A national security expert who served in the Trump administration on Wednesday issued a “chilling forecast” over the potential threats to American democracy a second presidency under his former boss would pose.
Miles Taylor said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut with Joy Reid” that the “good guys” who kept Trump in check in the former president’s first term would be unlikely to help much in a second term.
Taylor, who also served in the George W. Bush administration, authored a newly released book titled “Blowback” that articulates his concerns. In 2018 he wrote anonymous NYT op-ed published under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
“Unfortunately, we all hoped that the people around Donald Trump would keep him from doing bad things, but we learned that even well-meaning bureaucrats could not keep a wayward chief executive in check, so the executive branch guardrails were broken,” Taylor told guest host Jason Johnson.
“Congress failed to hold Donald Trump accountable in those two impeachments. Now, we're hoping that the judiciary does something, but as you've noticed, well, Donald Trump is still surging in the polls. He's likely to be the GOP nominee, despite being twice indicted. So I don't think we can count on the three branches of government. It's going to be up to the voters to prevent our democracy from falling on a knife's edge.”
Taylor said the source of his concerns are former colleagues from his time in the Trump administration.
“The people that I interviewed for this book, my former colleagues and Trump cabinet secretaries described this as a quote ‘nightmare slate,’” Taylor said.
“I mean, the fact that Trump's own lieutenants would say if given a second go around, he would bring in a nightmare slate of public officials. It's not you saying it, Jason, and it's not TV commentators, it’s Trump's own people. That should really worry you. If you thought a first Trump administration was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet, because the people who were willing to stand up to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement who would try to say no to illegal and unethical and unconstitutional ideas, will not be back for a second go around.
“It will be the enablers and look, I'm not saying that those of us who went in to try to keep the guardrails wrong did everything right. In fact, I have enormous regrets about how that was handled. We were naïve in thinking we could keep him in check. But that's the message I want to send is do not count on good people going in and a second go around. It will be the enablers. It will be people who want to execute his vision.”
Johnson asked Taylor what compelled him to write book, saying “Did you did you write this book because you don't think that the Biden administration is doing enough? Or do you see some signs that they're taking some of the concerns that you're laying out in this book seriously?”
“Well, I wrote the book in part, Jason, because I'm sick of all these Trump retrospectives of people trying to burnish their credentials and rewrite their story,” Taylor said.
“We don't need another Trump memoir on the bookshelves, and no offense to my former colleagues who've gone and written Trump retrospectives, what I wanted to see is someone to tell us what Trump wanted to do in a first term, what he was stopped from doing and what he would do if given a chance to go back into public office and what and what the MAGA movement would do if it was a copycat. So this is a forecast and unfortunately, a very chilling forecast about what could happen if we make the civic mistake of giving like someone like that a second opportunity.”
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