Former Trump official turned critic Miles Taylor anticipated that President Donald Trump's latest business venture — Trump Mobile — could be "a prophecy of what’s to come."
Taylor wrote in an opinion piece for The i Paper on Friday about his experience working with Trump during the president's first administration, revealing what motivated Trump the most: cash.
"I saw it play out inside the Oval Office during the 'hype phase' of Donald Trump’s first presidency," Taylor wrote. "Now, in the second term, we’re beginning to see the 'fail phase' of the largest product Trump has ever tried to brand: the United States of America."
The pattern has become familiar to the former insider.
"The anatomy of a failed Trump venture is something to behold, if anything because of its consistency," Taylor explained. "It often begins with his name going on something he didn’t build and doesn’t seem to understand, followed by a launch that is pure, breathless spectacle – the best-ever, the most beautiful, the toughest! The hype appears designed to hoover up as much media and money as possible before any of the reviews roll in. That’s because the product was never the point. The producer was."
But Trump doesn't have the same backing he once had, Taylor argued.
"Many previous Trump products had some kind of an exit ramp," Taylor wrote. "A country isn’t the same. Trump realised as much in panic as he tried vainly to hold on to power in 2020 and to intimidate the Republican Party into sticking with him in the aftermath. Now, he’s losing many of those hardcore supporters who were deluded into buying the product again. The Maga bros and the Maga congressmen and the Maga moms are starting to realise, like Trump-phone buyers, that they’ve been misled."
"The United States may turn out to be the biggest bankruptcy of Trump’s life, but the people he’s screwed are the ones who own the company. This time, they may not let him walk away," Taylor wrote.
