The MeidasTouch Podcast - EXCLUSIVE: Former Trump Insider Miles Taylor EXPOSES Trump MISHANDLING Classified Info + MORE

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

Ben Meiselas interviews former Donald Trump official Miles Taylor, who became an outspoken whistleblower against Donald Trump. Miles is out with a new book warning about the dangers of another Trump term and how our democracy will be destroyed if that happens. Meiselas gets Miles to deliver some breaking news exclusively with the MeidasTouch Network that Miles Taylor saw Donald Trump mishandle classified information. Special Counsel Jack Smith, are you listening? Thanks to our sponsor: Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made! Go to TryMiracle.com/MEIDAS and use the code MEIDAS to claim your FREE 3 PIECE TOWEL SET and SAVE over 40% OFF. Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 The Influence Continuum: https://pod.link/1603773245 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 The Weekend Show: https://pod.link/1612691018 The Tony Michaels Podcast: https://pod.link/1561049560 American Psyop: https://pod.link/1652143101 Burn the Boats: https://pod.link/1485464343 Majority 54: https://pod.link/1309354521 Political Beatdown: https://pod.link/1669634407 Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://pod.link/1676844320 MAGA Uncovered: https://pod.link/1690214260 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario i'm ben mycellus from the Midas touch network and we are joined by miles tay. Miles previously served as the chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, where he published an anonymous essay in the New York Times blowing the whistle on Donald Trump. Miles has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, giving us an inside perspective of the dangers posed by this malignant, narcissistic, unqualified, sociopathic criminal trader. And Miles, a New York Times bestseller, is out with a new book, Blow Back, a Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump. It was released on July 18th. I've had the opportunity to read it. And now I

have the opportunity to speak with you, Miles Taylor, and share it with all of the Midas mighty watching out there. How you doing? Ben, I'm just glad you didn't introduce me as a narcissistic, sociopathic criminal traitor. So, you know, if I ever enter that territory, I need you to send me a text message and call me out. But but it's always great to be with you. And and I've got to say just the other day, she's going to get a kick out of this. But my stepmom said, I hope you're talking to the Midas Touch guys because I love them. You will be delighted to see on the schedule that I am. That is so good to hear that she's a part of the Midas Mighty and

knowing that she's going to be watching this interview. So let's get right into it. You know, and I've seen a lot of your interviews out there. We've covered your book in some of the segments we do here on the Midas Touch Network. So our viewers are familiar. But there's one nagging question that I haven't heard you been asked by anybody yet. And it relates to Donald Trump's handling of classified information. And if you've observed anything about that yesterday, there was a big hearing in the federal criminal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump for his willful retention of national defense information. So I think the million dollar question out there that I've never heard you've been asked is,

did you, Miles Taylor, observe Donald Trump mishandling classified information and his special counsel, Jack Smith, reached out to you? Well, you know, Ben, I did and I haven't heard from the special counsel, but, you know, I'm willing to say I'm more than happy to talk to the special counsel and his team if it's additive to this case. And I think there's actually probably a lot of other people from the administration who could add color to this narrative of Trump's really, really reckless handling of national security secrets, which we saw all throughout the administration. In my case, there were several episodes. I mean, one was getting a phone call early in the administration from Trump's Homeland Security advisor, who called to say that the president had just disclosed highly classified information in the Oval Office, not just to some civilians and tourists, but to a foreign adversary. It's when the Russians were

visiting the White House, and that was publicly reported. The sensitivity, I think people still don't understand the extreme sensitivity of what Trump had shared, but it didn't stop there, because after that, we became really concerned about what to share with Donald Trump had shared, but it didn't stop there because after that, we became really concerned about what to share with Donald Trump and when, because we had no confidence that he would protect highly classified information that we put in front of him because he had a proclivity to talk about those things. He liked having leverage, which was, you know, secrets that other people didn't know that he did know. And I saw him brag about it, you know, in a number of occasions. And one that stood out in particular was a day that I was sitting in John Bolton's office having a conversation with him when he

was Trump's national security advisor. And Sarah Sanders, then press secretary, enters sort of breathlessly to say that Trump had just had a meeting with a group of reporters and sort of carelessly picked up a fistful of classified documents and waved it in front of the reporters to brag about the sensitive intelligence he got as commander in chief. It was an unbelievable lapse in protocol, but I think is indicative of a wider behavior we saw from Donald Trump, which was, again, a failure to protect those secrets that American lives depend on. And we've seen it since the administration. So I do hope the special counsel is building out a longer historical narrative of Trump's

