In a normal presidential administration, the kooks get corralled far away from the president’s ear so they can do the least damage and annoy the minimum amount of serious people. But that was in other more responsible administrations, said Miles Taylor, President Donald Trump’s first-term whistleblower.

“In my two-and-a-half years inside the first Trump administration, I saw how ideas … traveled,” Taylor wrote on his Defiance website. “In a normal administration, layers of lawyers and advisors weed out wacky notions before they get to the president. In Trump world, it happens the other way around. He ‘mainlines’ recommendations from quacks — who go straight to him with their off-the-wall, unconstitutional, and impossible ideas — then dumps them onto his advisors.”

He added that “back then, a great deal of your government’s time was spent chasing those absurdities away, before they became reality. Now, his team chases them into reality.”

The latest nut pile on the menu appears to be a plan by 80-year-old Florida lawyer and Trump friend Peter Ticktin, who is pushing Trump to place the fall midterms under federal control. Taylor said Ticktin helped draft a 17-page executive order justifying the emergency on the grounds of foreign interference in electronic voting machines, despite that “interference” not being found credible by a joint Justice Department and Homeland Security review. Indeed, U.S. intelligence found that no foreign government altered a single vote.

Nevertheless, Taylor said the order is being taken seriously because that’s what happens in a Trump Quack Cabinet.

“I call it the Quack Cabinet. Donald Trump has always kept an informal shadow council of true believers, conspiracy peddlers, and grievance merchants who get his ear because they know how to work the man,” said Taylor. “Flattery. Sensationalism. And more flattery. Lou Dobbs was like this. The conservative commentator and Fox News anchor would fawn over Trump on his show and, simultaneously, churn out conspiracy theories knowing the president was watching and would gulp it all up. It got so bad that we dubbed Lou the White House ‘deputy chief of staff.’ Trump would see a kooky thing Lou said on television, call one of us up in the middle of the night, and demand that it be investigated or pursued.”

The Quack Cabinet is not interested in the truth, Taylor said. It consists of “ill-informed people” interested in spectacle and power.

“For that reason, they don’t tell Trump what he needs to hear; they tell him what he wants to hear. That keeps them in the inner circle. And it also creates an echo chamber of country-wrecking ideas. Arrest the RINOs! Ignore the judges! Seize Greenland! Build the ballroom! Deport the Democrats! These ‘cabinet’ members hold no offices and pass no background checks, but they have a better legislative record than most U.S. senators, because their ideas keep becoming policy,” said Taylor.

“If you doubt the danger here, consider three facts: Ticktin was in the Oval Office last week, seated beside Tina Peters, the former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of breaching her own voting systems and who walked free after Trump pressured Colorado’s governor into a commutation,” Taylor pointed out. “Sources told ABC News, months ago, that Trump had personally reviewed versions of the draft order and discussed it with those involved. And the president has already signed an executive order attacking mail-in voting and voter registration, which felt like it was plucked straight from these conversations.”

Yes, the White House waves the threat of the nutjobs away by saying Ticktin “overstates” his influence, but Taylor said Trump officials say the same thing “about every crank whose proposal later appeared over the president’s signature.”

“Having sat in those rooms, I can tell you the distance between ‘the president has never heard of it’ and ‘the president signed it this morning’ is way, way shorter than most Americans can imagine,” said Taylor.

President Donald Trump is preparing to release classified intelligence documents he claims will reveal “irregularities” in American elections address during the election he lost in 2020. But Trump’s former intelligence analyst Miles Taylor says it’s all going to be bunk. And Taylor should know — he helped scoop it.

“I know what’s in that well of information [Trump’s] drawing from, because I helped dig it. During Donald Trump’s first term, I worked on election protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), helping to stand up the administration’s response to historic Russian interference in 2016. We built an entire, government-wide response system — intelligence analysts, cyber defenders, and law enforcement agents — who were full-time focused on stopping any such attack from happening again,” Taylor said on his Defiance website. “And I can tell you now, before Trump says a single word, he’s full of s——.”

