On Monday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first term warned that the latest administration shake-up will bring a new level of "chaos." According to Miles Taylor – who spent two years as Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Homeland Security – Stephen Miller’s ascension to White House Chief of Staff means that the president’s longtime advisor now has the power to advance the “shock-and-awe blitz” he’s been pushing for a decade.
According to Taylor, the danger arises out of the confluence of a few post-midterm occurrences. First, there are the threats Trump began posting to social media over the weekend, in which he ramped up election denial claims and announced that he’d ordered the Justice Department to investigate Democrats who were seeking to investigate his Cabinet. On Sunday, Attorney General Todd Blanche went on CNN and poured gas on the fire, making statements suggesting that the investigation and prosecution of opponents in Congress could be on the way. What’s more, another report by the Atlantic revealed that the White House and DOJ have been discussing jailing journalists to force them to give up their sources. All of this is particularly worrisome in the context of Miller’s new role. According to Taylor, former Chief of Staff Susie Wiles objected to these plans, while Miller was all for it, and his promotion is a clear sign of whose approach Trump favors.
With this in mind, Taylor warns that having spent over two years working alongside Miller, “his selection for the job is among the most dangerous, foolish, and self-defeating actions we’ve ever seen an American president take.” While other officials at the time understood how lawless Trump is and would push back against him, “Stephen, on the other hand, was the one person in Trump’s orbit I never once heard criticize him. Not because he was blind to it. But because Trump was the vehicle for Stephen’s agenda.”
“I vividly remember an Oval Office meeting one afternoon with Trump, Stephen, and a handful of us inside the administration,” recalls Taylor. “The president had just lost a ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was furious, and he said — in front of the whole room — that he wanted to eliminate the people ruling against him. ‘We need to get rid of the judges,’ he declared, pounding his fist on the desk. ‘They are ruining this.’ Most people in that type of situation would find a diplomatic way to let the moment pass. To not take the president seriously. Instead, Stephen replied: ‘Yes sir, a country without judges would help.’”
According to Taylor, those who have worked with Miller in the White House know that “he’s not a stabilizer in that building. He’s an accelerant of the president’s absolute worst impulses. Before I quit the first Trump administration, Stephen showed me a locked drawer in his office on the second floor of the West Wing. In it, he said, were draft executive orders written for a second term, each designed to test the outer limits of presidential power and to get those tests to the Supreme Court as fast as possible. It would be a ‘shock-and-awe blitz,’ he grinned.”
Already in the second term, notes Taylor, the administration has deployed the National Guard in U.S. cities, attempted to end birthright citizenship by decree, impounded money appropriated by Congress, fired inspectors general and civil servants by the thousands, and openly discussed invoking the Insurrection Act. Miller himself has spoken about suspending habeas corpus. ANd now, with Miller running the West Wing, warns Taylor, we’ll likely see the president double down on seeking revenge against his enemies, abandon Ukraine and force a settlement with Russia, pull back from NATO, if not withdraw entirely, and let all of his agencies be personally micromanaged by his MAGA-obsessed Chief of Staff. As Taylor concludes, “Stephen’s ‘locked drawer’ is now open, and there’s no one standing in between him and the president. So Americans can expect serious confrontation, not course correction, from the Trump administration — the likes of which we’ve never seen.”