mishandling of documents so that they can show that what happened with the documents at Mar-a-Lago was by no means some accident or just a brief lapse. And you'd be willing to testify and speak with special counsel Jack Smith about your observations about how Donald Trump continuously mishandled classified information while you were in the administration, correct? Well, look, I'd be happy to talk to any of the investigators in any of these cases that have to do with the former president, because I think there is really important historical context to a lot of these cases. So, I mean, let's take January 6th and the insurrection, for example. The special

counsel is investigating Trump's failure to respond to that incident or more directly, his fomenting of an attempted insurrection against the Capitol. But I think one of the things that will be really important in that case is telling the story of how Trump had an affinity for this idea of invoking the Insurrection Act years before he ended up fomenting January 6th. And it's something that I talk about in Blowback is, you know, as far back as I remember an episode in 2019, when we had to rush to the White House to stop Donald Trump from including the Insurrection Act in his State of the Union address. He had seen on Fox News these images of migrants coming to the border. And Trump was well aware that he had, in his words, this magical authority called the

Insurrection Act, where he could deploy the U.S. military on domestic soil. And he wanted to exert that power. And he was this close to including that in his State of the Union and saying that he was invoking the Insurrection Act, that it was a national emergency and he was going to deploy U.S. troops on soil to turn migrants away, migrants who had a lawful right to come to the United States, by the way, people seeking asylum. And we ultimately talked him out of it. We got his lawyers to stand down. But what this shows is that this

was in Donald Trump's mind years earlier. He knew that if there was an incident like an insurrection at the Capitol, it would give him pretext to potentially invoke those extraordinary presidential powers. And that's why I think he sat there in the West Wing of the White House for hours and watched the event unfold, is that he was waiting for the moment when he felt like he could justify invoking those powers. Now, that is speculation on my part, but I think it's completely backed up by the history of him wanting to use those authorities for unlawful purposes. Well, what's not speculation, though, on your part, and you've talked about this before, and I want you to share with the Midas Mighty what you observed. Donald Trump wanted to build out his own

mercenary force, similar to what he observed with Vladimir Putin. And he talked about, in a serious way, building out his own personal army to guard him and protect him and carry out his will. Did he not? Yeah. I mean, this sounds like the type of thing that is in a bad Hollywood flop, just a really bad screenplay. But it was the president of the United States that wanted his own mercenary force. And I witnessed some of the chaos around this internally in the administration in the first year, is we were in the process of briefing Trump on Afghanistan and trying to give him options for what to do next, because we were worried that Trump was going to recklessly handle the exit from Afghanistan and that people would die, U.S. troops and civilians,

because of the way that he wanted to just pull out in an instant. He needed a much more sequenced, reasonable plan so that troops wouldn't be put in danger, civilians wouldn't be put in danger. In the course of us developing those options, we got word that the president was having private conversations with people about potentially creating his own mercenary force that could be deployed into Afghanistan. Allegedly, one of those people he was talking to was Eric Prince, the controversial founder of Blackwater, the black ops group that got a lot of attention during the Iraq war. And thankfully, we talked him down from this. And in the process of that, you can read about it in the book, was absurd.

I mean, John Kelly called me and said, you know, this 50-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read. We've got to boil this down into a one-pager in his voice. And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, Afghanistan, how to put America first and win. And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language,

because it was the only way he was going to understand. I mean, I literally said in there, you know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we want to be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals. I mean, it was it was that dumb. And that's how you had to talk to him. So, you know, I had to write this this absurdly stupid memo and Trump's voice to persuade him to really take the serious options seriously and not go create a private mercenary force that he could send into Afghanistan instead of the military. But then in the course of writing this book, I didn't want people just

to hear from me. I wanted them to hear from dozens and dozens and dozens of people, almost all of them Republicans who were appointed by Trump or were Republican members of Congress about what would happen in a second term. And in the course of those interviews, someone brought up this idea of a mercenary force. Again, a top official on Trump's National Security Council said that after I left, the idea came back again, and that Trump desperately wanted to create his own armed mercenary group, so much so that the NSC had to scramble to write these memos and brief Trump and explain to him why it was a bad idea. And they ultimately shut it down. But what was clear to them is that he had this deep envy of Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Putin's own Wagner group, right? His sort of unaccountable, you know,

