A prominent former Trump staffer is warning that the "worst is yet to come" from MAGA, writing in a piece for The i Paper that Washington, D.C., insiders have told him that "the last embers of resistance within the Republican Party are being snuffed out."
Miles Taylor previously worked in the Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump's first term in office, eventually rising to the role of chief of staff at the agency in 2019. He found a national spotlight in 2018, however, after publishing an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times, warning of the abuses he was witnessing in the administration and the threat Trump posed to the country. Since leaving the White House, he has emerged as a prominent conservative critic of Trump and his political agenda, making frequent media appearances and penning numerous columns sharing his insider perspective on the president's continued chaos.
On Wednesday, he published his latest piece for The i Paper, revealing the alarming things he had heard from past colleagues and other insiders on Capitol Hill.
"The conventional wisdom in Washington this week is that Senate Republicans are finally finding their footing against Donald Trump," Taylor wrote. "They see the U.S. President as a growing electoral liability, the headlines say, and they’re starting to undermine his vanity projects. But even the senators themselves don’t really believe this. Privately, my former colleagues on Capitol Hill acknowledge that they’re no match for this President. What they see, and what they’ll admit to off the record, is that the last embers of resistance within the Republican Party are being snuffed out. GOP leaders won’t stand up to the man who’s got them at political gunpoint, and it’s a harbinger of the next phase of Trumpism."
The president's "own advisers are saying the quiet part out loud," Taylor added, as evidenced by a recent Axios report which noted that he "doesn't much care if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate in the midterms this fall." While a win would be preferable, either way, Trump is planning for "an all-out, two-year “finale” in which he intends to wield power in ways he’s heretofore avoided, or only flirted with," as Taylor put it.
"The people I served with in the first Trump administration see the worst as yet to come," Taylor continued. "What worries them most isn’t just the midterms, which Trump will attempt to steal or discredit, but what condition the US Constitution will be in by the 2028 presidential election. Their fears are specific. They expect Trump to ignore Congress wholesale, including bypassing the Senate on cabinet appointments, spending money lawmakers never approved, and impounding money they did. They expect him to ratchet up his punishment of Democratic-led states with the full weight of the federal government (denying disaster aid and gutting programmes for the sin of voting wrong), while showering loyal cronies with pardons, contracts and regulatory favors."
Taylor was ultimately hopeful for the future, despite these warnings, concluding: "Despite the flaccid resistance within the GOP’s ranks, you already see a burgeoning defiance spreading across the United States, from ordinary people willing to run federal agents out of states where they don’t belong, to news outlets taking the President to court and winning. So while America may be entering the darkest act of this drama, I believe it will be the last one. The hard years to come will blow back on Trump. Defiant Americans will make sure of it."
