning. And I was warning people, do not reelect this man. But what I wanted to do this time was go speak to not, not to write it in my voice, but to go speak to as many Trump officials as possible from his cabinet

secretaries at the highest levels down to the staffers that sat outside the Oval Office and interview them and say, you tell me based on what your job was in the first Trump term, what you think he'll want to do in a second term. And I'm going to write it in your words and you tell the world. And I was even more shocked than I thought at what people were spelling out. You know, I've seen so many of the Trump administration people that worked in the White House. They're always talking about this. And I believe I'm pulling up here.

I believe it was Woodward when he interviewed him. And it was either Bernstein or Woodward, but I'm pretty sure it was Woodward. But he was telling him, you will know me in my second term. And he kept telling him that. And that was chilling to me. And then, you know, we've heard so many people from the Trump administration that worked inside of it say, there were things we talked him out of that, that that's too much shocking shit, but you can get away with that in your second term.

And that's a little too much. And, and I wish there was more of a documentation on what it was, what that actually was. Like I I'll hear on CNN and be like, Hey, what, what was it,

man? Tell me. So, uh, I think it's good that we, you know, we're talking about this so we can paint a picture of the future maybe. And I'll set the alarm.

Well, you know, one of the people that I spoke to for the book, and I did about 100 interviews with ex-Trump officials. One was John Bolton, who, of course, had been Trump's national security advisor. And Bolton has this quote in the book, and he said, look, the damage Trump did in his first term is repairable, but that a second MAGA administration would do damage that is not repairable, especially in a White House surrounded by what he called fifth raiders, low level, low quality staff. And Bolton's view, and in the view of a lot of these folks that I spoke to, it just will not be experienced public servants and lifelong conservatives that will go in. It will be Trump lackeys and an island of misfit advisors that come in to run the federal government. And, you know, if you thought the

first term was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet, because when those guardrails are gone, it's going to be no holds barred. and in fact stephen miller told me trump's immigration advisor he said it will be quote a shock and awe blitz in a second term wow and and i think he's you know you probably wrote this and it's been in the can for a while our book folks uh you know usually you write these books and they're they're they're kind of stuck in that uh waiting for the publication date you know there's been a couple things that come out since like what are your some of your thoughts on uh i think didn't he didn't he outline some things or they outlined some things about what their plan is for the new thing and it's very

fascist you know like they want to get rid of everything you know all the government employees well uh okay mussolini yeah i mean look it's you can't make this stuff up and uh you know, all the government employees. Well, okay, Mussolini. Yeah, I mean, look, it's, you can't make this stuff up. And, you know, Chris, I'll say you're right. You know, you write a book, and then you finish it. And sometimes it takes three, six, nine months to come out after you're done because of the publishing process. So I'd written all of these things about how the second term of Donald Trump, if he's reelected, will be all about revenge. And what he will try to do is systematically use every department and agency under him to get revenge against his rivals. And I was worried about that message, frankly, because even though I cite dozens and dozens of Republicans who served under him saying this, it still sounds extreme. And true to form, Donald Trump came out recently and very publicly said in a second term, I will be your retribution. I will be your revenge.

And since then, there's been a lot of fantastic reporting from the New York Times and others documenting, again, in their own voices. These are not anonymous sources. These are people saying that they are planning a systematic effort in a second term to essentially create what I would call a playbook of persecution. How do we use the Justice Department to go prosecute our democratic rivals? How do we use the Department of Education to kick migrant kids out of US schools to punish them and their parents for being undocumented and on down the list. So if that recent reporting is the tip of the iceberg, I would say what this book is, what blowback is, is a detailed map of everything below the waterline to show you really how big that iceberg is. Hi, Voxers. Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the

show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership management entrepreneur ism podcasting corporate stuff with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris foss leadership institute.com now back to the show there you go i gave the book to my mom she usually gets gets the books that get delivered to the thing and take them over to her.