band of, you know, ex-military fighters that he directly controlled. Now, we've all seen how that worked out for Vladimir Putin, but Trump wanted his own group like that. And a number of other officials, former top counterterrorism officials and folks from different departments and agencies, said that they also had seen plans on the shelf to deploy the U.S. military domestically, to deploy DHS security forces domestically with political aims. And that's what they worry about in a second term. And it's what I worry about in a second term. I mean, one of the people I spoke to for this book, who was on Trump's National Security Council, appointed by the president, said, look, in a second term, they will try to take DHS forces

and they will send them to polling places in the name of election security. But the goal will be to have armed individuals at the polls to intimidate the political opposition. And Ben, we saw this in Arizona in the last election, these so-called ballot watchers, these militiamen who showed up with guns, and their goal wasn't to protect the polls from violence. Their goal was to scare Democrats away from voting. And to have one of Trump's own senior National Security Council officials say in a second term, he'll do that. And he'll do that with official state security forces is, I think, deeply, deeply disturbing. It's the kind of thing you would hear about in a story about a third world republic, about a North Korea or an Iran, not the United States. But that's the moment that we're in and that's the possibility we're facing.

Yeah. And both unlawful and stupid when you look at some of his ideas. And you talk about in the book how Donald Trump's former chief of staff, someone you mentioned earlier in the interview, John Kelly, made the comment that you heard that, look, one third of the things that Donald Trump does is illegal. One third of them is just completely stupid. And one third of that is not possible. Did I butcher the quote or did I get it about right? That's about right. I mean, you know, Kelly's point was that, you know, we rarely have credible ideas from the president.

And, you know, that was a point in the administration shortly before Kelly left. And he was growing immensely frustrated at his inability to sort of hem Donald Trump in. You know, year one, I think we were able to keep a lot of the bad ideas in the box. You know, his plans to pull out of NATO or shoot migrants at the border or, you know, weaponize America's spy powers against his political opponents. Those things were put back in the box. But by year two, Trump was resisting these people who had a conscience around him. And if you can give him credit for anything, it's that he had this finely tuned radar for people with a conscience. And he found them and he systematically eliminated them

from the administration. And that's one of my warnings about a second Trump term or a copycat is there will not be these John Kellys and Jim Mattises that come into the administration with the goal of trying to help the president govern and keeping him in check. There won't be. It will be filled with political loyalists. And John Bolton said that to me and Mark Esper, his former defense secretary, and on down the list. It was actually the biggest thing I heard is people fearing the low quality and character of the folks that will be running the federal government if we see a return of Trumpism in the White House. When you talk with some of these Republican colleagues and I don't even know if they still identify with this modern day

Republican Party, but one of the things that shocks me is when I guess nothing could shock me anymore, though, when you see someone like the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and he says things like he recognizes that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to our country, that what he did on January 6th was traitorous and make statements. He tried to overthrow the election in Georgia. But then in the next breath, he's asked a question. Well, would you vote for him? And the response is, well, if he's the Republican nominee, yeah, I would vote for him. It's really inexplicable to me. And look, Brian Kemp, you can say a lot of things about him, and I could be very critical of some of his policies, but in theory, an intelligent person, how does that, how do you square that away when you see that?

And do you see that when you speak with kind of former Republicans who are very critical of Trump, who, who, who say, well, I guess if he's a nominee, I still got to vote for him. I think it's incredibly depressing. And, And I hear that from a lot of folks. And I think that's why it's very plausible that Donald Trump becomes the next president of the United States. I think it's a very real possibility. You know, Ben, a lot of our friends are sort of in denial about that. And folks don't want to think it can happen. And we keep fantasizing that the Justice Department is going to take him down or this case or that case. You know, we've got a twice impeached, twice indicted, you know, potentially soon three time indicted, maybe more ex-president who's still not suffering in the polls because of it. We have to

