'Seriously great danger': Ex-DHS official lays out Trump’s 2024 authoritarian threat

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times anonymously published an op-ed headlined "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" — which was written from the perspective of a conservative Republican who considered then-President Donald Trump a threat to the United States yet stayed in his administration in the hope of mitigating the damage. Subsequently, in November 2019, an entire book by "Anonymous," was published; by that time, he had left Trump's administration.

In 2020, Miles Taylor — who had served as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's chief of staff under Trump — revealed that he was "Anonymous." And despite his conservative views, Taylor made it clear that he would be voting for now-President Joe Biden.

Three years later, Taylor is still sounding the alarm about Trump and the MAGA movement in his new book, "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump." The ex-DHS official discussed the book and the authoritarian threat the U.S. is facing in an interview with The Guardian published on July 18.

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Taylor told The Guardian, "The people who most needed to come forward and tell the truth were cowed into silence, including me. I thought anonymously sounding the alarm about the president would draw attention to the message instead of the messenger and always intended to unveil myself. But in the aftermath, I realized I really should have done that a lot sooner both for political reasons and personal reasons."

In "Blowback," Taylor reveals that because of the stress he experienced from 2018-2020, he turned to substance abuse and suffered severe depression. On Election Night 2020, he was contemplating suicide.

Taylor laments that "the leading figures of the Republican Party" still "refuse to repudiate this man and continue to support him."

The former DHS official told The Guardian, "We are doing this again, even though those people say privately he's a threat…. (House Speaker Kevin McCarthy) thought Trump was a buffoon and a danger, and I'm sure Kevin still thinks that privately. Those people publicly, because they're afraid, are still supporting the man. That collective anonymity is putting us in pretty seriously great danger."

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Taylor vehemently disagrees with pundits who say that Trump is unelectable in 2024 and warns that "Trump 2.0" will be even more dangerous than his January 2017-January 2021 term if he becomes the GOP nominee and defeats Biden in the general election. The non-MAGA conservative proposes a "unity coalition" for 2024 and suggests that perhaps Biden should do something that would shock a lot of Democrats: replace Vice President Kamala Harris with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) as his running mate.

Taylor told The Guardian, "There's been a number of polls that show the ex-president beating Joe Biden by several points. It would be hubris to say, 'Oh, no, we would beat him again a second time.' Actually, I don't think that. If the election was held today, I think Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden, and that really concerns me."

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Read The Guardian's full interview with Miles Taylor at this link.