Insider Reveals the Leaks in WH and Trump’s Hidden Secret

IHIP News

Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor joins Jennifer Welch to discuss the psychological and structural shifts occurring within t

Key takeaways

• Miles Taylor claims 90% of his predictions regarding a second Trump term have already materialized.
• The selection criteria for administration officials has shifted from competence and law to pure personal loyalty.

Main topics

• Psychology of Trump 1.0 vs 2.0
• The erosion of democratic institutions

Notable quotes

When you have an autocrat at the top, there is one selection criteria, and that's loyalty and not the law.

Conclusion

The episode highlights the urgent need for organized, legally-backed r

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) He's basically said, could you put the cameras down? Yeah. And we kept talking. And he said, I'm thinking I'm going to have to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life. We were talking about James Tallarico. And he's like, it's one of those weird things where I know other people in my social circle, they're going to do the same. He's like, I got family members that are going to do the same, but we're not talking about it. Speaker 2 (0:34) All right. Joining me today in studio is national security expert and founder of Defiance.org, incredible organization, which we're going to get into. Of course, I'm talking about Miles Taylor, who actually worked inside the Death Star in Trump 1.0. He resigned because he's not a dipshit and he didn't want to do bad things. And now he is out fighting for justice and transparency and shining a light on all the corruption that Trump is doing. Miles. How are you? Speaker 1 (1:03) It's great to be with you. I love being here in person. It's the best. I know. No more Zooms. Death to Zooms and sub stacks. Speaker 2 (1:09) I Speaker 1 (1:09) know. Speaker 2 (1:09) In person is better. Okay, before I get into more complex things, I want to dive into when you worked in Trump 1.0, the psychology behind the scenes. So you have this man, Trump, who's got personality disorders out the wazoo. It's not the sharpest tool in the shed. It's not a big, long, deep, methodical thinker. It's super impulsive. Behind the scenes in 1.0, was everybody like, God, this guy's nuts? Speaker 1 (1:36) Yeah, absolutely. Look, this is one of the things that was so confounding to me. I shouldn't have been the person who needed to quit and come forward from the first Trump administration. There were a thousand people more interesting than Miles Taylor to come say the things that I've said. Virtually every cabinet member in the first Trump administration that I interacted with on a daily basis felt. precisely the same way I feel. Now, you've heard that from some of them after the fact or close to the 2020 election. I spent like two years begging people at coffees and lunches and dinners, please come forward with me. We have to go say this before the election. But a lot more of them you have seen stay silent because they want to continue to remain in the party. They don't want to be on Donald Trump's enemies list. But they all felt this way. They either felt like the man was one of the stupidest people they'd ever met in their lives without exaggeration. I mean, those are things you would hear the Mike Pompeo types say. I wish he would say it publicly, is this guy is so dumb. Speaker 1 (2:37) Or things like my former boss, John Kelly, said, which was towards the end, he said to me, Miles, this is a very, very evil man. That's what he said of our boss, Donald Trump. And I agreed with that assessment. Speaker 2 (2:51) Is John Kelly the one that reported that Trump wanted generals like Hitler's generals? Speaker 1 (2:58) Yeah, he did. You know, he had shared, of course, the. story about Trump's comments about suckers and losers over there at the cemetery in Europe. But also on multiple occasions, Trump had raised with John Kelly, Hitler being perhaps not as bad as people said he was, or that he had obedient generals, or he'd said to John Kelly at one point, Hitler did some good things too, didn't he? These things would shock anyone. Okay, just... Anyone could listen to us right now and put themselves on the couch with a grandparent and say, this is some real weird shit talking about how Hitler might have been a good guy. Yeah. Talking about the American president and while he's in office. And I think those things, again, they would have rocked anyone. They certainly rocked John Kelly. But that's why you saw four-star Marine generals who hold their tongues and don't usually come forward and don't talk politics come out and say, look, this guy. has the heart and soul of a fascist. You didn't just see John Kelly say that. You saw Mark Milley say that, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I did not know these men to engage in hyperbole. I wasn't even coming out in 2020 and saying Donald Trump was a fascist. I felt like people wouldn't take me seriously if I used that language. But that's the language that these men chose. And I think now in the second term, we understand more precisely why. Speaker 2 (4:18) So I always think that one... Good thing. One thing that Trump excels at is self-preservation. So Trump 1.0 delivered the most narcissistic injury he's ever experienced in his life. And that was the defeat of the presidential election when Joe Biden beat him. Speaker 1 (4:35) And Speaker 2 (4:36) then these people he worked with, these very respected, weathered, learned men, patriots in every sense of the word. Speaker 2 (4:46) dismantled him and exposed him for