Miles Taylor is best known as the Trump administration official who, in 2018, wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the president. Taylor later revealed his identity and wrote a book warning about the dangers of a second Trump term.
Top on his list of concerns: Trump deploying the military into American cities.
Taylor told me that he saw up close how Trump was itching to do it in his first term:
There was one specific episode where this really came to a head in 2019. We'd spent the better part of a year in the lead up to this incident trying to persuade the president not to invoke what's called the Insurrection Act. This is the presidential authority to basically deploy the U.S. military on U.S. soil to enforce domestic law, which, you know, you can't get too much closer to a police state than that.
And there were a lot of circumstances where Trump wanted to do that, either, you know, if there were protests or riots. Usually, it was about immigration. And there was one particular instance. In 2019, there was a migrant caravan headed towards the U.S. border. And I'm telling you, nothing made Donald Trump more apoplectic than if he turned on the news and he saw hundreds or thousands of people marching towards the U.S. border to claim asylum.
We got a heads-up from the White House. We got a phone call over at the Department of Homeland Security, and a senior aide to the president said, “Hey, I think you guys need to get over here. The president is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act. He wants to deploy the military and fully seal the U.S. border.”
I'll tell you why, even if you believe we need to crack down on illegal immigration, I'll tell you why that's wrong. Because the Insurrection Act is only supposed to be invoked in cases of invasion or rebellion. And we neither thought this was an armed foreign invasion of a foreign country nor a domestic rebellion in the United States. And therefore, our lawyers felt like, yes, it would be unlawful for the president to go send thousands of U.S. troops down there
So we rush over to the White House. The president is in the Map Room preparing for the State of the Union address. And he wants to insert language in there, basically announcing that he's going to go do this troop deployment. …
Suffice to say we spent hours going back and forth between the White House counsel's office and the president and finally got him to understand that this would be an extraordinary escalation and that he would probably lose in the courts. But more importantly, it would set a really dangerous precedent for him to be personally directing U.S. law enforcement around the country. So we talked him out of it.
But after that I had a lot of fear that in a second Trump administration, there wouldn't be people that would advise Donald Trump not to do that. And he would get his way to go deploy troops and that it wouldn't stop at immigration enforcement at the border. That he would go into U.S. cities with U.S. troops. And it wouldn’t stop at immigration enforcement in those cities. That he would potentially have the opportunity to intimidate protesters and try to enforce other U.S. laws personally, and that it would be a slippery slope into quasi-autocracy….
And this seems to be precisely what Donald Trump is now doing. He's executing the playbook that he was prevented from executing last time.
In our conversation, Taylor also had this chilling account of what it was like to be called out by Trump personally after Taylor revealed himself as Anonymous:
The blast zone is big. … Doing that cost me my home, my job, the marriage I was in at the time, my personal security, and my savings. I mean, it detonated everything. And so much so that on election night 2020, I was in a safe house in Northern Virginia under armed guard and with a pistol under my pillow. None of that is an exaggeration. The death threats were so serious that I had to have an armed security detail.
On April 9, Trump targeted Taylor with an Executive Order, throwing his life into a new round of chaos, which we also discussed at length.
You can watch the entire interview at Telos News or on YouTube, or download it as a podcast.
I highly recommend this one — it was a riveting and important conversation.
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