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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Miles Taylor
Read between
August 2 - August 16, 2023
In truth, there were no heroes inside the Trump administration, only survivors.
If corrective action isn’t taken, the MAGA movement will reclaim the American presidency in the coming years and do irreparable damage to our democracy.
After witnessing Donald Trump’s rise, presidency, and fall up close, I now believe that the greatest threat to American democracy in this century will come from within.
In the end, I discovered that in politics, the real struggle is not us-versus-them. It is us-versus-us.
“I want a Trump inoculation plan,” House Speaker Paul Ryan demanded, making eye contact with each of us.
It wasn’t just that Trump was hostile to GOP orthodoxy; he was breathtakingly ignorant about the rule of law, the Constitution, and the democratic system.
My consolation that year was the feeling of certainty that Donald Trump would never, ever be president of the United States.
During the debate, Donald Trump angrily denied Moscow was behind ongoing interference in the 2016 election, and that the interference was even happening in the first place. Trump was lying to the American people. I knew it because I’d helped brief him on the threat days earlier.
The vodka-soaked frat culture of Capitol Hill was already making me feel disillusioned, but the state of denial in the party was worse.
Our system of government allowed an observably unqualified man to win the U.S. presidency.
The electoral guardrails that were supposed to stop someone like Donald Trump from getting elected have not been hardened to prevent a repeat.
The people who opposed Donald Trump in 2016 are either gone or converted.
A person familiar with the case believes the judge privately agreed with Maricopa County—and didn’t think there were legal grounds for an audit—but approved it anyway under pressure and fear that his family might also be targeted by the MAGA crowd if he didn’t order the county to hand over the ballots.
Tens of millions of people now believe conspiracy theories that are provably false, a reality that will shape the American political system in unknowable ways for many years to come.
An Economist/YouGov survey found that half of American Republicans now believe in core QAnon concepts,
Trump’s behavior toward Vladimir Putin vexed everyone, including Kelly, who worried we didn’t fully know whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Moscow or not.
After I started, I got “read in” on some of the issues Elizabeth had warned me about, especially the panoply of terrorist threats. It was worse than I had imagined.
“Miles, the details don’t matter to him,” he admitted. “He is the most distracted person in the world. He has no fucking clue what we’re talking about.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump was slated to meet the morning after the FBI director’s removal with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the country’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.
By midyear, I had begun to dread the meetings. We spent less time talking about international developments and more time figuring out how to fix crises of President Trump’s own making.
Trump’s shortcomings stood out particularly during emergencies.
You couldn’t write such a stupid scene in a movie, but it always got a little worse.
I felt secondhand embarrassment for the briefer in circumstances like this. He or she would stand there awkwardly waiting to get back on topic, while witnessing in person—often for the first time—how genuinely incompetent our president was.
In my interviews and conversations with former Trump officials, the most oft-repeated view was that a future MAGA administration would not be led by “the best men in the country,” as Publius hoped, but by the worst.
He wanted to host Taliban leaders—the same people who’d harbored the al Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11—on U.S. soil at Camp David for talks just days before the anniversary of the tragedy. Bolton objected strenuously. Trump cut him out of the decision-making process, tweeted the summit into existence, and fired his national security advisor soon after.
Then Trump put in motion a hasty framework for exiting Afghanistan.
“The damage Trump did in the first term is reparable,” Bolton told me. But a second MAGA administration “would do damage that is not reparable, especially in a White House surrounded by fifth-raters,” he predicted.
they were ready to force VA leaders to disrupt and even dismantle the veterans’ healthcare system without a medically competent and safe follow-on plan to implement.”
a historic number of officials—nearly thirty in four years—were placed in nonpermanent roles running cabinet agencies during the Trump administration.
he carefully shepherded a multi-month process that—surprisingly—resulted in all four agencies agreeing to a series of recommendations on how to make U.S. classrooms safer and prevent shooting tragedies like Parkland. That’s when the trouble started.
The final language on restricting firearms purchases was definitive: “Existing research does not demonstrate that laws imposing a minimum age for firearms purchases have a measurable impact on reducing homicides, suicides, or unintentional deaths.” (Emphasis added.) This is the opposite of what experts were recommending internally.
junior staffer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development had been “caught” liking a Taylor Swift post on Instagram, an issue that was elevated all the way to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows,
“The MAGA movement has paved the way for a politicized intelligence community,” added Fiona Hill,
We must urgently fortify the “deputy” guardrail of democracy. No American president should be able to pack the executive branch with unblinking loyalists and rewrite the laws of the land unilaterally.
the day he walked into the State Department office that archives gifts given to the United States by foreign leaders. “There was a bunch of young people scratching out Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s names,” he recalled. “Their job was to go through items from the last administration—cups, candlesticks, you name it—and deface them.”
No matter what assurance the HR people offered, mental health issues were still taboo for people with security clearances, so I kept the problems to myself and kept the doctor’s appointments confidential.
He had an idea: “a big, deep moat.” She muted the line. “Did he just say what I think he said?” “I want you to figure out how deep you can dig it, okay Kirstjen?” Trump proposed filling the moat with “snakes and alligators” to eat people alive if they fell into it. “How much would this cost, honey?”
The rest of us partied the night away, not knowing it was the last time Trump officials would mingle with the press at the annual gala. The president heard he’d been mocked. He later issued an order forbidding staff from attending the dinner in the future.
A president who can investigate, prosecute, and serve as his own judge is not a president at all, but a despot.
In a rare rebuke, former president Barack Obama condemned the White House for trying to “pressure the Attorney General or the FBI” to punish political opponents.
Everyone knew the piece was accurate, so there was no point in finding the writer. We were all culprits.
Trump said nothing about Russia—the bigger threat to the election—surely hoping Putin would try to help him again by boosting Republicans.
“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.”
When he decided not to endorse the New York businessman’s candidacy in 2016, Rigell was ostracized. Republican Party officials in Virginia prepared to kick him out of the GOP, and House colleagues stopped associating with him.
Of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate or House when Donald Trump was inaugurated, close to half were gone four years later.
His GOP counterparts view their jobs like professional wrestling, Swalwell said. “They think in the ring we’re supposed to hit each other over the head with chairs, but backstage we’re supposed to know it’s fake and the fans just want it.
Congress passed a budget without the billions in border funds Trump had demanded. The president had nothing to show for the debacle except for thirty-five days of political wreckage and an exhausted federal workforce.
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.
Jared agreed. Despite his flaws, the young real estate scion was one of the few reliable checks on his father-in-law, when no one else could be.