the fraud that he is, the people who worked in his cabinet. And... Trump 2.0 fast forward and he has learned, I need to be around losers. And he said it. He said it. I love hanging out with losers. So I feel like I'm the smartest person. So now he is surrounded by losers. And when you talk about Millie and John Kelly, these people who served and genuinely really care about the United States of America in a true patriotic sense. But I don't know that I really feel that. But I think these people who serve in the military. have that experience where they really feel that. And now you have the Secretary of Defense, I refuse to call it Secretary of War, the Secretary of Defense, firing seasoned, weathered, learned, non-impulsive people from the Department of Defense. I'm terrified right now that he learned a lesson from that narcissistic injury in 2020, that now he is inside the Death Star. Anybody who was a Miles Taylor or a Millie or a John Kelly hit the bridge. You're out. And now he has all of these morally defunct, emotionally stunted people that are cultists, that whatever the election results are of the midterms, he has things in play where he's going to mess with it. Speaker 1 (6:13) Well, there's this illusion, I think, in American politics that our institutions. are this like literal brick wall that protects us from bad things. The institutions are only as strong as the people, only as strong as the people. And what that really meant practically, brass tacks, people in the first term who were willing to say no to the president's face. Now, a lot of them weren't. A lot of them would sidestep a crazy thing Trump said and try to find a way to turn off the bad idea without pissing off the president. But some folks realized after a year or two, Saying no was no longer enough. You really had to get the lawyers involved, tell the president, you will be impeached if you do this. You will, you know, you're going to lose massively in the elections if you do this. There were a lot of behind the scenes confrontations with the president of the United States because there were people willing to tell him no. Those were the institutions that held. Now, I get the folks. who cast a side eye at people like me or Kelly or John Bolton or anyone who came forward after the first administration said, okay, you guys are saying you saved the world and that the sky is falling. Sure. Why should we believe you? Look, I'll be the first to say there were no heroes in the first Trump administration. There were only survivors and witnesses. And we were trying to bear witness to what we had seen and say, believe us. If he gets elected to a second term, He's already tried to systematically get rid of the people who said no. He's going to be able to do all of these batshit crazy things if he packs his cabinet with the people who will say yes. And now we see that. We see what that looks like. I mean, Jen, the White House counsel, Will Scharf, the man who's the president's chief lawyer, that job should be the chief person saying no to bad ideas and illegal ideas and unconstitutional ideas. That same person. is the head of Donald Trump's Monuments Commission in Washington, D.C. The man literally approving monuments to a living president of the United States is supposed to be the lawyer that tells him no? He's not. And so you're right that he, Trump has, he learned that lesson. He built a cabinet that would say yes instead of no, even if something was illegal. But I think if we look back at history, we identify that pattern. I always cite back to A guy named Friedrich Hayek, Austrian economist and philosopher, he wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom in the 1940s about what he had witnessed with Nazi Germany. And I think it's chapter eight or nine of the book is called something like Why the Worst Rise to the Top. He could not understand how in the German federal system, so many people who'd been coached in democracy and the origins of free society could end up. doing whatever Adolf Hitler wanted. And his ultimate conclusion was, when you have an autocrat at the top, there is one selection criteria, and that's loyalty and not the law. And if you're loyal, that means you're willing to do anything. That means you'll say yes to anything. That means the worst will rise to the top. We saw that in Stalin's Russia. In fact, people have written volumes about how the little Stalins were worse than Joseph Stalin because the little Stalins would do anything, even beyond Stalin's imagination, because they had to, to win his favor. And now you see that with Trump. The little Trumps around Donald Trump, in some cases, are even worse than this man is because there's nothing that they won't do. Speaker 2 (9:37) So that makes me think of little Marco, obviously. You know, but... OK, I Speaker 1 (9:42) want to ask you this. It's Speaker 2 (9:43) the Speaker 1 (9:43) best example. I used to work on the Hill with Marco Rubio. I used to look up to Marco Rubio. I used to want Marco Rubio to be president of the United States. He has sold his soul to Trumpism. It's so hurtful to see this, Jen, because the months before Donald Trump won his second term, I went to a private event with Marco and we were talking about. We were talking basically about the universality of freedom and spreading freedom around the globe. And he would talk in these broad brush terms in ways very similar to Hillary Clinton. You could have said Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton shared a lot of the traditional – what's called the Washington consensus about the need to help spread liberalism around the world. Not necessarily