Miles Taylor says Donald Trump can win: The former Trump Administration official, who wrote an anonymous book trashing the former president, is now warning that Trump could win again
Donald Trump: Winning in 2024?
Miles Taylor was a relatively little-known national security expert who served in Republican administrations, including some time as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security between 2017 and 2019.
In 2018, he wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times with the title “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” in which he argued that Trump was unfit to be president. This was later followed by a book called “A Warning.” The op-ed led Trump to accuse the then-anonymous author of “treason,” and to demand the newspaper unmask him.
This led to much argument about the identity of the author, with many speculating that it was someone better known than Taylor. Taylor went on to come forward under his own name in October of 2020, when he was in his early 30s. He announced in 2022 that he was leaving the Republican Party.
Now, Taylor is back with another new book, called “Blowback: A Warning to Save America From the Next Trump,” and is warning that Trump could return to the presidency. And he’s discussing all that in a new interview in The Guardian.
In the new book, because it was written under his own name, Taylor goes a bit more into autobiography. And he also talks about the reactions he’s received from his past anti-Trump writing.
“It’s been my experience the past couple of years that when someone notices you and they come over and say, ‘Are you such and such person?’, you don’t know if that’s going to be someone who says thank you for what you did or someone spits in your face and tries to punch you. So yeah, I try to lower my voice in public,” Taylor told the Guardian.
He also went into his decision to come forward, which followed a period of stress that led him to overindulge in alcohol and prescription drugs.
“The people who most needed to come forward and tell the truth were cowed into silence, including me. I thought anonymously sounding the alarm about the president would draw attention to the message instead of the messenger and always intended to unveil myself,” Taylor told the Guardian. “But in the aftermath I realised I really should have done that a lot sooner both for political reasons and personal reasons.”
That disclosure led to personal attacks and threats, and even to a near suicide attempt, Taylor told the newspaper.
“The public fight against Donald Trump cost me my home, my job and savings, friendships, a relationship, and my family’s security, temporarily putting me on the run,” he said. “Late one evening in a Virginia high-rise, it also nearly cost me my life.”
Now, Taylor has a warning for America, ahead of the 2024 election.
“The flirtation with putting another hyper-populist far-right person in the White House is effectively civic suicidal ideation,” he told The Guardian. “In the course of writing this, the personal guardrails being ripped off in my life looked an awful lot like what’s happening right now where our collective silence, at least in the Republican party, about this guy is leading us potentially towards self-destruction.”
Taylor also claimed to have spoken to many Republicans who have told him privately that Trump is dangerous and can’t be trusted, but are not able to say the same thing in public.
“Some of the people who were incredibly critical of me for publishing anonymous critiques of the president are the same people who when I interviewed them, asked that I not use their names so that they could speak candidly. They asked if they could be anonymous in the book. You can’t even make that **** up: that’s insane hypocrisy,” he says.
Taylor also says in the book that Trump aide Stephen Miller once proposed using drones to attack migrants. And he accused Trump of speaking in sexual terms about his own daughter, Ivanka.
He also warned that, polls notwithstanding, Trump can win again.
“There’s been a number of polls that show the ex-president beating Joe Biden by several points. It would be hubris to say, ‘Oh, no, we would beat him again a second time.’ Actually, I don’t think that. If the election was held today, I think Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, and that really concerns me.”
Author Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
