President Donald Trump’s latest flailing efforts at “revenge” are becoming increasingly desperate and self-defeating for two reasons: his enemies have learned to fight back, and he knows his own downfall is near. This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in Homeland Security during Trump’s first term and famously leaked White House secrets, who on Friday explained why the president is “genuinely terrified” as his power diminishes and the prospect of consequences looms.
“This week, it became clearer than ever that Trump’s victims are no longer coming to the negotiating table. They’re flipping the table over,” writes Taylor, asserting that, “Nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back… Something remarkable tends to happen the moment a target stands their ground. Trump starts to come apart. He overcorrects. He crashes the clown car into the median. And when it’s all said and done, he defeats himself.”
Here Taylor cites the example of “Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump has twice tried to fire on trumped-up mortgage fraud claims.” As Taylor explains, Cook “didn’t resign quietly. She sued, won at the Supreme Court, and this week her lawyers answered his second removal attempt by pointing out that Trump himself (along with his Treasury secretary and his attorney general) signed the very same kind of contradictory ‘primary residence’ mortgage paperwork he claims makes her unfit to serve. ‘Surely the President does not believe himself “unfit for office,”’ her counsel wrote. Trump reached for a weapon and basically handed it to his target.”
Institutions are learning to do the same. According to Taylor, “When military news publication Stars and Stripes broke the story of the mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Pentagon’s response was to move to fire the paper’s leadership and seize control of a newsroom that has served American troops since the Civil War. But the journalists didn’t throw in the towel. This week, they sued on First Amendment grounds, and in the process, they basically ensured that the story about the USS Lincoln and the administration’s censorship campaign will continue to get a thousand times more attention than if the Pentagon had let it go.”
Finally, Taylor notes that entire nations have learned to fight back. While many used to court him with flattery, that habit is being broken. As Taylor writes, Canada has been dealing with Trump’s threats and tariffs for his entire presidency, but “this week, Ottawa decided they’d had enough. They called Trump’s bluff, slapping counter-tariffs on twenty billion dollars’ worth of American goods.”
“Trump’s flailing and petulant response? He signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario ‘Lake America.’ If he thought cartography revisions would somehow get his leverage back, he was wrong.” According to Taylor, “Even the map companies were ready to defy him. ‘We’re not changing it,’ wrote the company MapQuest on social media, pasting a map screenshot of Lake Ontario with the body of water renamed Lake Are We Doing This Again?. ‘Name it whatever you want at your leisure.’ The clown car has hit the median. Again.”
Previously, Trump was emboldened as his early-term targets capitulated to him one after another. “No longer. The targets have enrolled in ‘revenge studies,’” writes Taylor. “And now that they’ve figured him out, Trump is genuinely terrified.” Taylor asserts that there is clear evidence of this, noting a story that emerged this week.
“Jared Kushner requested a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries,” explains Taylor, “ \and I can tell you firsthand that a meeting like that doesn’t happen without the president’s knowledge. The focus of the secret summit was reportedly on seeking ‘common ground,’ during which Kushner urged Jeffries to also sit down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. You don’t need a PhD to know what’s going on here. Trump is trying to cut a deal with Democrats to blunt the scrutiny he knows is coming. The meeting surfaced just days after reports that Democrats are planning to put Trump-family corruption at the center of congressional probes if they win the House. The same Donald Trump who called Jeffries a ‘low IQ individual’ and a ‘THUG’ who is a ‘danger to our Country’ is suddenly striking a softer tone and dispatching family members to make nice.”
“That ain’t strength, folks. That’s fear,” concludes Taylor. “So how do you scare the living daylights out of Donald Trump? You fight back.”