She's just horrified. She's like, oh my god! You've got to get this on air! You've got to get it! She's like, do you know about all this? I'm like, yeah, a lot of it. I follow the news. Chris, this was actually a big conspiracy theory

from the beginning to scare your mom. Was it? Me and some of your friends got together a few years ago and they said, could you write a book and we'll just scare the shit out of Chris's mom? I said, I'll do that. Chris's mom has got it going on. There you go. I'm not sure what that means.

I'm not sure about that reference. Tease us out any tidbits you want to do. I think one question I have for you to set up too. Are you thinking about doing a uh a dual road show with chris christie because uh sounds like the two of you are playing the same game you know calling out trump well i think it's been really interesting to watch christie i mean look christie was someone who politically was a very vocal defender of donald trump for the longest time i mean you know, the difference between Chris and I is that,

you know, I was, you know, I didn't vote for Trump. I was not a Trump guy, and I never publicly defended him. But I went into the administration because I think a lot of us were scared shitless about what would happen to the federal government. A lot of Republicans, you know, we went in to do that, you know, but Chris has taken a very powerful turn and he's out there on the campaign trail just pummeling Trump. But I've got to say what I'm more surprised by is that more of Trump's opponents aren't doing the same. This is politics after all. And it shows you how strong his stranglehold is over the Republican Party, that even the people running against him are scared to attack him. That's what you're supposed to do in politics. You're supposed to say,

here's why the other guy sucks. Here's why I'm better. And I don't think we've had any better indication of how much control he's had than the fact that most of the people besides Chris Christie are afraid to even utter his name out loud. Yeah.achments and and uh january 6th and so much other things and people are still like yeah let's go ahead and reelect them i'm sure maybe he learned his lesson from last time which i i imagine he's learned some lessons but to take a very dark term with him in the end uh i think a lot of us know that a second term would be bad right we don't need a book to tell us that but the things that people told me that I detailed in here are the ones that I really want folks to be able to share with their friends and family who might consider a second term. And one of the ones that really

caught me off guard had to do with military veterans. And I'll admit, when I went and spoke to Trump's top officials that ran the Department of Veterans Affairs, I did it as a box checking exercise. I wanted to be able to come on shows like yours and say, look, I talked to people that ran almost every department and agency and here's what they had to say. And I didn't think they would tell me a lot of controversial things about the VA. You know, the Department of Veterans Affairs does a good thing. It takes care of veterans. It may do it inefficiently as a big, big government bureaucracy. But like,

look, caring for our veterans is not controversial. And, you know, the things they told me just blew my mind. I mean, one of Trump's top officials that was running the VA, a lifelong Republican handpicked by the president told me, quote, Trump talked about veterans, veterans, veterans, but at the end of the day, he thought they were lazy malingerers and he wouldn't care in a second term about flipping them out on the street. And I said, whoa, hold on a second. You need to dive into this story and tell me what's going on. Well, apparently unbeknownst to me, because when I was in the administration, I didn't deal with the VA much. There was an effort by Trump and the White House to, quote, detonate the veterans social safety net. Why on earth would they want to get rid of veterans benefits or throw them

into the private marketplace? Well, the reason is Trump found out that the VA had a $250 billion budget and he wanted to spend that money elsewhere. It's the second biggest department in the federal government and his animosity towards veterans. We know about department in the federal government. And his animosity towards veterans, we know about it. During the 2020 campaign, we all heard about how Trump said that the troops who died in Normandy were suckers and losers. But it was a more vicious animosity than that. He wanted to take away their benefits and spend it on his other political priorities. And again, these people are cited by name in my book, these veterans officials say, look, if Trump had done what he wanted to do, tens of thousands of veterans would have died and he'll do it in a second term. And I think that's a, that's an enormous worry,

regardless of what your politics are. It is disgusting to think that we would have a commander in chief that would let our people who've served our country in uniform wither and die on the street to go spend that healthcare money they get somewhere else. Yeah. You, you heard what he said about John McCain, you know, well, I don't, I don't like guys who are captured, you know, and this guy's an American icon and hero. Uh, well, I mean, I had firsthand experience with that, Chris, right after John McCain died. Uh, it's actually, few people know this. It's the job of the Department of Homeland Security to go tell federal buildings around the country when a statesman dies,

