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Miles Taylor is a national security expert. Based in Washington, D.C., he is editor of the recently launched newsletter Treason on Substack. Taylor previously served as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where he published an “Anonymous” essay in The New York Times, blowing the whistle on presidential misconduct.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Miles Taylor discuss to what extent the “adults in the room” made a difference in Donald Trump’s first administration, the president’s disregard for rule of law, and why Taylor wrote the anonymous New York Times op-ed about internal resistance to the first Trump administration.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: So many different things have been happening in the first six months of the Trump administration that it’s hard to keep abreast of every element of it. Both because you believe it is important in terms of assessing the extent to which Trump is attacking the rule of law in the United States and for personal reasons, you have been particularly interested in ways in which he’s trying to exact revenge on his political enemies. Tell us a little bit about what he has actually done in that arena so far.
Miles Taylor: I would say it’s almost a question of what hasn’t he done? I think we’ll get to that—the things that he might end up doing from a retribution standpoint. But so far, in just the nearly six months that Donald Trump has been in office, we have seen far and away the most comprehensive revenge campaign any American president has ever attempted to undertake, certainly against his political enemies and in some ways beyond what even folks like me had forecast might happen in a second Trump administration.
I would break it up into two facets: one being the efforts that Donald Trump and his allies have undertaken within the executive branch to exact revenge against the so-called “deep state” that he believes held him back in his first term; and then, secondarily, the external institutions that you would expect to keep an American president in check that Donald Trump has gone after in this term. That campaign has been quite sweeping.
Within the executive branch, it has been the decimation of agencies that he feels should not exist or had challenged him previously. They have systematically purged civil servants, including specific individuals who they think are problematic, and have commandeered a lot of the guardrails within the executive branch that are meant to keep a check on the president—things like the inspectors general, watchdog groups, and ethics offices. Trump has tried very hard to take over those organizations so that as he goes about this revenge campaign within the executive branch, there is not someone looking over his shoulder telling him what he’s doing is unlawful.
The campaign goes far beyond the interior of the executive branch. Donald Trump has gone after law firms in the United States, sanctioning them with executive orders and bringing them to heel. Yes, a handful of law firms fought back against that and have prevailed in the courts, but by and large, the biggest law firms in the United States of America have capitulated and made deals with the White House because they are afraid of being denied the ability to practice the way they would like to. That has meant that the organizations that would normally be the vanguard in challenging the president’s unconstitutional or illegal actions have stepped to the side.
He has gone after educational institutions and a whole host of other institutions that he feels might challenge him, and individuals—including me and others who had previously served in the first Trump administration and criticized the president.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about those attacks on individuals. I know that there are a number of people whose security clearances have been revoked. That is a serious attack on their ability to pursue their professions. It doesn’t necessarily impose personal dangers. I understand that there are also some cases in which individuals who enjoyed actual protection because they had served in positions which made them potential targets of foreign adversaries have had that security protection revoked, which to me is even a step further toward really saying if you cross us politically, then we may stand by when there’s a genuine personal danger to you.
Taylor: That’s right. The president has gone even further than that. A few months ago, he issued on the same day two executive orders—one against myself and one against another man, a former colleague of mine named Chris Krebs. We had both been presidential appointees in the first Trump administration. I had been chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, overseeing a department of 250,000 employees and a $60 billion budget. Chris had overseen the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency.
Both of us, even though we are lifelong conservatives and Republicans, had spoken out against Donald Trump, spoken out against the wrongdoing that we witnessed within the administration—the corruption. As retaliation for that, Trump issued these two executive orders in April directing federal investigations into the two of us.
This is the first time in American history that a president has issued an executive order to have an individual critic investigated by the federal government for First Amendment-protected speech. Legal scholars around the country tell us, and have declared publicly, that this has never happened before in the 249 years of America’s history—that a president has gone after his enemies by name and directed investigations.
Mounk: What is the purpose of this executive order? Clearly the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, is a Trump loyalist. He has, in more indirect ways, instructed the FBI and other agencies to investigate political enemies, including former President Barack Obama, without, I believe, an executive order. Why choose to do an executive order? What is in that executive order that’s different from the step—which would also, of course, be concerning and a break in key democratic norms—of simply calling up Kash Patel and saying, hey, why don’t you look into that fellow Miles Taylor over there?