prepare ourselves for the prospect of a second term. And that's why I wrote this. I mean, no one wants to read another Trump retrospective or another memoir. And but what I was frustrated by was that no one was out there detailing in a very clear eyed way what would happen if we make this civic mistake again. And we had great reporting from The New York Times a few days ago that talked about how Trump has these plans to use the powers of the presidency for revenge. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, blowback goes into detail department by department of exactly what they mean by revenge and what they're going to try to do with those agencies. I mean, you know, one of the ones that was really disgusting to me is what I heard about America's veterans is there's plans on the shelf

in a second term to basically destroy the social safety net for America's veterans, the people who served this country in uniform, many of them wounded, their families who sacrificed to pull that social safety net out from under them. Why? I mean, why would anyone even consider that? Well, it's because Donald Trump found out that the VA was the second biggest department in the federal government with a $250 billion budget. And he wanted that money spent somewhere else. He wanted to spend it on political priorities. Again, this isn't Miles Taylor saying this. I mean, this is Trump's senior leaders at the Department of Veterans Affairs that he appointed. They said that Trump thought of veterans as, quote, lazy malingerers,

and he didn't care if they were kicked out onto the street. He was just so frustrated that so much money was being spent on them. And we know about Trump's long history of animosity towards veterans, how he went to France to mark the anniversary of the Normandy invasion and said the guys in the ground were suckers and losers because they didn't survive in the battle. And look, I'm not a psychologist, but I'm sure this has something to do with the fact that he was a draft dodger, that he used a false excuse allegedly of bone spurs to avoid going into the draft. And since then, he's had this deeply vile view towards people who serve this country. And that's why he was so excited as president to bring the generals to serve under them.

He wanted the generals to serve under them. He wanted the generals under his thumb. And I'll never forget standing in the Oval Office when John Kelly was sworn in as White House Chief of Staff. It was like a good man jumping on a grenade being thrown by a bad one. And the only person smiling in that room was Donald Trump is because he thought he was bringing Kelly in to keep him in check. And Kelly thought he was there to keep Trump in check. And ultimately, as much as I admire General Kelly, and I do, Donald Trump ended up being the right one, because it was clear that we were wrong, that unelected bureaucrats were never going to be able to protect this country from a wayward commander in chief. And they certainly won't be there if there's a second term. Did you know that your temperature at night

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Miracle-Made, for sponsoring this. You also describe Donald Trump's treatment of female staffers, how he talked about his own daughter, Ivanka. Can you speak to that? Yeah. You know, this is something that I have told a couple of other people that I was unsure whether I even wanted to put in the book because it's so disgusting. It doesn't have to do with public policy on the surface. But I included it anyway, because when John Kelly recounted that episode to me about Trump talking about Ivanka's body and what it might be like to have sex with her, his comment after that is, Miles, Trump is a very, very evil man. And there's not a lot of things that can persuade his voters, MAGA voters, really hardcore ones to break from the former president. But I've got to think they

draw a line somewhere. And I've got to think they would draw the line at incest. And it's not just John Kelly saying this. There's this rap sheet that goes on and on of Trump sexualizing his own children. I mean, you've got Trump going out there talking about how Democrats are pedophiles and perverts. This guy acts in a way that makes pedophiles look like innocent people. He is a consummate pervert. And that deficient moral character can't somehow be compartmentalized from the full-time job. He brings that same lack of character and disgusting attitude towards his work, towards relations with other countries, towards democracy's guardrails. He's a man without a moral compass

whatsoever. And what worries me, Ben, is for the longest time, I made the mistake of thinking that Trump was an aberration and just a uniquely disturbing human being, and that we only needed to get past him. But his views and his ethos have infused the Republican Party. And now we are seeing them fall all over themselves to try to become the next Trump. And that's what I try to warn about here, is that even if Trump doesn't win, a lot of the candidates in this field are trying to outdo him and take the policies that even he walked back from and take them further and implement them if the MAGA movement retakes the White House. And it pains me to say it, but I genuinely think if we put another MAGA president in the White House, it is the end of our democracy. And there's other people

in this book quoted, one of them, Sue Gordon, who was deputy director of national intelligence under Trump. I asked her and her comment was, I have low confidence that America reaches its 300th birthday in any recognizable form if we put another person like that in the White House. And that's pretty damning coming from someone that Trump handpicked to run his intelligence community. So in 2020, a lot of people who may have been on opposite sides of the political spectrum united in a common goal for democracy. There was a lot of passion, a lot of energy out there from the ads that were being made to whistleblowers coming forward to there was a lot, a lot of energy at that time. As we approach the twenty twenty four election, what do you think is the solution? We know the warning, but what has to be done now?

