Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor has become one of President Donald Trump's targets after spending the better part of five years speaking out. Now he's taking another big step.
Taylor announced on MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace that he was founding his own club of anti-Trumpers, and connecting all anti-Trump groups together in one place over a common goal.
He began by recalling Trump attacking him personally in April, and that he was flooded with many well-intentioned people who warned him to stay quiet and lie low. Taylor considered another option and started the pro-democracy coalition Defiance.org.
"If we don't fight back, then the risks of retaliation against other people are much higher," he said.
One key element is mobilizing people to contact officials so that people like Taylor or AG Tish James aren't the targets all the time. The American public can be those willing to fight back collectively.
Taylor said that he will never forget a meeting that he had with Stephen Miller not long before he left the administration.
"We're in his little, tiny second-floor, West Wing office and he points to a drawer and he said, 'You know what's in there, Miles?' And I said, 'What's in there?' He said, 'There's a stack of executive orders that I'm going to issue in the second Trump administration. I'm going to issue, by the way," Taylor recalled, pointing to Miller bragging he was the one in charge. "You read into that what you want."
"And he said it's going to be a shock and awe blitz against the American people," Taylor recalled. "He used the language of the airstrikes in the Iraq War. 'Shock and awe' blitz. They are doing what Steve Bannon said and flooding the zone and we've got to be able to react in real time and quickly and dynamically."
His group won't be the one to take over the issue; rather, his coalition wants to connect with the groups that make sense to do that work and use his big community of followers to push out their messages.