Taylor: Well, because it formalizes the blacklist. It’s one thing if the president makes a private phone call and says, I want you to investigate someone. It’s another thing if he’s live on television in the Oval Office signing an order and telling the world that you’ve committed treason and that you’re a traitor. The same thing he said about Barack Obama last week, he enshrined in an executive order against me. So the president of the United States, without evidence, without due process, and without any legal proceeding, told the world that I had committed treason against the United States. I was a traitor and then he inverted the justice process and effectively said to his team with the executive order, now go find me the evidence. I have declared that Miles Taylor committed treason. Now go find me evidence to justify that he committed treason.
What are the consequences of that? The White House knows that by blacklisting someone that way, it will cost them everything. I’ll tell you, professionally, it’s forced me to leave the firm that I built. I’ve had to leave my job. My wife, who’s a stay-at-home mother, had to return to work because I’m the sole income earner in our household, and it’s meant security threats against our family.
That’s not just hypothetical. We’ve had people issue violent threats against our 10-month-old daughter, against family members, posting pictures of our homes, doxxing us online, impersonating us. Because even if the president doesn’t take the accusation of treason seriously, his supporters take it seriously. That’s why last week I was warning that these treason accusations against Barack Obama were going to increase the threat to him, because our family knows first-hand—we’ve been in court the past few weeks against stalkers and lunatics who have tried to go fulfill Donald Trump’s executive order for him by trying to scare our family and friends with these accusations of treason.
It becomes very serious and it takes a climate of political intimidation and violence in the United States to the next level.
Mounk: The other thing about the term traitor is that it has this strange double duty where it’s part of ordinary personal speech. I mean, someone double crosses you in private life in some way, and you say, you’re a traitor. It’s a kind of general political insult, but it is also a specific crime which carries a very serious penalty—the most serious penalty. So to be accused by a sitting president of committing treason is a very serious matter.
Take us back a little bit to the first Trump administration. Presumably, you had some concerns or misgivings about Donald Trump when you accepted his political appointment in 2016. What were your hopes and fears at that point? What convinced you at that juncture to go into the administration?
Taylor: Well, I went into the first Trump administration knowing very well who this man was. I didn’t know Donald Trump socially or personally at that point in time, but I think it was evident to anyone who had followed the 2016 presidential campaign that at best this man was uneducated and unprepared to lead the federal government, and at worst would try to do very deliberate damage to the foundations of American democracy. That’s actually one of the primary reasons I went into the administration.
Normally, if you take a job in a presidential administration, you do so for more inspiring reasons. You like the person, you think they’re fantastic, you’re excited to go help them implement their agenda. For a lot of people that went into the first Trump administration that had served in the Republican Party, who had served in the Bush administration, they did that out of a sense of concern that Donald Trump was not prepared to take on this role.
In my case, I had spent a lot of years working in national security, and Donald Trump had selected someone to be the Secretary of Homeland Security—someone I had looked up to for a very long time, a man named John Kelly, who later became Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. I spoke with Kelly, and I was still working on Capitol Hill and in Congress at the time. He had already taken the job of Secretary of Homeland Security and said something to the effect of, Miles, it’s not as bad as it looks inside the Trump administration. It is so much worse. He was trying to send a message, which was that it was very chaotic and that the initial wave of appointees were having a hard time counterbalancing the president’s regularly unlawful impulses.
It’s not that they were trying to prevent Trump from doing things he was allowed to do. They were trying to prevent him from breaking the law, because his impulse was regularly toward illegality.
Mounk: What are some examples of that? Tell me a little bit about the kinds of things we’re talking about here.
Taylor: Within days of taking office, Donald Trump had issued his first travel ban, and the reading of the executive order of that very first travel ban prevented people who had green cards from even coming back into the United States. So if you were someone from, let’s say, North Africa, and you had a green card to be in the United States, you’d lived here maybe for the past two years, all of a sudden this travel ban forbade thousands of people, tens of thousands of people and beyond, from reentering the country.
It was written in a sloppy way. It was written in a very reckless way. It was clear from the get-go that there was a team that had gone in with him that didn’t understand the rule of law, that didn’t understand what was permitted, that fundamentally didn’t know how to govern. This led into a whole range of issues of Trump wanting to do things—sealing the southern border and detaining migrants without habeas corpus and all of these different things that were violations of law.