“Pardon my language. But I’m virtually certain that whatever he presents on Thursday, it will be twice-warmed leftovers of information, cherry-picked and recast to tell a story our intelligence agencies never told because it was never true,” added Taylor. “

What actually happened in 2020 when it came to foreign interference, said Taylor was that America’s adversaries did try to meddle in U.S. elections during Trump’s first term and his his re-election. This included Russia, Iran, and China. Taylor says “we knew it, we tracked it, and the U.S. government declassified much of that information years ago.” But Trump’s agencies were unanimous on the crucial point that none of that tampering changed votes in either 2018 or 2020.

Trump’s own cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history,” putting him in the way of Trump’s Big Lie that someone stole victory from Trump. For that, Taylor said Trump fired him by tweet.

“Trump never wanted election security,” said Taylor. “He wanted selective election security.”

In 2018, ahead of the midterms, Taylor and his co-workers briefed Trump on the fact that multiple countries were planned to interfere, but Trump was only uninterested in exposing any country that wanted to interfere in ways that would help Democrats, specifically China.

“And wouldn’t you know it — that September, Trump stood before the UN General Assembly and delivered sweeping warnings about Chinese interference. Yet he said next to nothing about Russia, the country that had actually run a sophisticated operation to help him in 2016 and was gearing up to do it again,” said Taylor. “We were gobsmacked. So were Members of Congress briefed on the same intelligence. … Inside the national security community, the conclusion was as obvious as it was appalling. Trump welcomed foreign interference when it helped him and opposed it when the threat actors seemed eager to hurt his chances.”

So when Trump resurrects old news about Chinese meddling Thursday and “inflates them into proof” that 2020 was stolen from him, Taylor said remember that he’s only recycling intelligence he cherry-picked for political convenience eight years ago.

“If this evidence were real, Trump himself had the power to declassify all of it before leaving office in January 2021,” said Taylor. “He didn’t … because it doesn’t say what he’ll claim it says … and proof doesn’t exist.”

Meanwhile, Taylor said Trump has installed loyalists over the DNI, DOJ, and FBI, and his crew is mounting a “whole-of-government campaign to sow doubt about the vote that it fears it will lose.”

On June 25, the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft — a $69 million exhibit underneath the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC — opened. The exhibit features rare artifacts, including copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the U.S. Constitution's 13th Amendment. And according to City Cast DC reporter Emma Uber, the historic treasures are in danger because of excessive heat.

"The documents — treasured turning points in the nation's effort to end slavery — date back to the 1860s and are worth millions," Uber reports in City Cast DC. "But three National Park Service employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, described a facility with faulty security measures. Notably, the employees said, the Park Service has struggled to maintain proper conditions for its rare and delicate documents. Screens designed to shield the records from harsh light have been defective, and temperatures inside the display case have repeatedly reached more than 80 degrees (Fahrenheit), according to the Park Service officials. Experts say that's a violation of professional standards for housing historic documents and hot enough to accelerate decay."

According to Katie Lowe of the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, historic documents from the 19th Century should never be exposed to temperatures higher than 75F — especially if there is high humidity.

Lowe told City Cast DC, "Decay is a chemical process, and when you introduce heat you accelerate chemical processes."

Uber notes that according to the National Archives' website should be stored at temperatures under 75F to "slow the rate of chemical decay and reduce insect activity." And the Northeast Document Conservation Center recommends temperatures between 64F and 72F degrees for storing important documents.

Highlighting her article on X, Uber notes, "Less than a month after the opening of a $69 million exhibit beneath the Lincoln Memorial, Park Service officials are raising alarm bells .... It's the latest in a string of troubles involving upgrades to the National Mall as part of America's 250th birthday celebrations. An NPS spokesperson told me the documents are being properly cared for. They did not answer when I asked why there was a fan pointed toward the display case. "

The historic artifacts in the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft, according to Uber, are "on loan from hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin through June 2027."

Lowe told City Cast DC, "A year is certainly enough time for damage to occur."

President Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff, Miles Taylor, is mocking the Republican’s current press secretary for a gaffe that arguably symbolizes the administration’s larger seeming ineptitude.

