Miles Taylor: Trump 2nd Term Would Focus Solely on Revenge

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Now, our next guest once blew the whistle anonymously on former President Donald Trump conduct in office. Now, Miles Taylor, former head of Homeland Security, is publicly warning about what he sees as even greater dangers if there was a second Trump term. His new book, Blowback, is the product of almost 100 conversations with former Trump staffers, and he also reflects now with Michel Martin on his own time in that administration.

MICHEL MARTIN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Christiane. Miles Taylor, thank you so much for joining us.

TAYLOR: Thanks for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: I think people who kind of follow politics, even a little, know that there are a lot of Trump retrospectives out there. There are a lot of books by former Trump officials or people who are kind of Trump adjacent, kind of giving their take on the administration. This book is different. Explain how.

TAYLOR: Well, I kind of got sick of reading all of those retrospectives, as I’m sure others did. There’s been a lot of self-congratulatory memoirs of the Trump years about how brave and bold people think they were during that time period. But what they were not giving us was a lucid projection of what could happen if we made this mistake. Again, if we put Donald Trump or another hyper populist in the White House, and to me, that’s the utility of history. The utility of history is to tell us about what could happen next and to teach us lessons. And those Trump memoirs really didn’t give us that. So my goal was to try to paint a picture of Trump 2.0 and a second term and not just in my voice, but to go talk to dozens and dozens of cabinet secretaries and senior officials all the way down to the staff assistants that sat outside the Oval Office during the Trump administration to ask them one simple question, what would happen in a second go-around? And to convey that message to the American people?

MICHEL MARTIN, JOURNALIST: How did they respond to that query? I’m just wondering what it was like when you first approached people to ask them this?

TAYLOR: Yes. If I could boil it down into a sentence, I would say that the general response from ex-Trump officials was a second term will not be as bad as you think. It will be so much worse. And that ended up being the prompt that led to a lot of really shocking conversations to me. I’ll confess, Michel, to sort of arrogantly thinking I knew how bad another term could be, because I had witnessed the policies that were thwarted in the first term. Some of the really ugly things, illegal things that the president wanted to do that were thought. And so based on that, I thought I knew, you know, pretty clearly what they would want to do in a second term. But after probably close to 100 conversations with ex-Trump officials, it was a much more grim portrait than I had expected. Because quite frankly, I didn’t realize in how many other departments and agencies, there had been this corpus of very ugly rejected policies that we would expect to make a return if Trump himself does return.

MARTIN: Let’s go through a couple of those departments. And let’s start with the place that you — where you served, which is the Department of Homeland Security. Give us a sense of what you and your reporting — frankly, your reporting with other officials described what might be the playbook?

TAYLOR: Well, first, I want to start on immigration. You know, I’ve never been an immigration policy expert. And most of my time in the administration was working on counterterrorism and intelligence. But I, of course, was exposed to Trump’s immigration fixation, because it’s all he ever wanted to talk to the department about. And there were a lot of descriptions about Trump wanting to use the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus against unarmed innocent migrants. And that’s really concerning to me. But Trump had learned in the first term that post-911, we got really, really good at counterterrorism. What do I mean by that? Watch listing bad guys, going after them with lethal force and tracking them. And he wanted to use those tools against migrants. And so I had, you know, people telling me about how in a second term, Trump would designate migrant groups as foreign terrorist organizations. He would deploy the military and give them authorization to use lethal force, really shocking things that again, I have to be clear, are not legal for a president of the United States to do. But even beyond the border, a number of officials who were there till the end of the administration, long after I had left, said that Trump had an interest in deploying DHS counterterrorism forces into U.S. cities, especially democratic cities to exert control. We saw a sample of that in Portland, during the riots in Portland. But I had one official tell me in a second term, Donald Trump would deploy DHS forces to the polls during the election to try to intimidate voters. In other words, to scare Democratic voters away from the polls. And we’ve seen a sample of that with so-called poll watchers in places like Arizona showing up with weapons.

MARTIN: You describe in the book meetings, where he expressed admiration, you know, for dictators. You described meetings, where he described tactics that he wishes he could employ like creating a demilitarized zone such as exists between North Korea and South Korea, where he describes people literally shooting people coming across or trying to cross the demilitarized zone. Are you, Mr. Taylor, you have confidence that the people sitting in these meetings actually heard him say that?