John Kelly and others went into that administration wanting to keep things steady and to bring in a team to do that. I think a lot of us had misgivings going in and more specifically felt like going to work in the Trump administration would likely be career-ending. Yet many of us had gone into government after 9/11 wanting to serve our country and did not want to see things like the national security apparatus of the United States turned into a weapon to go after the president’s political enemies, which is something that we tried to prevent. He’s come into a second administration hell-bent on doing that anyway.
Mounk: Yeah, I’ve joked a little bit in the last months that we owe an apology to the “adults in the room” in the first Trump administration, who were much mocked at the time because it felt very easy to say, we’re really there to prevent damage and we’re the ones who are stopping Trump from doing all of these crazy things. I think there were plenty of bad and concerning things that Trump did in his first administration, particularly in the area of foreign policy, when we think, for example, about his evident disdain of NATO and his treatment of American allies.
A lot of people at the time made light of the people who were both serving in the administration and wanting some amount of moral approbation for how they were stopping all of these bad things. I think to look at the contrast between how impactful the first four years of Trump’s presidency have been and how much faster he’s moved, how much further he’s gone in the first six months of his second term, shows that perhaps all of those adults in the room really did have a moderating influence in all kinds of ways.
What did that look like? How did that clash between a president who had strong ideas of his own and did have democratic legitimacy to enact them—even though he hadn’t won the popular vote, he was the duly-elected president—and a staff which rightly felt an obligation to the United States Constitution and to some of the core political norms of the American Republic play out?
Would that be the president sort of making an order and the staff slow-walking it? Would it be telling him, Mr. President, we just can’t do that, this is illegal? What would that look like on the day to day?
Taylor: I’m guilty of being one of the lead progenitors of this adults in the room thesis. In fact, at the time early in the administration, I helped coin a term called the axis of adults. I spoke to a reporter at the time from inside the Trump administration, and I said, listen, the American people shouldn’t be completely terrified because there is this axis of adults in the administration—John Kelly, and Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary, Mike Pompeo over at CIA, and Rex Tillerson at the State Department—who see how turbulent things are and are trying very hard to get the president to govern.
I said that at the time, recognizing that that thesis would become a much-mocked thesis. Of course you’re self-justifying, you’re in the administration and things are going to be okay. But that was important for people to signal because of how truly vile some of the suggestions were that came from Donald Trump. I’ll be more specific about that. You would be in meetings with him talking about migrants at the border. He was so obsessed with immigration. He would propose shooting them to stop them from coming into the country. I’ve been to the southern border a lot. There are a lot of women and children crossing that southern border. To Donald Trump, it would be acceptable to shoot them to keep them from coming across. This was met with abhorrence in conversations with Trump. He would say, I don’t mean you have to kill them. Just shoot them in the legs. People need to think about that for a second. The President of the United States is sitting there in the Oval Office recognizing he’s giving an order to potentially shoot pregnant mothers in the legs to stop them from getting across the border.
Not only is that wrong and sickening, it’s completely and patently illegal. As a first line of defense, you would say to the president, Mr. President, this is against the law. You cannot do that. But then he would keep bringing these ideas up. I can remember one time being on an airplane flying to New York City with the Secretary, and we’re on our plane, and we’d already had one of these conversations with the president. No, Mr. President, you cannot shoot innocent people at the border. He goes on television and says it anyway. He says, if these migrants throw rocks in protest at the border, then we’re going to use rifles. We called the Defense Secretary at the time, Jim Mattis, and said, we’re clearly not getting through to the president. You need to call him and tell him it is a violation of the law of armed conflict for him to shoot innocent unarmed people at the border. We need to be saying that publicly, even if we’re contradicting the president. I say that because sometimes it was in private—coaching Donald Trump, here’s what you can and cannot do as commander-in-chief. But sometimes it meant you had to go out there publicly and defy him because he’s continuing to pursue an immoral idea to its source.
In the first year of the Trump administration, often those efforts to put bad ideas back in the box were relatively successful. By year two, a lot of the bad ideas that he had wanted to pursue, that we had talked him out of, he started to do anyway. Things like family separation at the border started to come to fruition despite efforts to stop them. That’s when it started to occur to me that there was only so much we were going to be able to do to keep him in check.
Mounk: What created that change? Is it just that he came in with very little political experience and didn’t really know how to work the machine and so on? Is it that he recognized that his commands were being frustrated in various ways, and so he found ways of ensuring that they would be listened to? Is it that he, over time, was more able to promote the staff that would do whatever he wanted irrespective of its morality or legality?