Reflecting on how Karoline Leavitt said that what Trump reveals tonight "will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president,” Miles Taylor quipped that “yes, and if your ears watch closely, you'll be doubly stunned.”

This is not Leavitt’s first faux pas. Earlier this month, while speaking with Fox News journalist Jesse Watters, the 27-year-old — who achieved her wealth by marrying a New Hampshire real estate developer who is 32 years older than her — expressed scorn for members of Generation Z that she claimed have turned to left-wing politics because they are supposedly entitled.

“My generation — I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me —have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them,” Leavitt told Watters. She described Generation Z as being fueled by “laziness and the liberal indoctrination” and suggested that they be sent to fight Trump’s war against Iran and threatened war against Cuba.

Similarly, Leavitt was heavily criticized last year for justifying the administration’s revisions of jobs data so as to imply that the American economy was performing better than was actually the case.

“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said during a press conference. “We want to ensure that all of the data ... coming out of the BLS is trustworthy and is accurate, which is why the president has restored new leadership at the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”

This reporter has also interacted with Leavitt while she made inaccurate or stylistically questionable statements. When asked about evidence that Trump’s ongoing Iran war is failing, Leavitt told AlterNet in May that he had in fact succeeded.

“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”

Similarly, speaking to this journalist shortly after the second assassination attempt against Trump in 2024, Leavitt complained that a historian with whom he spoke compared Trump’s ongoing violent rhetoric and vilification of leaders who disagree with him to the actions of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler,” Leavitt told this reporter. “It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

President Donald Trump reignited the ire the world over with his recent meddling in the World Cup, but according to his one-time first-term whistleblower, the scandal exposes a fundamental truth about Trump's worldview that he saw firsthand in the White House.

Earlier this week, FIFA overruled a suspension for the U.S. Men's National Team's star striker, Folarin Balogun, allowing him to take part in a much-anticipated round of 16 match against Belgium. Without Balogun, many observers gave the U.S. even worse odds than usual to win the match.

The USMT ultimately lost, but not after becoming embroiled in scandal after Trump claimed to have called FIFA leaders about their call against the striker. While Trump claimed that he only asked for a review, speculation soon ran rampant that he had exerted pressure to reverse the suspension, a damning accusation of the sort of corruption that the organization has dealt with for decades.

Miles Taylor previously worked in Trump's first-term Department of Homeland Security and became famous for an initially anonymous New York Times op-ed where he criticized the administration from within. In a Tuesday piece published by The i Paper, Taylor said that the situation had cost the U.S. "decades of hard-fought credibility," and argued that "the moment a head of state phones the head of world football trying to push for special treatment for his own team’s star player, and a favourable ruling follows within hours, the belief in impartiality dies instantly."

Overall, however, Taylor said that the situation playing out as it did was not a surprise to him, as he had witnessed similar disdain for judges, the "referees of our democracy," in Trump's White House, which he called "a pattern too obvious to ignore."

"Trump would intimidate them publicly on social media, work the higher-ups privately, and when the rulings still went against him, attack the legitimacy of the refs’ robes," Taylor wrote. "I vividly remember one such Oval Office meeting. The sky was dark outside as a half dozen of us sat on the couches in front of the Resolute desk, listening to Trump complain that the courts were making him look weak politically. They were striking down his orders left and right, and no one was giving him good ideas to fix the problem. 'We need to get rid of the judges,' the President declared, pounding a fist on the desk. He was particularly angry at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for reversing his decisions. 'They are ruining this.'”

He continued later: "A man who thinks that way about federal judges was never going to think differently about a FIFA disciplinary panel. FIFA simply proved easier to move than the American judiciary. This time, the referees folded."

The New York Times reports President Donald Trump’s love of no-bid contracts with connected contractors and flunkies have ruined another Washington, DC., project, this time at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Whistleblowers say renovations at the center “were rushed to meet the deadlines driven by the president’s desire to host official events at the center [and] federal contracting laws and regulations were ignored.”

In one case cited in Congressional internal documents a new bathroom floor in one of the center’s three presidential boxes was ordered torn up last year and redone after the White House complained about the beige color of the tiles.

