Former Trump administration Homeland Security official Miles Taylor described how "dangerously close" President Donald Trump has come to invoking the Insurrection Act — and how he believes he will do it.
Taylor described in a Substack essay Friday that Trump has threatened to to bring U.S. troops to Minnesota after protests erupted in the wake of an ICE agent fatally shooting mother Renee Nicole Good and how that threat should be taken seriously. As federal forces ramp up operations in the state, Trump has said that he will "send in the military using one of his most extraordinary powers," threatening that he will make the move unless the state “stops the professional agitators and insurrectionists."
"Donald Trump’s desire to invoke one of the presidency’s most extraordinary, emergency powers is ten years in the making," Taylor wrote. "I believe he will do it. And I believe we have real options to fight back."
It's something Trump most likely won't stop pursuing, according to the ex-insider.
"Contrary to the analysis of many pundits, this isn’t bluster. It’s the culmination of a nearly ten-year fixation I witnessed firsthand inside Donald Trump’s first administration," Taylor argued.
Taylor described how in 2019 Trump wanted to militarize the Southern Border and had threatened to shoot migrants crossing into the United States, and how Taylor then worked to persuade him from stopping, telling him it was the wrong time and circumstances.
"We’ve been here before. In fact, I watched Trump nearly invoke the Act — and talked him out of it," he wrote.
But he said he knew that Trump would ultimately try again and laid out several ways that he could prevented from doing so, including legal action by Minnesota, an emergency summit among state governors to unify and take action against the administration, a Congressional investigation against using the military to discuss illegal orders, impeachment proceedings that Taylor argues should begin the moment Trump acts and "mass civic resistance."
He warned that people need to give real thought to the moment.
"What we cannot do, though, is be lulled into a false sense of comfort that this is another Trump 'joke' and not the real thing. We have to be ready," Taylor wrote.
"Like I’ve said, again and again, Trump has been rehearsing this play for a decade. I watched the dress rehearsals," he wrote. "This time he believes the stage is set. But it isn’t, unless we surrender it to him. The Constitution still works when Americans use it, and the United States won’t become a despotism unless we allow it to be one."