you need to lower the flags to half staff. And when that happened, I was halfway around the world in Australia, huddling with foreign intelligence leaders talking about a very sensitive issue. And I get a phone call from the White House. And Trump wants the flags that were lowered to honor John McCain raised back up. He is pissed that the country is honoring John McCain, because he hated him that much. Now, we ultimately did not comply. And John Kelly convinced Trump that it was a very petty order. But that was one of the last straws for me. It was just like, you know, watching a bad man dance on the grave of one of the last straws for me it was just like you know watching a bad man dance on the grave of one of my heroes yeah i mean i mean when you read about what john mccain's uh and and what many people survived in in hanoi hilton and other things and you know living your

whole life with the with the abuse and and damage he took you know uh i mean you had to respect the man even if you didn't agree with him politically, just for his tenacity. I mean, I don't think I would do very well. I wouldn't survive today in Hanno Hilton, let's put it that way. So it's great that you're doing this warning, that you're sharing this vision of the future of what can happen. What's the, are Republican voters going to get get this do we just need louder voices do we need to shout it and i don't know maybe you need to do like the germans where we have you sit down and watch movies about what you did in the horrors there the last four years

there you go chris uh that that may end up being the policy that gets adopted but um you know i think what we really need very candidly is we need more Republicans, like you pointed out, breaking away from the tribe and showing that it's okay to break away from the tribe. Like Chris Christie, uh, has done like Will Hurd, who's running for president and ASA. We've had him on. You know, yeah, it's, you know, right now to most elected Republicans, it seems very scary to break with Trump because the base is so MAGA

now. And I talked to these people, a lot of them are still my friends, a lot of them are my peers, a number of them I interviewed for this book. And I'll say to you, Chris, very ironically, that some of the Republican elected leaders who were most critical of my decision to come out against Trump anonymously, asked that their names be withheld in this book. They asked to be anonymous because they wanted to share their opinions, but they didn't want to be attacked. I mean, let that sink in for a second. The cowardice is extraordinary. But, you know, at the same time, these people have watched folks like me go public and just get ripped to shreds by the far right.

And, you know, life got pretty dark for a while. I mean, we were on the run for a while. We've had stalkers. We've had a slew of death threats. And these folks are really scared because they don't want that in their lives. They would rather just hope that the situation will fix itself. And that's frankly what most of us naively thought, that Donald Trump was an aberration and that once he was gone, things would go back to normal. Well,

that's just not the case because he basically radicalized a whole movement towards his view. And now it's going to take a really strong centrist leader from the GOP to swing the pendulum back the other direction. But that person won't emerge if we don't lower that price of dissent, if we don't make it easier for folks to come forward and criticize the party. And that requires more simply put, Chris, strengthened numbers. And so I'm glad to see some people in the presidential primary starting to chip away at that. But it's going to need to be more than just a drip, drip, drip. It's going to need to be a deluge in order for these Republicans to, you know, get a stiffer spine and come out and turn against the ex-president. And we're almost in the third quarter of the game. I mean, those watching this video years from now,

today, Donald Trump's lawyers met for the second time with the Justice Department for Jack Smith's investigation over January 6th. You know know it's presumed that tomorrow or sometime over the weekend or or next week they could get the indictment of of whatever the january 6th thing is going to be on top of everything else that's gone on and here we are almost to the point where i mean he's doing tours of in what ohio and different places i mean he's already you know starting to run for office i think there's going to be what primaries coming up here fairly soon. Yeah, for sure. And he's leaving. Yeah, the first presidential debate will be in August. The early primaries will happen several months after that, and we'll be in the heat of it. And right now in the classified documents case,

the judge has set the trial for next May. Well, for folks who kind of vaguely remember presidential calendars, oftentimes we get to May and we know who the nominees are and the primary process is effectively over. It's very possible that Trump goes to trial in multiple different indictments and he's already locked up enough votes to be the GOP nominee, then not only will the Republican Party be in crisis, but the country may face some sort of constitutional crisis if the man is elected and justice has not yet been handed down. And this is a this is there's more than a nonzero chance of this happening. There's a very significant chance. And what I've been saying a lot recently to try to get people to wrap their heads around it is go look at what the betting markets say. Not that the betting markets