We're less than five hundred days away from election. Well, what has to be done? Well, a couple of things need to be done. And you point to one of the really important ones, which is what I call coalition campaigning. It's really, really vital that this time around, we make sure that concerned conservatives and independents coalition with Democrats to make sure that this doesn't happen again. My worry is I'm not entirely sure that that's the case. I mean, when I look at the polling and I look every week at these new polls that drop about the attitudes of the GOP base, you see a lot of these Republicans who defected in 2020 and voted for Joe Biden, you see them going back home. You see them going back to the GOP tribe. And that worries me because we need those voters as a firewall to prevent someone like Trump from coming back. But they aren't. And part of the reason they aren't is because Republican leaders have continued to stand by

Trump at every opportunity they've had to break with him, whether it was the insurrection, whether it was the unurrection, whether it was the unlawful retention of classified documents, indictment after indictment, largely Republican leaders have stood by them, which basically signals to voters, hey, he's a good guy. This is all politicized. And it perpetuates this conspiracy theory of a Justice Department that's out to get him for political retribution. Most of these people on Jack Smith's team and otherwise, they're all public servants, apolitical public servants, and they have no reporting line to the President of the United States that's actively used to run these cases.

But that narrative has taken hold. So I worry about that coalition staying together. And the only way we can make it work is to get more of these prominent Republicans to speak out. Luckily, in the primaries, we've seen people like Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson and Will Hurd go out there and speak the truth, but these guys are a minority. I mean, they've got single digits in the polls. What we need are people who know better, like Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, to come out and say the things he used to say privately about Donald Trump. I mean, I witnessed him complain about Donald Trump all the time, not just when I was working in the House, when I was at the Department of Homeland Security as chief of staff.

I mean, you know, Kevin McCarthy would call us when we would enlist his help in trying to fix Trump problems and say, you know, one time this is quoted in the book. He said, you know, why the fuck am I having to do this? You know, essentially, like, why is this guy so out of control? Why do I have to keep intervening from Capitol Hill to keep him from making stupid decisions? Kevin needs to say those things publicly. Kevin needs to stop keeping those opinions private and the same with his lieutenants and the same with his caucus. I mean, I've got a lot of friends who are still in Congress. I've got Republican members of Congress that are friends of mine, that are peers of mine, that we came up together. We'll go out for beers and they'll say

the same thing. Trump's a danger to democracy, but their mistake is in thinking he will just go away. No, he will not go away unless they have the courage from within the tribe to start attacking him and diminishing his political support. And if they don't do that, we are going to zombie walk off the democratic cliff. You know, one of the reasons I took a detour in the career trajectory I was on to build this pro-democracy media network is I just felt when I was clicking through the channels or searching online that a lot of, I'm not saying all, I don't want to cast it with such a broad brush, but a lot of legacy media is also normalizing the behavior. And every single day, Donald Trump's on his social media platform, posting QAnon memes, threatening prosecutors,

yet the story that's presented to the public outside of this network and a number of other, and some small few other networks is, yeah, it's just Democrats, Republicans. We are in a situation where there's lots of polarization. Americans are very divided and they just fail to meet the moment. And do we just have to recon... My answer was, I just got to rebuild the thing and create a new one and do it. But what do you see there? I mean, they over-intellectualize it. What's going on there? I think it's going to be really hard because people are exhausted and you know this well, Ben, it's one of the ironies of being in this space is, you know, the other side, the MAGA side tries to say, well, any of these never Trumpers or former Republicans or RINOs or, you know, these these, you know, Democrats, you know, they're all

coming at us because they're grifters. I find that allegation remarkably funny because doing this, being on this podcast, talking to you, writing this book, has been literally the opposite of financially lucrative. When I was working in the private sector and working in the tech sector, I was finally making very good money. You know what's not a really good thing for business? You know what's fucking the really good thing for business? You know what's fucking the stupidest thing for business? Is to go out and talk about politics. It's the dumbest thing. I mean, if people want to know,

if they want to see my salary for the past two years, my salary for the past two years has been less than it was when I was in government. And we don't pay government servants well, so no, I'm not getting rich off of talking about Trump. If anything, it has deeply suppressed my financial situation. And again, no one has to have sympathy for me. I'm doing this because it has to be done. But, you know, when I came out against Trump, yeah, I say this all the time.