How can that help us understand the transformation from the first Trump administration to the second Trump administration, where clearly he has a team of willing and capable loyalists around him to implement his wishes?
Taylor: The first point would be that he is entirely indifferent to the rule of law—genuinely. Donald Trump does not care. He does not care about the United States Constitution. He does not care about the law. He only cares to the extent that he continues to maintain support from his base. Beyond that, he’s indifferent to the law. I’ve seen that time and time again over many years, and now it’s very evident to the public—he’s indifferent to the law. So that’s piece number one. He genuinely lacks any moral center outside of personal self-interest.
Second, as he realized that there were people with a conscience around him, he undertook an effort, starting in year two, to systematically eliminate anyone who would challenge him in private—whether that was firing them, pushing them out, pressuring them out. It started with his National Security Advisor in early 2018, H. R. McMaster. His lead lawyer at the White House, he pushed out around the same time period. Eventually, many of the cabinet secretaries that I had considered to be part of this axis of adults, over the course of the rest of that year, he started to push them out of their jobs—the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and eventually Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
Trump went person by person to these individuals who challenged him, often in the Oval Office in private, and pushed them out of his administration. He started to replace them in the first term with individuals that were acting secretaries—they hadn’t been confirmed by the United States Senate. He told us, I like acting officials. He liked them because they wanted to win his favor, because they were auditioning for the job. They wanted to get the “acting” out of their title and get the official position. He found them to be more pliant.
That leads us into the second administration, because the four years Donald Trump had out of office, he and his team had a lot of time to prepare for aggressive vetting to make sure that people who came into a second Trump administration weren’t just loyal to him but were willing to carry out orders that otherwise seasoned public servants would not be willing to carry out.
One of Donald Trump’s lead personnel employees that hires and vets the presidential appointees had said to me before I left in protest in the first Trump administration that when a second term comes, we’re going to put the appointees through “a fucking boot camp”. His point was that they would do much deeper vetting to make sure that they were bringing in hardcore folks that Steve Bannon later called “a team of assassins.” That’s how he described the type, the character of the people that would need to be brought into a second Trump administration—stormtroopers, individuals to come in who would unflinchingly execute the president’s orders. I think, largely, they have been successful at recruiting that type of cadre.
Mounk: For a lot of the first Trump administration, it sounds like you were sometimes briefing journalists privately with the idea of the axis of adults. You were sometimes telling the president directly that some of the things that he was doing would be illegal. Sometimes it sounds like you found other ways to slow walk or frustrate some of the things that he wanted to do.
You then wrote an op-ed, which may be one of the most read and discussed op-eds ever to have appeared in The New York Times, without giving your name—anonymously—saying that you were part of a resistance inside the Trump administration. Tell us a little bit about what your reasoning was for writing that op-ed and what it was trying to accomplish.
Taylor: I’ve said for many years since then—that was now seven years ago—that people would be right to question why someone would publish this piece from inside the administration anonymously. It had to have been that the author was too afraid to reveal their identity. I always intended to come forward, which is what I eventually did. But I wrote it anonymously for one very, very important reason.
I knew it would get a lot of attention. There was no issue I felt was more serious in the United States of America than the fact that Donald Trump’s own team thought he was not only unfit for office, but that he was an active danger to the security of the United States. Think about that for a second. We’ve never seen in the history of the Western world so many people serve under a Western leader and harbor such deep misgivings about that person’s stability and their relative threat to the country. This was all being discussed in private in the Trump administration—his top lieutenants, his top cabinet—meeting in private and saying, the president is so unstable, there might be a moment that we have to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would allow his cabinet to remove him temporarily from office. That is very serious. In my view, that’s not the type of conversation that needs to happen in Washington back rooms. It’s the type of conversation the American people need to understand is happening because of how serious that threat is. So my inclination was to write that warning using the device of anonymity to deprive Donald Trump of the ability to quarrel with the author, and to force him—and to force the country—to contend with the message instead of the messenger. That message was: the president’s core team believes he’s engaged in continuous misconduct and is potentially a danger to the country.