have a crystal ball, but the betting markets are a good proxy for how the people are feeling. And in 2016, on the eve of Trump's election, some of the odds makers had him at a 9% chance of winning, and then he won. Right now, and I just checked, he's got more than three times the odds of winning the presidency right now than he did on the eve of actually pulling it off in 2016. So that just goes to show you, despite every controversy, and he's easily been the most controversial president in American history, despite all of that, he's three times as strong in a sense as he was in 2016 electorally. I think that is the wake up call people need to hear and share with their friends and family is we can't wish this thing away. If you don't want it to

happen again, it requires really actively convincing people to get out there and be a part of the democratic process to steer us a different direction. And a conservative i want nothing more than the republican party to just go back to normal damn it and i was hoping that ron de santis would at least split the ticket or uh you know come out as a as a as a good runner so we could put trump away but if that appears to be backfiring as well it doesn't look like anybody likes him. Well, you know, and Mitt Romney came out recently and said what I think is probably the most obvious but best analysis of all of this is that the Republican field needs to slim down really fast to a two-man race as quickly as possible. Because if you've got all these Ron DeSantis and Ron DeSantis lookalikes and copycats, they're going to split the other 50 percent of the vote share. And Donald Trump is going to do exactly what he did last time and win without even needing the majority of the vote in the primary states because he has so many competitors that are dividing at so many different directions.

It would be incandescently stupid for us to make that same mistake again, because we had this. There's zillions of op eds from 2015 and 2016 of people saying the field needs to shrink. The field needs to shrink or we're not going to be able to beat this guy. And people didn't drop out and they stayed in the race in this false hope that they may surge forward. And and that's how we got Donald Trump. And so if we do it again, and frankly, Chris, if we elect him again and he wins, I hate to be so grim about it, but we deserve everything that's coming to us because what we will not be able to say is we didn't know it would be this bad. The whole point of blowback is to tell you in the voice of his own

people, here's how bad it will be so if we make that mistake again if we decide to do it uh you know we deserve everything that's coming to us i often tell people that complain about well you know it's the politicians it's the government i go they're a mirror of us and you get the government you vote in and so they're a mirror of us and if we're a bunch of idiot fuck-ups that put idiot fuck-ups in the thing well yeah go go check the mirror so vote better do better all that sort of good stuff um i wanted to ask you because we've had a few people on the show that have ended up on the tweet storm of of donald trump what what is that like your perspective was even more unique because you're kind of uh i don't know what a good description was i'll throw out some uh things a mole or you're kind of, I don't know what a good description was. I'll throw out some things.

A mole, you're inside and they're looking for you. They're hunting for you. I mean, I know they were cleaning. I know at one point they were going to put everybody on the polygraph at the White House. What is that experience like? And you've got everybody after you. I know the press was also, I don't know if they were sliding you yet, but they were peppering you, thinking you might be.

What's that like to go through that gauntlet? Yeah, I went into it pretty clear-eyed. I knew it was going to be a frenzy. sounded the alarm by just quitting my job and speaking out about Donald Trump, he would immediately do what he always does very effectively, I might add, which is he redirects the focus onto the person and just rips them to pieces. And then everyone forgets about what the original message was. And they just pay attention to the UFC brawl that's now in front of them. I didn't want to give him that opportunity. I wanted to deprive him of the thing he loves the most, which is the opportunity to brawl with the messenger because he wins that fight every single time. And he doesn't win it

on the merits. He wins it with a really hard head, but with his orange head. And so I wanted to write this anonymously. So he would have to contend with the message and the message was your own cabinet thinks you're incompetent your own cabinet is so scared of you that we've had conversations about if it gets any worse we'll have to invoke the 25th amendment and your people think you might need to be removed because you're so unstable uh and every day your team is working to put your illegal ideas back in the box. Now, I want to be clear, what this was not was a group of people resisting the lawful orders of a commander in chief. It wasn't a coup. It wasn't treason. If Donald Trump said, I am president, we will do X and it was legal, people did it. What we're talking about is his frequent inclination towards

