Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

by Miles Taylor

What began as a small faction within the party now commands the entirety of it. The MAGA movement—or Trumpism, which I use interchangeably—remains the fastest-growing political coalition in America, regardless of how damaged its namesake is. The coalition has been able to unify disparate groups of Republicans—Tea Party, libertarian, small business, establishment, Evangelical, and beyond. Various factions within the GOP no longer compete and balance each other out. They’ve been subordinated to Trumpism.

Several months before she was defeated in the Wyoming Republican primary, Liz Cheney told me that the fear of physical harm was working. Flanked by armed guards at a fundraiser, she said that Republican colleagues rejected Trumpism but were afraid to come forward after witnessing her experience. She was no stranger to Secret Service protection, given that her father had been vice president of the United States, but this was different. A security detail was not a mark of status for the Cheneys anymore; it was reflective of the fact that people were making violent threats against her family back in Wyoming, where she couldn’t go out in public the way she used to. Her fellow dissenters felt the same. “You know, it puts you at risk,” said Michigan congressman Fred Upton, who decided to walk away from a thirty-year career in Congress after his impeachment vote, “particularly when they threaten not only you—and I like to think I’m pretty fast—but when they threaten your spouse or your kids or whatever, that’s what really makes it frightening.” Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez decided to quit, too, confessing to receiving threats and fearing for the safety of his wife and children.

DEFINITELY ZERO SURPRISE; that is MAGAs for you!

“Now the party is putting its thumb on the scales,” he explained at the time, noting that the Arizona Republican Party was openly favoring pro-Trump figures over centrist alternatives. “Even the people who aren’t endorsed by Trump… are still falling all over themselves to be MAGA. The movement is permeating the entire party.” Is the intimidation working? I asked. He thought for a beat and looked out the window, as if expecting someone to show up when I said it. “Anyone who would dare speak the truth to these people is in danger.”

“There’s a soft totalitarianism coming into play,” Michael Steele professed. He spent two years leading the GOP as chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Modern-day conservatism meant lower taxes, less government, free markets. What we are witnessing now is a deconstruction of that.… I think the rational side is losing, if not having already lost. “For a party that’s all sensitive about the Left canceling them, they do a pretty good job of canceling their own,” he added. “That’s why the hammer came down so hard on Liz Cheney—to send a message of fear. No one wants to be targeted the way she’s been targeted, which makes this period we are in perhaps the most dangerous.”

Gods help us all ...

Trump’s shortcomings stood out particularly during emergencies. I remember briefing the president in the Oval Office on the projected storm track of an Atlantic hurricane. At first, he seemed to grasp the devastating magnitude of the Category 4 superstorm, until he opened his mouth. “Is that the direction they always spin?” the president asked me. “I’m sorry sir,” I responded, “I don’t understand.” “Hurricanes. Do they always spin like that?” He made a swirl in the air with his finger. “Counterclockwise?” I asked. He nodded. “Yes, Mr. President. It’s called the Coriolis effect. It’s the same reason toilet water spins the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere.” “Incredible,” Trump replied, squinting his eyes to look at the foam board presentation. We needed him to urge residents to evacuate from the Carolinas, where it looked like the storm would make landfall, but the president mused about another potential response. “You know, I was watching TV, and they interviewed a guy in a parking lot,” Trump leaned back and recounted. “He was wearing a red hat, a MAGA hat, and he said he was going to ‘ride it out.’ Isn’t that something? That’s what Trump supporters do. They’re tough. They ride it out. I think that’s what I’ll tell them to do.” Sometimes his irreverence could be funny, even charming. That day it wasn’t. Worried looks filled the room. A clever communications aide piped up. “Mr. President, I wouldn’t take that chance. This is going to be a pretty bad storm, and you...

Jesus Christ; well he DOES make me laugh! How utterly ridiculous!!!