“The 82-page submission to Congress was made under a law designed to protect federal employees who disclose allegations of wrongdoing from retaliation. The lawyers who sent it, David Seide and Dana Gold, work for a nonprofit that represents government whistle-blowers,” reports the Times. “ … Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center on Thursday demanding information related to the renovations. Mr. Whitehouse, an ex officio member of the center’s board, said the submission raised ‘serious questions’ about whether public funds were being spent properly.”

No-contract painting was done by Cypress Painting Systems, a company in Maryland that has done work under prior administrations. But lawyers for the former project managers reported that the work began before any contract had been awarded, said the Times. Cypress Painting also installed Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center’s marble facade, under a separate arrangement, before his name was ordered removed by a federal judge.

The Kennedy Center whistleblower complaint is part of a broader pattern of concerns about the Trump administration's contracting practices across federal projects. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool project, for example, has been carried out through multiple no-bid contracts, with administration officials justifying the bypassing of competitive bidding by claiming deadlines tied to the nation's 250th birthday celebrations were critical.

The Kennedy Center adopted a new procurement policy in November 2025 that exempts the institution from federal contracting regulations it previously followed as a nonprofit on federal property. The relaxed policy allows sole-source contracts when "circumstances beyond the center's control require an immediate award" or when "the requirement is unique or has a compelling business interest"—standards critics argue are dangerously vague and lack meaningful oversight.

The whistleblower submission also raises questions about potential favoritism. Representatives of Low Country Flooring, the South Carolina company selected without competition for a five-year, $8 million flooring contract, posted photos on Facebook showing themselves praying with Trump at the Kennedy Center before being selected for the lucrative deal. One company official commented on the image: "He asked, and the president said of course.

The Kennedy Center maintains it followed proper procedures and conducted exhaustive market research before vendor selection.

President Donald Trump has significantly boosted AI throughout his second term — and a whistleblower confirms that major economic bubble is about to burst, and take many Americans' fortunes with it.

“We've spent something like $1.4 trillion dollars building data centers in this country, and the revenues on AI are $600 billion,” said Alexis Goldstein, a former financial regulatory expert for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Maryland Democratic congressional candidate to The Left Hook’s Wajahat Ali on Thursday. “So the tech industry has earned not even half of what they've spent building these data centers.”

Goldstein then compared the AI bubble to the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession.

“If you remember the 2008 financial crisis, the asset at the back of all that complicated financial engineering was a house, and the saying was, ‘Well, you'll always have the house, and so it will always have some value,’” Goldstein told Ali. “And that turned out not to be true, because there was just such an oversaturation and so much predatory lending — not every house did end up having value.”

She added, “So what do you want to guess the asset is behind the financial engineering right now, building out these data centers? I'll give you a hint: it's not a house. What is it? It's the graphics card that they fill up these data centers with to run all of these large language models — the Nvidia graphics card that they're using to do all of this ChatGPT generation, predicting something that sounds kind of like something you might say in the future, or helping you produce a piece of artwork like a Pikachu blowing bubbles at the Apple logo, or whatever it is that you use ChatGPT for. It's these graphics cards that get obsolete really fast. They're taking an accounting tax break over six years, but these graphics cards last two to three years max, and then they either burn out or they become obsolete.”

Because AI technology is so unsustainable, Goldstein argued that AI tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg are engaged in billions of borrowing in order to keep building their investment. Despite their massive investment, however, few people are paying for AI, and when they do — such as the military-industrial complex that bombed an Iranian school — they tend to find it less effective than promised.

“Nobody is paying for this except the military, and when the military is paying for it, it is creating lethal, horrible consequences,” Goldstein said. “There is a lot of reporting on this in the financial press, though less of it has made its way to the mainstream press. But I think we're seeing that the public sort of gets it. The data centers raise utility bills. They often pay very little in local taxes. They can lead to bad health outcomes. I visited one in Maryland's 6th district, in Adamstown, and it actually smells bad, in addition to everything else.”