illegality and people trying to prevent those sorts of things from becoming law. So that's why I did it. But it was it was frenetic. And I actually, Chris, didn't understand the full scope of it until after the administration ended. And Stephanie Grisham, who had been Trump's communications director, press secretary, came to me and she said, Miles, you have no idea how much this drove him crazy. She said for years, every meeting, even after you left government, you know, and she didn't know I was anonymous at the time. She said for years he would sit there in meetings and he would look around the room and he would say, do you know who anonymous is? Do you know who anonymous is? It drove him bananas. But I think in a sense that proved my point, Chris, it proved my point because this guy

is so allergic to criticism. First Amendment protected criticism that it's the best display of his autocratic tendencies. And as soon as I released that op-ed, he treated in all caps, treason, question mark. And he demanded that the New that op-ed, he treated in all caps, treason question mark. And he demanded that the New York Times hand me over for quote, national security purposes. When I unmasked myself, he sent the justice department after me. Again, to be clear, all I had said was the president's people think he's an idiot and that he's dangerous. That is not illegal. That's what we call first amendment protected speech but he wanted to find a way to put me in prison because of that that's the type of thing he won't be told no about in a second term well you know you can go talk to some people in prison now uh as far as

i'm concerned so there you go uh but uh you know we'll see how this all plays out i mean what could go wrong right uh yeah yeah that's the whole reason for your plays out. What could go wrong, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just play a little. That's the whole reason for your book, Blowback. What could go wrong? So there you go. Well, Miles, it's been wonderful and fun to have you on the show. I would imagine you're not getting any Christmas holiday cards from the Trump and Melania household, I guess.

You know, I'm going to see if they want to do my place or their place. We haven't settled on that yet. There you go. Well, your place looks nice in the background. It doesn't have that tackiness. I think we could all fit in this bed together. Yeah. Yeah.

Probably bring over Stormy Daniels. Anyway, thank you very much for coming on the show, Miles. We really appreciate it. Chris Voss, you're a legend. Thanks, my friend. Thank you, sir. Gibbouser.com, too. Let me get that in there.

So the plug there. Thanks, my friend. Thank you, Mr. Gibbouser.com, too. Let me get that in there. So the plug there. Yeah, yeah. You can find me on social media at MilesTaylorUSA on Twitter, Instagram, and on Threads. And you can also check out this new podcast we launched with iHeartMedia called The Whistleblowers. So we'd love for folks to check that out and to pick up a copy of the book Blowback. So it seems obvious, but you're probably going to have some of the whistleblowers on there and stuff and the people that call out all the bad stuff. Maybe. Oh, I lost you for a second, Chris.

Oh, are you going to have all the whistleblowers on there and people to do all that? It's an eight-part series. Very, very highly produced, back-in-time storytelling. And I'll just say i actually was very flattered that they asked me to do it it's helping tell other people's whistleblower stories and these are they are gripping they are raw they are emotional these are intense stories of whistleblowers from inside the government so i hope folks get a chance to check it out there you go did anybody else know that you were the one or did you keep it secret from every single person because i managed in in the town where you can

keep almost nothing secret um i managed to keep it except for the you know two people at the new york times were aware and there was a document in a locked vault that you know had my signature on it but but otherwise you know we largely had kept that under wraps but look at the end of the day i felt like it would be cowardly to keep the mask on and that before people went to the polls i wanted to take that mask off and say we need to own our criticisms in our own names now's the time for people to come forward and shit chris it looks like we're all going to have to do that again i mean we're all going to have to come forward again in the lead up to 2024 to protect this country so i hope folks will i hope they will too thank you very much for coming on, Miles. Thanks a lot for tuning in.

Order up the book where refined books are sold. Blowback, a warning to save democracy. Democracy is pretty cool. We should probably keep it around. To save democracy from the next Trump, July 18th, 2023. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.