Ex-staffer reveals Trump’s  'extreme measures' after bruising new defeat

President Donald Trump's reaction to his bruising new Supreme Court loss will not be quiet, according to a prominent former staffer from his first term, as he is now likely to get "reckless" and demand "extreme measures."

Trump this week saw his attempt to meddle with voting in the U.S. fall apart, after the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 ruling, declined to halt a lower court ruling that blocked the implementation of mail-in ballot changes while a lawsuit progresses. The suit stems from Trump's efforts, via executive order, to use the Postal Service as a means to enforce new restrictions on mail voting, a system he has falsely accused of being ripe with fraud for years.

Miles Taylor is a national security expert who previously worked in the Department of Homeland Security in Trump's first term, rising to the office of Chief of Staff before departing in late 2019. He also gained notoriety after writing an op-ed for The New York Times in 2018 as an anonymous whistleblower, claiming to be part of a resistance movement within the administration against Trump's worst impulses. He has since emerged as a vocal conservative critic of the president and has frequently endorsed his political enemies.

On Tuesday, Taylor published his latest column for The i Paper, offering his own first-hand accounts as a means to predict how Trump reacted to his major new Supreme Court loss.

"When Donald Trump loses, he lashes out," Taylor explained. "And if the past few days are any indicator, his top advisers will be getting phone calls – like we did in his first term – demanding extreme measures. Only this time, he’ll have a more compliant audience... I can tell you what probably happened inside the White House late last night and this morning, because in that first term, I was on the receiving end."

He added later: "Moments like this one produced a particular kind of phone call. Late at night, Trump would dial up from the residence, angry about being boxed in and demanding increasingly absurd measures that tested the bounds of legality. I remember when he lost a major case in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and flew into a rage, summoning us to an urgent meeting and telling us he wanted to 'get rid of the judges.' We had to tell him that a president cannot unilaterally abolish a federal appeals court without setting the U.S. Constitution on fire."

Taylor noted that, during his time in the first Trump White House, he never worried much about these demands being met, given that the officials "around him would slow-roll it, talk him back down or quietly let it die." Now, however, his administration is more thoroughly staffed with loyalists, likely to ask "how soon" when asked "to jump off a cliff."

In the wake of the latest ruling, Taylor suggested that Trump is likely to be calling up the "White House, Justice Department and Homeland Security" to demand the most "extreme" possibilities for rigging the midterms in favor of the GOP. He also said Trump's recent demand that his supporters "cheat" at the ballot box to help him was far from a joke, as the president previously "joked" about ideas as a "trial balloon" for actually going through with an idea.

"I spent years watching this President absorb humiliation and somehow turn right back around and convert it into fresh recklessness," Taylor concluded. "Last week, he got a partly empty arena. Last night, he got a legal smackdown of his latest election scheme. In the first term, when the phone rang after moments like these, Trump would recount his lawless fever dreams and bark immoral orders. But there were still people in the building willing to say 'absolutely not' to the crazy idea on the other end of the line. The phone is ringing again, but this time I have no idea who’s left to refuse him."