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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Miles Taylor
Read between
April 15 - May 19, 2024
Internal dissent was one of Trump’s worst fears.
Trump is a master at the politics of personal destruction,
there were no heroes inside the Trump administration, only survivors.
The public fight against Donald Trump cost me my home, my job and savings, friendships, a relationship, and my family’s security,
the danger of an American autocrat will endure beyond his life span.
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.
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.
Both Trump and Clinton were briefed on the very sensitive intelligence about Moscow’s ongoing operation. Yet Trump continued to dismiss it.
Trump knew the truth, so why was he covering for one of America’s adversaries, Vladimir Putin?
The same people who had equated Trump to an “evil force” were now giddy about the prospect of a drain-the-swamp disruptor in the White House.
Our system of government allowed an observably unqualified man to win the U.S. presidency.
Pro-Trump forces are silencing dissent and eliminating internal opposition using a three-pronged approach: threaten, defeat, and destroy.
votes had nothing to do with policy but with complete loyalty to the president.
they privately mocked Trump as “probably high on meth,”
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.”
He got another call on January 6, 2021. This time, a friend in the business community phoned to report that armed protesters had constructed a full guillotine—a wooden structure for beheading criminals—on the grounds of the Arizona state capitol. The device was meant to send a menacing signal to those who were upholding Biden’s victory.
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.
The president’s notorious reputation as a gossip made us nervous to talk about classified information.
“He is the most distracted person in the world. He has no fucking clue what we’re talking about.”
The president had given “code-word information” to the Russians, a top official familiar with the episode told the paper. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”
Trump wanted to cooperate on anti-hacking with the very same man who’d just hacked the 2016 vote in the United States. It was like agreeing to host an anger management class with a serial murderer.
We were forced to dumb down life-and-death decisions.
“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.
In other words, the VA could be a piggy bank for Donald Trump. When he interviewed candidates for the department’s top positions, he quizzed them about how they could whittle down the size of the VA and reallocate its resources. VA leaders (especially those who had served in uniform) were
former VA leader commented. “But at the end of the day, he thinks they are lazy malingerers.”
cabinet member who shared that the president’s paranoia was causing him to unravel, so much so that he wanted to spy on his immediate lieutenants. He allegedly told aides that he wanted to “tap the phones” of White House staff to find out who was leaking damaging stories about him to the media.
Trump over-hyped terrorist threats at the U.S. border and deliberately played down the danger posed by dictators he considered to be friends, despite intelligence briefings to the contrary.
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.”