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. —JAMES MADISON, FEDERALIST NO. 10, 1787

“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you.… He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster,” she emphasized. “If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any!”

A president who can investigate, prosecute, and serve as his own judge is not a president at all, but a despot. Donald Trump worked assiduously to break down the barriers between the presidency and the justice system, fiddling with every part of it along the way for personal benefit. He planned to go further in a second term, and his political movement is poised to perpetuate those tendencies, putting another democratic guardrail at risk.

Donald Trump is immoral. His leadership style is impetuous, adversarial, petty, ineffective. His behavior is erratic, anti-democratic. His own Cabinet is frightened, so much so that officials have considered invoking the Twenty Fifth Amendment.… The President is working against GOP principles. Pushing back against half-baked, ill-informed, and rash decisions is not the work of a nefarious “Deep State.” We’re a “Steady State” trying to steer the Administration right until—one way or another—it’s over.… This is about more than Trump and what he’s doing to the presidency. It’s about what he’s doing to us. He’s dividing us, destroying us. We can’t let him. We need to heed John McCain’s words and put country over party, before it’s too late.

“Among us friends, let’s be honest,” Kelly said. “About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.”

On October 18, the chief went to the Oval and unloaded on Trump, telling the president he simply didn’t have the legal authority to do what he wanted to at the border. The best option was to focus on getting Congress to reform our broken immigration system. Trump was unmoved. If his people were going to defy him, he’d empower new ones. The president tapped his son-in-law to take on immigration. Jared was in charge, Trump said. Kirstjen and I were sitting in Kelly’s office when the chief came back from down the hall. I’d never seen him so mad. “Fuck him,” Kelly roared. “I’m done here. I’m leaving, going home, and quitting this job.” He walked into the hallway to tell his Secret Service agents to get his motorcade ready. “I quit.” Back in the office again for a brief moment—briefcase in hand—Kelly picked up the phone and got Jared on the line. “POTUS says you’ve got it figured out. So fuck you. It’s on you now, Jared. I’m out.” He slammed the phone. With that, Kelly left the West Wing.

A day later, I woke up to an encrypted message from Jim Dao. The New York Times editor who published my anonymous essay had sent me a link. It was an article written by Bret Stephens, entitled “Dear Anonymous Inside the Trump Administration.” The open letter was addressed to the still-masked author. “You… believed that your efforts to resist Trump were often successful,” he wrote. “On foreign policy, you noted, the Administration’s policies were far more sober and serious than the President’s reckless rhetoric. You were wrong. This week proves it.… You must know by now that you are no longer keeping a bad thing from getting worse. All you are doing is disguising how bad it is, thereby helping it to become worse.” Stephens closed with an exhortation. “Trump will never have trouble surrounding himself with ambitious and unscrupulous flunkies. Do you want that to describe you? Get out while you still can, whoever you are.”

“Article One is pretty well undone,” former Republican congressman Reid Ribble told me. In a second MAGA term, he said, “it will be undone entirely.” Ribble doesn’t believe it will happen in a sweeping constitutional clash but quietly and gradually. Members of the GOP will grow accustomed to another Trump-like president governing by executive order. “They will allow [the Next Trump] to become a soft dictator by complying with his legislative circumvention because it’s in the service of implementing policies of which they approve,” he said. “It slowly normalizes legislative nullification.”

Sig Sauer P365, the perfect concealed weapon. That’s what I did. The thin, lightweight pistol held ten rounds and boasted a tritium night sight that allowed it to be aimed with deadly accuracy even in the dark. I needed a refresher on how to shoot.

The next week, Trump called again to submit more instructions about the design of the border wall (which had long since been designed). In a rambling conversation, he told us to paint the wall “matte black”—he didn’t want it shiny—and complained that the contractors building it were “filthy fucking rich, having lunch with each other every week and deciding how they are going to divvy it all up.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. We muted him for most of the rant. Painting and repainting the border wall was the conversational equivalent of Trump’s pre-naptime coloring book. We would let him go and go, until he wore himself out.