She continued, “So the public is saying, ‘We don't want these.’ You see executives at graduation ceremonies talking about AI being the future, and they get booed by the students. The public, I think, is very informed about this. The people who aren't informed — and unfortunately this is common — is Congress. It's sort of like in 2008, when the people on the ground were saying, ‘Well, this is kind of crazy. This mortgage thing seems to be going out of control. My friends seem to be getting really predatory mortgage loans, or cash-out on their houses, especially in communities of color — this seems really messed up.’ And Congress, of course, was the last to know, and then the crisis happened and there was so much money lost in the economy.

So I'm really afraid that this is all that over again.”

Speaking to this author for Democracy at Work in 2025, linguist Emily Bender discussed a book she co-authored with sociologist Alex Hanna called “The AI Con.” In it, she explained that AI does not do all of the things that the corporations that promote it say it can do.

“We call the book ‘The AI Con’ because there's a con happening here and it's happening at many levels,” Bender explained. “At the base, you have what's effectively a parlor trick, the systems that everyone's excited about. Right now, the large language models or chatbots are systems designed to do exactly one thing, which is to output plausible looking text. They mimic the way we use language.”

In a December article, The Conversation pointed out that philosopher Karl Marx actually broke down the same dynamics that are at play with the AI boom.

“Marx argued that an economy becomes unstable when the mass of accumulated capital can no longer be profitably reinvested,” The Conversation observed. “An overproduction of capital, he explained, occurs whenever additional investment fails to generate new surplus value. When surplus capital cannot profitably be absorbed through the production of goods, it is displaced into speculative outlets.”

President Donald Trump may think he’s found a Trojan horse to seize the midterms, but security expert Miles Taylor says that horse isn’t riding off anytime soon.

Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted to election administration at a moment when the president is working to warp federal voting rules. And Taylor said a captured EAC could conceivably begin Trump’s dirty work under the direction of anti-democratic loyalists the White House plans to parachute into the commission.

“What’s more, they could rewrite state-specific instructions on the voter forms to create registration traps and onerous requirements, confusing instructions, translation issues, and on and on,” Taylor reasoned. “Surely, the sycophants in Trump’s orbit are thinking of other evil ways to manipulate the EAC’s powers to steer the elections in Trump’s favor.”

“[But] here’s where I get to tell you why their plan is doomed,” Taylor added. “And it isn’t because I’m a cock-eyed optimist. It’s because a lot of very good lawyers out there are prepared to tear Trump’s plan to shreds.”

Taylor, who worked in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security in his first administration before becoming a whistleblower to the administration abuse, said Trump must get the replacements confirmed by the Senate or install legally dubious “acting” appointments. And lawsuits are waiting for him as soon as he tries to circumvent requirements.

Furthermore, whatever changes Trump makes to the EAC doesn’t mean they can just start tampering with voter registration forms because the forms are protected by law. When former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach attempted to force citizenship documents onto the form a decade ago, Taylor said the Tenth Circuit shut him down, and the Supreme Court backed that decision up.

“Third, agencies can’t just flip on a dime,” said Taylor. “Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an abrupt reversal of decades of an agency’s position — especially with no clear evidence of the ‘voter fraud’ it purports to solve — is the textbook definition of ‘arbitrary and capricious. Courts have thrown out far less blatant reversals.”

Courts have already rejected Trump’s other bids to unilaterally implement new restrictions. A federal judge in Washington permanently blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order and its proof-of-citizenship mandate. And just two weeks ago, another federal court destroyed it in a suit brought by nineteen states. The judiciary, said Taylor, isn’t “rolling over to let Trump hijack voting in America.”

“Also, for what it’s worth, the plaintiffs are ready,” said Taylor. “I suspect lawsuits are being drafted as I write this. … groups … are probably preparing legal briefs this very morning. I know state attorneys general are gearing up, too. When I say that we’re better prepared for these types of anti-democratic shenanigans than we were the last time, this is what I mean.”

“Trump may think he found a Trojan horse. What he actually found is a trap of his own making. Every action he tries to take to abuse the EAC will be met with resistance and tie him up in litigation as the clock ticks to November,” Taylor added.