The proximate cause was I was in Australia at the time meeting with the Five Eyes Intelligence Community—that’s America’s closest intelligence partners—and I got a phone call from the United States. A statesman had died in the United States: U.S. Senator John McCain. It’s tradition to lower the flags across the country to half-staff in honor of a public servant who has passed away. The White House called, and Trump wanted the flags raised back up. He did not like John McCain. He wanted to actively dishonor him by raising the flags back up across the country. There were a lot of reasons, Yascha, to snap during the Trump administration. But I had known John McCain personally. He had been a mentor. I watched as a bad man jumped and stomped on the grave of a good man. I thought, why are we all silent about this? Why aren’t we talking about this? I reached out to The New York Times. I asked if they would publish this opinion piece anonymously, and they agreed to do it. But there’s a really important thing that I want to flag. I talked about a resistance inside the Trump administration, but that got widely misconstrued. What I was talking about was not a group of people who were defying all the lawful orders of the commander in chief.
Donald Trump rightfully won the presidency. He had a mandate to be able to carry out lawful orders as commander in chief. What I wrote in that opinion piece was that the group of people defying him were defying the unlawful orders of the commander in chief—that he was attempting to carry out things that were immoral, illegal, even unconstitutional—and that there needed to be people to speak truth to power. That took a lot of forms, from people telling the president no in person, people having the lawyers stand up, going and informing Congress if Trump was going to do something illegal. Eventually, he realized he couldn’t have people on the team who told him what he could and couldn’t do and tried to systematically eliminate those folks from the administration, myself included. I ended up resigning in protest a few months after that opinion piece and then eventually went and unmasked myself publicly so I could talk in more detail about what I had witnessed inside the administration.
Mounk: When I listen to all of this, I must admit that I’m somewhat torn. Like you, I believed and argued publicly early on that Donald Trump was and remains a danger to the American Republic. I think one of the most impressive things about the tradition of public service, including the tradition of the American military, is that people are sworn to protect and uphold the Constitution rather than a particular individual. I know that that’s something that many public servants and many military officers take very seriously, and it’s a very important thing. I certainly can imagine how, if you’re in a position to stop deeply immoral things—shooting at migrants in the way you outlined—you would feel it incumbent on yourself to do what you can to prevent that kind of atrocity.
At the same time, I worry that one of the key arguments that Donald Trump has always made is that there is this deep state which is out to frustrate whatever the elected servants of the people want to do. Part of that is a substantive worry, part of that is a stylistic worry.
Substantively, there is a really complicated question about what an elected president and commander in chief should be able to do. I agree that there are certain limits of legality where it is, in fact, the duty of anybody serving the president to step in. Then there are things that we might consider to be deeply immoral, deeply unwise, detrimental to the interests of the United States, but which are rightfully, according to our political system, in the judgment of that elected official. We can ask, in a country that has so many political appointees—many more than in other countries—in a system that does have a very effective but also a very complicated state apparatus, what entitles any one individual to prioritize their own judgment above that of the person elected, whether we like it or not, by the American people to make those judgment calls? There’s one substantive set of questions about how to walk that line, about where something is so clearly and blatantly unconstitutional or illegal that, in fact, the explicit duty of a civil servant is to say, I cannot do this, this violates my oath of office. Versus, where is it a substantive judgment call, a substantive moral call, which makes it much harder to know what to do?
Then the other question is stylistic, which is to say, if you’re doing that—if you’re engaged in that—if you are, in fact, preventing some really bad things from happening, why go public with it in the kind of way which might excite and titillate readers of The New York Times and opponents of Donald Trump and perhaps reassure them, but which would also whip up Trump himself and his supporters into a frenzy and make them say, here you go, this is proof that the deep state is frustrating what we’re trying to do? Look at these traitors talking about being the resistance to the president. This is exactly what we’ve been talking about. So how, with the distance of some years—about seven years—are you thinking about these two questions?
Taylor: Yeah, it’s a big challenge. I’ll say on the first point, there are a lot of moral questions there. I would love to hear from the person who had a better way to do it. To your point about an apology to the axis of adults—I just want everyone to imagine if the first Trump administration didn’t have people who tried to tell the president not to do illegal things. All we would have is this second Trump administration that we have seen starting much earlier. You would have seen much more grave damage, not just to American security but to international security. If that group of people had not gone in, I will tell you right now, the United States would not be in NATO. The United States would have imposed massive trade barriers sooner. It probably would have caused a global recession. I predict millions of people would have died from lack of foreign aid from the United States—among a long, long list of things that would have been very catastrophic.
Do I think the axis of adults was successful? No. I ultimately think they weren’t successful. All they succeeded in doing—all we succeeded in doing—is delaying Donald Trump from doing more egregious things. The unfortunate and very difficult moral choice at the same time is that, yes, you feed Donald Trump’s narrative that there’s this deep state. I think the deep state was miscast. It was cast as a group of villains pulling the strings and saying no to a president.