TAYLOR: Well, I actually heard him say that. I mean, I — you know, I took notes and documented Trump actually saying to us, he wanted the border to be just like the DMZ in Korea. In fact, I think his exact quote to us was Kim Jong Un does it so much better. Why don’t we do it like him? And his reference was to tanks and barbed wire and landmines. And that’s what he wanted the United States border to look like. Now, make no mistake, the situation at the border is a mess, but it’s not just a mess because it’s unsecure. It’s also a mess for the people who are trying to seek a better life in the United States, because we have such a broken system, that even if they have a lawful right to be here, they don’t get an answer from America’s courts until five, seven, or even 10 years later. In the meantime, they have to live in limbo. That’s just wrong. And Donald Trump wanted to make sure they lived in limbo forever, or worse, that they’d be targeted. But I also want to, you know, mention, Michel, what you said about dictators. This came up a lot during the administration when I was there, and in my interviews after, which is we have these weekly national security phone calls. So think the national security adviser of the White House and the top cabinet secretaries at the national security departments and agencies frequently on those phone calls. We would be confounded by the president’s public comments, praising America’s adversaries, XI Jinping and China, Kim Jong Un and North Korea, Vladimir Putin and Russia. His own people were sort of shocked that he had this deep, deep and abiding affinity for dictators, and quite frankly, an aversion for our allies. Anytime he went abroad to a NATO meeting, he was frustrated that he even had to go. He did not like meeting with America’s Democratic allies. And the reason was, because he didn’t think they would do him favors.

MARTIN: Wow. All right. So I’m going to go right to the Department of Education. And the reason I’m going there is, is that — is that I don’t think people really necessarily think about the ways that the education department could be weaponized, as you put it in the book. So would you talk a little bit about that?

TAYLOR: I’ll give you two anecdotes that really shocked me and one was on immigration is I was told by Trump’s own Chief of Staff at the Department of Education, Josh Venable, that there was a policy that they tried to implement — that the White House tried to implement to force migrant children out of public schools. In other words, if their parents are here in the United States, and they were undocumented, to punish those families by kicking their kids out of public school. Well, how could that possibly happen? You ask? Well, Venable explained to me that all the Department of Education would do was say to public schools that they would no longer receive funding from the Department of Education, if they were teaching undocumented immigrants. And a lot of public schools don’t have the ability to go without the federal funding that they need. So this would be a way to coerce them to kick these innocent children out of school. In fact, Venable said, the White House was so serious about this, he called it quote, the cockroach that wouldn’t die. And that they resisted the policy. But in his view and a second term, they would implement that policy. And another one was on LGBTQ issues. You know, we’ve seen in Florida how Ron DeSantis and his administration implemented what’s the — what’s been referred to as the don’t say gay law, forbidding teachers from talking about same sex couples, even if a student’s parents are saying sex couple. Department of Education officials explained to me that that policy would be federalized on a nationwide scale using the same tool, is that school districts would be threatened that they won’t get federal funds if they don’t implement don’t say gay policies. That’s something that a second Trump administration could do without consulting Congress at all. And it’s a really chilling implementation of the culture wars, in my view.

MARTIN: Let’s go back to your kind of first life in the — in the Trump administration. I mean, people who have followed you, you know, even a little bit may remember that you kind of outed yourself, as anonymous, you wrote a piece for The New York Times where you talked about the fact that there were other civil servants who were trying to keep the president in their view, sort of from acting on his worst impulses, and in many ways, sort of — sort of violating the law. Why wasn’t that enough? Because it clearly wasn’t.

TAYLOR: It wasn’t enough. And this will sound ironic coming from me, Michel, but I learned through long, hard experience that anonymity, not only was unhelpful, but in a sense, is a danger to democracy. Let me explain what I mean by that. At first, it seemed to work, putting the message out anonymously, blowing the whistle anonymously drew attention to the message instead of the messenger. And that was my big frustration with Trump is anytime someone leveled an allegation, he made it personal and he found a way to distract attention. And so by anonymously blowing the whistle, I wanted to deprive him of that opportunity. But even that ended up being something that Donald Trump weaponized to say, see, I told you so. There’s a deep state inside the government, and they’re trying to launch a coup when in reality, all any of us were trying to do was keep the president from doing things that were illegal and unconstitutional. But because that’s fed his narrative, I felt like it was important to come out in my own name, so I could detail in very specific fashion what my allegations were. My big regret though, Michel, is that I didn’t do it sooner because to my surprise, and to my delight, in fact, when I did come forward, a lot of my peers came forward too. And I realized belatedly that what many of them needed was someone to step out there first. And I wish I had given them air cover sooner. And I’d had more time to recruit more people to turn against Donald Trump, because Joe Biden just barely beat Donald Trump and the ex-president has a very viable path back to the White House, if that’s not done again.

MARTIN: And I do want to mention that you paid a heavy personal price for that. And I do recognize, as you say, in the book that you want your focus to be on the policies and the future, and not you personally and the past. But even having said that, you paid a heavy price for that. And I — do you mind saying about what that was?