at the barrel of a gun but that this was our mission as America is like let's open up free societies wherever there's not free societies. Say Marco Rubio months later goes into the Trump administration and now is presiding over the destruction of our alliances with the free world and the opening of relations with the worst autocracies on the planet. I mean, it's got to be the most humiliating thing to him when he goes to bed. Everything he spent his career railing against, Marco Rubio now owns. Speaker 2 (10:47) It's really, it's incredible. It's incredible to watch the capitulation. What has surprised you most from Leaving Trump 1.0, being a whistleblower, seeing where this was heading with your colleagues, you all saw where this was heading, waved your hands, do not do this. We're telling you this is what is going to happen. Trump 2.0, has it gone faster than what you thought it would go? Is it about the same as what you thought it would go? Do you think he's... planning to go further? Because you have a unique insight that so many Americans don't. So what's your take on analysis on 2.0 thus far? And how far do you think he's going to take this thing? Speaker 1 (11:29) Yeah, two things. One's bad news. One's good news. He did go further and faster. I wrote this book that almost no one read, 2023, called – I wrote a book that a lot of people read in 2020 about why not to reelect the guy. It was great. And I'm not saying the book kept him from getting reelected, but a lot of people paid attention to those warnings. In October of 2020, I think Jake Tapper, when he had a bunch of us on this program called The Insiders, said it was the largest group of American officials in US history who had turned against a president that they had served, right? There was an outpouring. And a lot of Republicans voted against Donald Trump for the first time in their lives voting for a Democrat. By the skin of our teeth, we prevented a second Trump term. Then in 2023, I was like, I think we're going to forget the lesson. I think we're going to forget the lesson. And I went on this odyssey to try to paint as lucid of a picture as possible of a second Trump term. I went and spoke to 100 of my former colleagues from the Trump administration and in the Republican Party, and I asked them all one question. I said, what did he want to do in a first term that he wasn't able to do? and that he would do in a second. And I wrote the entire thing into a book and I said, this is what the second term of Donald Trump will look like. Now, at the time in 2023, Trump and his minions came out and said, this is horseshit. One of the quotes from his ugly ass spokesman was, this is, you know, toilet paper to wipe yourself with. I mean, just on and on and on. All lies, all lies. Did an analysis three months ago, 90 % of the predictions in the book have come true. Not 60, not 70, not 80. 90%. But that's because these were the things he had already wanted to do, that he had already directed aides to do, that they said, no, Mr. President, this is illegal. And that happened a lot faster than I thought. They got to 90 % a lot faster than I thought. That doesn't mean that all the danger has passed. It means they've put it in place, the foundation, to continue this autocratic experiment for the duration of his presidency. That's the bad news. They've moved a lot faster and a lot further than I thought they would. The good news is I think we have too. I have been surprised at the level of defiance in this country. I have been surprised at the resistance coming together societally against this guy in a way that I didn't feel like at the beginning of last year. When he came back in, the level of social fear, you remember this, I felt it. It was off the charts. Celebrities who used to speak out against Donald Trump for a decade. went silent and they said, I can't talk about this guy. Business leaders who had spent millions in their own pocketbooks against Donald Trump said, I'm going to go donate to his inaugural fund. I mean, up and down, where it was most visible to me and shocking to me was at the grassroots level. So in April, when Trump came back in, he signs this executive order opening a federal investigation into me for treason, okay? A crime punishable by death, yes, for having spoken out against him. The president felt like I should be executed, not an exaggeration. I was told at the time that was the first point in 250 years of this republic that any president had opened a federal investigation into a critic with the stroke of their pen. That's never happened before. That's called a bill of attainder. It's one of the reasons we separated from Britain because the king was literally taking his pen and ordering trials of his critics. It's in the Declaration of Independence that this is one of the reasons we separated. Donald Trump last year broke that norm. American president directing an investigation. Same day, he signed one into my former colleague, Chris Krebs, who had said that the election was not stolen in 2020. Another fellow Trump appointee, he fired Chris by tweet for that. But the point here is Trump opens that investigation. One of the first things that I try to do is go fundraise for my legal defense. My wife and I were thinking about, do we have to sell the house? to defend ourselves against this guy. And we were planning a great organization to step forward and offered a legal defense fund. And we were planning a fundraiser for it in Chicago. And we went to three different venues to try to get them to host this fundraiser. Like we're talking restaurants, catering companies. Each of them said no. And the