The part where I would push back and disagree with you is this: what we did not do is deny the president the ability to implement things that were legal. He did things that were legal that were stupid. Sometimes you have to let a president do things that are legal and fucking stupid. You let him do it anyway and learn from his mistake. Because the president does have a right to do things that are legal and fucking stupid if he wants to. As everyone remembers from the initial Trump administration, that happened very often. Donald Trump did and said a lot of very stupid things. It was not my job to stop him from doing something stupid. It was my job as a public servant to tell him, Mr. President, you are about to do something stupid, and to give him warning, but to let him go forward with that anyway. However, if the president wants to do something illegal, then not only is it our job to tell him no, but if he proceeds with it anyway, it’s important to make that known to the relevant federal authorities and to the American public.
Mounk: But on some of the things that you mentioned in the category of legal and stupid—you’re saying that if it weren’t for the adults in the room, the United States would have left NATO, the United States would have imposed trade barriers much earlier—I oppose both of those things. I think that NATO is very important, and I think that free trade is an important thing and that the tariffs he has now imposed are a harm to the U.S. economy and a harm to the world economy. However, those fall in the category of legal but stupid things, don’t they?
Taylor: Yes, but I’m not saying that we defied his orders. Those are instances where we talked him out of those things. Donald Trump did not insist on pulling out of NATO and was only stopped because we refused to execute the order. He stopped because we talked him out of pulling out of NATO. That’s important for any public servant to do. I don’t care if it’s the Obama administration or the Bush administration or the Trump administration. Every public servant has a responsibility to speak truth to power and to persuade a president not to do something wrong. Now, if Donald Trump had wanted to overrule us and pull out of NATO, well, then if I don’t like that, I should resign. But we were successful in persuading him not to do some of those legal but stupid things.
At the same time, to your other question about sounding the alarm anonymously, this was something that I grappled with. One option would have been to simply resign in protest and go out there immediately and say what I knew about Donald Trump. But I’ll tell you what would have happened, because we all know what would have happened, because we’ve seen it happen dozens and dozens of times with Donald Trump. He would have quarreled with the messenger. It would have been a one-day news story, and people would not have paid attention to how serious the allegations were. By depriving him of the opportunity to talk about the messenger, I forced the issue into the public domain at a much bigger level.
Now I’m going to make a comparison here—not between myself and the Founding Fathers, but between tactics. Back when the founders were trying to sell the American public on the U.S. Constitution in the 1780s, they made a decision to write their essays about the new U.S. Constitution anonymously. They picked a pseudonym, Publius. They didn’t do it because the founders were scared to use their names. They did it because they knew it would create a spectacle and it would force the American people into this debate about the substance of the U.S. Constitution instead of into a debate about the different founders who authored the different essays. I’m a student of history. That’s actually the inspiration I drew behind writing the op-ed anonymously. As I knew with The Federalist Papers, with those essays, it achieved extraordinary effect. It got people to pay attention.
However, I also knew it was very important to eventually own that message. I could have remained anonymous to this day. But personally, I think that’s very cowardly, and I would have viewed that as a very cowardly thing to do. To me, it was important to get attention for the message that the president’s own team was worried he was so unstable he wouldn’t be able to govern, but then eventually to come forward in my own name to explain in more detail—only the detail you can provide if you’re not wearing a mask. That was important to do.
At the same time, as you rightfully note, the president used that to create a meme of a deep state that he said was actively working to thwart him and painted that picture quite successfully. So there’s not a clear moral answer there. I think the American people wanted to know what was happening inside the Trump administration. I think it played a very big role in 2020 in denying him reelection that year—that so many people came forward from his administration to talk about what they saw. As Jake Tapper referred to it at the time, it was the largest group of ex-officials in American history to come and speak out against a president they had served under. I think that did deny him reelection. However, memories are short, and he won a second term.
Mounk: One of the things I worry about in politics and in thinking about how to be a political agent that’s actually able to pursue your goals effectively is second-order consequences.