Hold on, I thought. We’re going to tell Texas ranchers not to use the gates, borrow fire trucks instead, lean the ladders against the border wall, walk their cattle up the ladders (and over the other side, somehow?), let the animals drink from the river for a little bit, and then hoist them back over?

The afternoon of March 15, we returned for another immigration meeting. The Oval Office lights were off. “Oooh.” The president smiled as he entered. “Dark in here. Kind of sexy.” As he settled into his chair behind the desk, Trump told us he wanted to get creative with immigration policy. In particular, he wanted us to revisit the travel ban. He was still fuming that we’d convinced him to pare it back, and thought the latest iteration was “too watered down.” “We just need more countries,” Trump insisted. “We need to ban more countries, okay?” There was a process, I told him. The Supreme Court had only upheld the limited travel restrictions because they were designed by career officials after an impartial review based on intelligence community threat assessments, not politics. We needed to defer to the experts. Stephen Miller corrected me, noting that the president had the ultimate say and could overrule his agencies. Trump preferred Miller’s analysis. “Imagine the headlines!” the president mused. “ ‘Trump’s Newest Travel Ban’—it will be beautiful.” He told us to come up with a bigger list of countries. I dutifully documented the order in my notebook, along with a doodle of a man (me) jumping off of a three-dimensional box. The president went back to his greatest hits—“a big, big border wall!” “cut off the cash!” “screw the Mexicans!”—and we sat there listening to the diatribe that had begun to sound like a Broadway sing-a-long from hell. We left without any clear direction...

I chose to say nothing. Enough years in Washington had taught me that if you extend a hand to a pitchfork mob, they’ll eventually try to take your head. Just as important, I wasn’t going to let this be the moment I came out against Trump, disrupting my plans.

If you listen to the intellectual architects of the MAGA movement, openness is the enemy. The postwar focus on free trade, open travel, and political integration have created “the forgotten man.” Globalization has left working-class people behind and made Western nations soft. Manufacturing jobs have vanished, stolen away by developing nations. Immigrants have flooded democracies, undoing a white Judeo-Christian culture, and institutions like the European Union have weakened the West. The myth conveniently ignores crucial facts. In the same period, the West saw an explosion in economic prosperity (GDP per capita soared year over year), unprecedented levels of security (armed conflict among democracies declined), and a surge in political freedom (democracies went from a minority of the world to the majority of nations). Regardless, pro-Trump forces want to turn back the clock. They are urging U.S. allies to embrace anti-immigrant policies and economic protectionism, from Britain and France to Hungary and Italy. A select group of foreign leaders are eager to see this happen. They want the United States and its allies to retreat, put up their walls, and look inward. Those observers are not our friends.

People around the country reached out to say thank you after my video and op-ed were released, from everyday voters and small business owners to celebrities. Actor Ben Stiller sent his praise. Jennifer Aniston posted a supportive message on Instagram. One of my childhood idols—Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself!—sent a note of gratitude. I’ve forgotten most of it. Positive memories seem to wane like sun-faded posters, while negative ones are chiseled in marble. Your brain reminds you of them again… and again… and again. That’s what mine did anyway, as political operatives and social-media trolls combed through my personal life and sought out anyone who might have something bad to say about me.

“I don’t know how he’s not in an institution somewhere, whether it’s jail or a nuthouse,” Kelly vented about Trump. “But he’s a seriously sick guy. I never heard him saying anything that wasn’t a lie.”

“Nothing would please me more than if he chained himself to the Resolute desk, and they have to go in and cut the chains and carry him away in a straitjacket,” he mused, only half joking. His premonition was eerily close to what would be the reality. I told him I’d keep him updated on our efforts.

“The depth of his dishonesty is just astounding to me,” John Kelly was quoted as saying about the president. “The transactional nature of every relationship, though, it’s more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death,” he opened. “Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”