I did lose my home. I did lose my job. I did lose relationships. I did lose my life savings. I was on unemployment for months. So, you know, I want those people who accuse folks like us, Ben, of being grifters, come say that to my face, because we are in this because our country is literally on the cusp of potential, what I call civic suicidal ideation. It's essentially as a country where we're looking down the barrel of a

gun and about to make a horrible mistake that we cannot walk back from. And we have to wake up to that. And I'm so frustrated with a lot of the mentors I had coming up in Washington who I thought would have the courage to go sound that alarm and they didn't. And I'm just a kid from a middle-class town in Indiana, a small farm town. And I grew up thinking if someone's bad and if there's a bully, you call it out. And a lot of these people apparently weren't raised that way. And rather than acting like adults, they've act like children hiding under the bed from the boogeyman. And if they continue to do that, we will lose this. We will lose this thing that we call our democracy. And, you know,

Reagan said we were, you know, freedom was always a generation away from extinction. And the founders thought that, right? The famous quote from Ben Franklin, when they asked him after he walked out of the Constitutional Convention, well, what have we? And he said, a republic, if you can keep it. And there was a worry even then that we were always a few steps away from throwing this away. And I think that right now we're at graver risk of that than we were in 2016 than we were in 2020. I hate to sound like the broken record, but I do think the 2024 presidential election will be the decisive referendum on the survival of American democracy. Really, who are we as a country? I mean, and I think it goes in two extremes, right? It either becomes this

fascist dystopia that looks like Russia, or I think a pro-democracy coalition can unite. And, you know, there could be actual progress made. And, you know, you and I probably disagree on a bunch of issues. We probably agree on a bunch of issues, but ultimately we can have a very civil conversation. And ultimately we want to make sure that Americans can find a great job. We want to make sure that they've got great working conditions, right? We want to make sure that people can get healthcare. Now, you and I in the past may have had disagreements or agreements. I don't know about what's the best delivery method, but we all agree that people should get healthcare and people should not be spending huge amounts of money because big pharma is jacking up rates and we should protect our

veterans. And you and I talk about those issues. If you were to watch what the podcast is going on on the other side of the country, they're talking about how the Barbie movie is a communist plot and Mr. Potato Head this. And I just think that's what's on the line ultimately. I'll give you the final word. And those things used to be fringe conspiracy theories. And what alarms me is my former party has mainstreamed those conspiracy theories and a vast majority of the base now believes them. That is changing their voting behavior. And it's leading to some very dangerous things.

And I'll echo your sentiment, Ben, which is you and I probably have tons of policy disagreements, you know, and for listeners, I'm no liberal. I'm a libertarian conservative. I'm that evil guy that you think wants to make government so small and destroy social services and blah, blah I'm a hardcore libertarian. That doesn't matter if the American experiment itself is on the line. I am more than happy to go team up with a Bernie Sanders, you know, Democrat. That's the antithesis of my worldview. If it means protecting our country, and we all need to be doing that because I would love next time I come on the podcast, Ben, that the world's better, our politics are better. and you and I are just getting in a scrappy debate about welfare reform or taxes or something like that. That's what we need to go back to, but someone who needs to read it, because almost all the voices in blowback are from Republicans and Republicans that were appointed by Trump or served under Trump painting a picture of what he or a copycat would do back in office. People need to be clear eyed about this before they enter the voting booth.

So I hope they spread the message. Well, we appreciate you spreading the message on the Midas Touch Network. Everybody gets your copy of Blowback, a warning to save democracy from the next Trump. I've read it. Hopefully all of you will read it and share in the comments your thoughts about the book. Share in the comments if you are purchasing this and make sure to recommend it to a family member, friend, coer, colleague, or neighbor as well. Miles Taylor, thanks for joining us as always. Ben, you're a patriot. I appreciate you. Thank you for everything you guys do. This has been the Ben Micellas from the Midas Touch Network interview with Miles Taylor. Have a great day, everybody. At Midas Touch, we are unapologetically pro-democracy and we demand

justice and accountability. That's why we're spreading our message to Convict 45. That's right. Gear up right now with your Convict 45 tees and pins at store.midastouch.com. That's store.midastouch.com.