TAYLOR: What I wanted to show, folks is how bad the environments gotten. And as a consequence of speaking out against the former president, I did lose my home and I was forced to flee my home, I did lose my job in the private sector. I did lose a very serious relationship that I was in at the time. I had to spend my life savings on lawyers and protection costs. And I ended up on election night 2020 in a safe house under armed guard with a pistol under my pillow. And grappling quite frankly, Michel, with addiction issues. The pressure was so intense from the threats across the political spectrum, frankly, that I ended up doing something I never thought I’d do is I took to coping by drinking and in excess to the point that it almost cost me my life. And in a sense, I think that is a little bit of a warning. And a cautionary tale for our democracy is just like me ignoring my personal guardrails. As the pressure got worse. If we ignore our democratic guardrails, we risk self-destruction. But I also wanted to tell those personal stories because even if I was prepared for the vitriol, the public officials across this country who stand up for the right thing, local poll workers, local leaders, election officials that stood up against efforts to overturn the election, many of them and their families were not prepared, and it’s something we need to be very aware of is political intimidation and violence right now in this country are soaring.

MARTIN: There have been people who identify as progressive or has liberals — or as liberals who have engaged in terrible conduct. But the reality of it is, is that this kind of behavior is very much, much more on the right. And I just have to ask you, why do you think that is?

TAYLOR: The Republican Party that I joined, and I’m a lifelong conservative, was not like Donald Trump. It just wasn’t. It was a very, very different party. And as he took it over, the mistake many of us made was thinking that he was an aberration, and that his character defects, his proclivity towards violent rhetoric, his misogynistic, and bigoted views would not imprint themselves on the movement. But we were wrong about that. And you don’t have to take my word for it. If you go look at the data and the cross tabs in the data, GOP voters changed dramatically during the Trump years, and they became much more amenable to Donald Trump’s worldview. And that includes violence as a legitimate tool of politics.

MARTIN: And now you also say, and we’re actually — we don’t need you to rely on you for this reporting. We’ve already heard the former president say, I am your retribution, in campaign speeches. We’ve already heard him say that he would use a second term to seek retribution. And he’s also telling his supporter base that I’m getting indicted, you know, for you. What — would you just say more about that? Like, what does that mean? And what does that foretell?

TAYLOR: Well, you know, while I was writing Blowback, some of the time, I was worried that readers would think it was hyperbolic, because what ex-officials projected for the future was so grim, and so focused on the weaponization of the government. I was concerned folks might not believe it. And then, of course, once the – – this book was finished and turned in and being published through to form Donald Trump’s at the quiet part out loud, and he came out, and he’s made clear the theme of his campaign has been that a second term will be focused solely on revenge. What this book does is provide a roadmap of that retribution. It goes below that tip of the iceberg, below the waterline to spell out exactly how in a second Trump administration or the MAGA White House have a copycat, how they would go about that. And I think people need to take that very, very seriously. So when he says to his supporters, I am your retribution. We actually need to hear that Donald Trump wants them to give him a chance to exact revenge for his own partisan purposes. And that’s not how taxpayers, regardless of their political affiliation want their government to be run, as a revenge machine for one man.

MARTIN: And you offer some specific thoughts about how that is overcome. Give us some of your thoughts.

TAYLOR: Well, in the short term, I wish we had seen Congress pass more legislation to safeguard our institutions after Joe Biden became president. Now because of polarization in Washington, some of those really good bills that were introduced had no chance of success, things that would fortify inspector generals, things that would make it more difficult to install political henchmen into really important nonpartisan jobs in government. So I’m afraid that window has passed. But what we still have the ability to do in the political draft that is arrest Donald Trump’s rise in the primaries. I don’t literally mean arrest him. That is maybe something the Justice Department will end up doing, yet again, with another indictment, but separately, to stop his rise in the primaries. And I am encouraged to see some Republicans starting to speak up very vocally, Chris Christie, Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson. It remains to be seen whether their efforts to expose who Donald Trump really is will impact Republican voters. But in the long run, I think all of this rests on everyday Americans. Because I say in the book, what we’ve figured out is that the price of dissent in the United States has become very high. And surveys show that your average Americans, the moderate majority of Americans are self-censoring their political views. In other words, they’re not speaking out against the MAGA movement or Trump because they’re scared of being attacked in their communities by more extreme people with more extreme political views. We’ve got to make it easier to dissent, easier for us to share our opinions and our concern. And the only way to do that, the only way to lower the price of dissent is to increase the supply. We need more people coming forward, and we’ve all experienced it. You don’t want to upset the MAGA guy at the picnic. But if you engage in that conversation, you actually might change someone’s mind. And I think democracy depends on it.

MARTIN: Miles Taylor, thank you so much for talking with us.

TAYLOR: Thanks, Michelle.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: And just a quick correction. I earlier said that Miles Taylor was actually the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, he was its chief of staff.