Miles Taylor > Quotes

“There’s a soft totalitarianism coming into play,” Michael Steele professed. He spent two years leading the GOP as chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Modern-day conservatism meant lower taxes, less government, free markets. What we are witnessing now is a deconstruction of that.… I think the rational side is losing, if not having already lost. “For a party that’s all sensitive about the Left canceling them, they do a pretty good job of canceling their own,” he added. “That’s why the hammer came down so hard on Liz Cheney—to send a message of fear. No one wants to be targeted the way she’s been targeted, which makes this period we are in perhaps the most dangerous.”
― Miles Taylor, Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

“I was wrong about the "quiet resistance" inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump in the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is. Americans should not take comfort in knowing whether there are so-called adults in the room. We are not bulwarks against the president and shouldn't be counted upon to keep him in check. That is not our job. That is the job of the voters and their elected representatives.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Trump’s shortcomings stood out particularly during emergencies. I remember briefing the president in the Oval Office on the projected storm track of an Atlantic hurricane. At first, he seemed to grasp the devastating magnitude of the Category 4 superstorm, until he opened his mouth. “Is that the direction they always spin?” the president asked me. “I’m sorry sir,” I responded, “I don’t understand.” “Hurricanes. Do they always spin like that?” He made a swirl in the air with his finger. “Counterclockwise?” I asked. He nodded. “Yes, Mr. President. It’s called the Coriolis effect. It’s the same reason toilet water spins the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere.” “Incredible,” Trump replied, squinting his eyes to look at the foam board presentation. We needed him to urge residents to evacuate from the Carolinas, where it looked like the storm would make landfall, but the president mused about another potential response. “You know, I was watching TV, and they interviewed a guy in a parking lot,” Trump leaned back and recounted. “He was wearing a red hat, a MAGA hat, and he said he was going to ‘ride it out.’ Isn’t that something? That’s what Trump supporters do. They’re tough. They ride it out. I think that’s what I’ll tell them to do.” Sometimes his irreverence could be funny, even charming. That day it wasn’t. Worried looks filled the room. A clever communications aide piped up. “Mr. President, I wouldn’t take that chance. This is going to be a pretty bad storm, and you don’t want to lose supporters in the Carolinas before the 2020 election.” The president thought about it for a moment. “That’s such a good point. We should urge the evacuations.” You couldn’t write such a stupid scene in a movie, but it always got a little worse.”
― Miles Taylor, Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

“They have more to add, if they'll find the courage. But even those who've dared to say something still feel deep down that it's not enough. Because it's not. No one is immune. Anyone aiding the Trump administration is, or was, one of his Apologists. They've all waited too long to speak out and haven't spoken forcefully enough. Myself included.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Social fear is creating a mass bystander effect in our politics. Psychological research has shown that pedestrians are less inclined to help a victim who is being attacked if others are present. They will stay at the edge of the crowd and watch, waiting for someone else to act. In today’s political climate, as democracy is being bludgeoned, citizens are shrinking in the face of intimidation, standing on the sidelines, and hoping that someone else will come forward to end the villainy.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“I concluded that in politics, as in life, the real struggle is not us-versus-them. It is us-versus-us.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Several months before she was defeated in the Wyoming Republican primary, Liz Cheney told me that the fear of physical harm was working. Flanked by armed guards at a fundraiser, she said that Republican colleagues rejected Trumpism but were afraid to come forward after witnessing her experience. She was no stranger to Secret Service protection, given that her father had been vice president of the United States, but this was different. A security detail was not a mark of status for the Cheneys anymore; it was reflective of the fact that people were making violent threats against her family back in Wyoming, where she couldn’t go out in public the way she used to. Her fellow dissenters felt the same. “You know, it puts you at risk,” said Michigan congressman Fred Upton, who decided to walk away from a thirty-year career in Congress after his impeachment vote, “particularly when they threaten not only you—and I like to think I’m pretty fast—but when they threaten your spouse or your kids or whatever, that’s what really makes it frightening.” Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez decided to quit, too, confessing to receiving threats and fearing for the safety of his wife and children.”
― Miles Taylor, Blowback A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump

“Word came down from the White House in mid-2017 to stop providing the president with lengthy documents. If there was a staple in it, the briefing paper was probably too long and needed to be cut. Fifteen page updates on complex issues were chopped down to one: bold fonts, simple words, and pictures. "Know your audience," they say, and the “audience of one,” as we called the president, had the temperament of a child, albeit a child with a finger lingering over the nuclear button. We were forced to dumb down life and death decisions.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“That’s the beautiful and terrifying truth of the human experience- it doesn’t rewind, but often repeats.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Alone, Judiciary is the weakest of the three branches. As Alexander Hamilton wrote, “it can never attack with success either of the other two. It merely interprets the laws and cannot rewrite them or force its own edicts.” The founders feared what might happen if the separation of powers within the justice system was erased. “Liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone,” Hamilton explained, “but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments. It is in continual jeopardy of being overpowered, awed, or influenced by its coordinate branches. A president who can investigate, prosecute, and serve as his own judge is not a president at all, but a despot.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“After witnessing Donald Trump's rise, presidency, and fall up close, I now believe the greatest threat to American democracy in this century will come from within. A widening cabal of democratic leaders here at home have exploited our political climate and are already mimicking Donald Trump. I've met them on the campaign trail as they run for local, state, and federal office. They're winning more elections than you think. The influence of Trump's example has created an opening for his apprentices to engage in abuses of power by using America's public offices to promote their own self-interests and to silence objectors. We can hold the spread of political extremism, but it will be a once-in-a-generation challenge.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Whatever you want to call it— anonymity, the bystander phenomenon, self-censorship— the reluctance of people to stand against extremism is putting our republic in danger. Too many Americans are donning figurative masks, preferring the safe harbor of obscurity to the discomfort of reality. A broken system perpetuates it. This is how the most dangerous president in American history ascended to power in the first place.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Now picture this on a national scale: under the next Trump, DHS might automatically respond to emergencies in red states but hold out on blue states unless they capitulate to White House demands. This was how Trump wanted to handle the disbursement of disaster aid to everywhere from Puerto Rico to California. The possibilities for corruption are limitless… Elected leaders should conduct an end-to-end review of DHS with an eye of insulating the Department from this kind of political abuse. No agency is fully immune to presidential misconduct, yet with such a long roster of White House appointees, the shield of American government is particularly susceptible to it. In particular, Congress should put career officials in charge of key agencies for multi-year terms, spanning presidential administrations and should pass legislation to reign in domestic security powers. ”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“The MAGA names and faces will change as time goes on, but their moral code and commitment to subverting democratic norms will not.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Kelly chose his words carefully. He reminded everyone in the room about the importance of swearing an oath to our constitution instead of to a person. If we swore allegiance to a particular man or woman, he said, we’d be living in a despotism, not a democracy.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“This is not happening to us; this is happening because of us. Our city streets are now the frontlines in the war for the soul of our political system, and it won't end without a great civic awakening”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“The president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office. The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“Our system of government allowed an observably unqualified man to win the US presidency. Democracy’s electoral guardrails were tested, and they failed.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“A quote from Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6, 1787:
“men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“A quote from Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 68, 1788

"The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning

“The founders envisioned the steady administration of the laws by a workforce of duty-minded public servants who would faithfully operate the daily functions of government regardless of who was president. “The true test of a good government,” Hamilton wrote under the pen name Publius, “is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” Donald Trump thoroughly dismantled this guardrail. He systematically sidelined or eliminated anyone who objected his agenda or sought to restrain his impulses. At the end of four years, only the sycophants remained. ”
― Miles Taylor, A Warning