One example of this is in the early stages of a pandemic, when a number of public health officials were saying publicly that personal protective equipment didn’t really work for ordinary people, it only worked for doctors who knew how to use them and handle them. I think one of the reasons why they did that was that there was a real shortage of PPE, and they wanted to make sure that doctors and nurses who were in desperate need of them were able to get their hands on them. That’s an understandable motivation, but it made them tempted to engage not just in a course of action, which I think was slightly misleading to the public at that time, but which also then delayed lots of private companies pivoting to produce much more PPE. They were not trained as economists, they were trained as public health officials, and didn’t think about the second-order economic impacts of delaying telling the public that there was a desperate need for this equipment and encouraging private industry to pivot toward producing more of it.
This is a slightly strange comparison, but I was thinking about this as you were speaking because I do believe that the adults in the room in the first Trump administration probably averted some bad things from happening. I do believe that they were motivated as patriots to do right by the most fundamental principles of a political system, by and large.
I also worry that one of the effects of that may have been to serve Trump’s ability to resurge. He did lose in 2020, but when he ran in 2024, one of his key arguments was about the deep state. Perhaps if he had been allowed to do more stupid things in the first term, inflict more damage on the interests of the United States, more people would have recognized how destructive a political program he actually pursues. It’s impossible in a situation like that to think about all of the second- and third-order consequences. But I do worry that there is a tendency of the establishment more broadly to be too clever by half in these kinds of ways—to say, we are going to keep the barbarians at the gate, we are going to somehow keep them out, but to do so in ways that actually just delay the inevitable sacking of the city and perhaps make it worse once it arrives.
Taylor: Well, you can never know. That would be very much like me saying, if only we had let Hitler kill the Jews a little bit earlier, then the war might have started sooner and we might have saved more Jews. But you don’t let Hitler kill the Jews in the first place. In the first Trump administration, we wouldn’t have been better off if there hadn’t been people like us there and Trump could have gone forward and shot the pregnant mothers at the border. It may have shocked the conscience of the world, but Trump would have gone forward with it anyway. Before there were people trying to speak truth to power in his administration, he was already hell-bent on the idea of draining the swamp and a deep state. I’m pretty convinced neither of us can rerun history. Donald Trump would have made that argument in his reelection no matter what. He would have always said, I’ve not been allowed to do what I wanted to do by a deep state.
I’ll present what I think is the real moral question: if you think you are able to persuade a president not to do illegal things, then when is the time to go? Do you stay if you’re successful in persuading him not to do illegal things? Perhaps. I would make the argument that as soon as you are no longer effective, it’s your responsibility to go undertake other means. In other words, you don’t remain inside the administration trying to thwart lawful orders if you think they’re bad. You don’t remain if the president’s not taking your advice. That’s when you leave.
This was the constant fight that I was in with Trump’s cabinet. In private, when we would get together for these dinners and have conversations—in the White House chief of staff’s office, on Air Force One, in the White House Situation Room after the president would leave—the case that I was making in 2018 was, we need to resign en masse. No one gives a fuck if Miles Taylor resigns. I don’t care. But if half of the president’s cabinet resigns at the same time and says what I said in that opinion piece, which was a view they all shared at the time, that makes a much bigger statement. You leave and you say, I have tried for the first two years of the Trump administration to persuade the president to abide by the law, but the president is no longer abiding by the law. So we must, as faithful public servants, leave together and warn the American people. I wish that had happened. I made the case for that to happen. There was a gathering in rural Virginia in fall of 2018 of senior officials from the administration to talk in secret about doing something like that. It fell apart because people were scared. So I left the administration.
What I am grateful for, though, is that as we got closer to that 2020 election, more of those people who were scared to get together at that time and send that message started to trickle forward. You saw Jim Mattis come forward and publish a piece about the president. You saw John Kelly come forward. It was on delay. I wish it had happened sooner.
I’m glad you brought up the pandemic, because there were some of those people who were going to leave in 2018 and resign in protest. At the time, I wished they had. But some of them stayed, I think, longer than morally was justified. Then the pandemic broke open, and some of those were very experienced public servants who were trying to keep the president from doing even stupider things during the pandemic and faced this choice leading up to the 2020 election: Is it more important that I stay in private and try to persuade the president not to bungle this response and cost thousands, maybe millions of lives? Or do I leave and warn the American people that he’s so reckless behind the scenes in managing the pandemic that they’ve got to get rid of him?
One of those people was a woman named Olivia Troye, who I had worked with. She was Homeland Security Advisor to the Vice President. Olivia grappled with this, and she ultimately came to the conclusion that she would resign from the administration and come forward publicly with her concerns. In her view, yes, working behind the scenes was maybe helping keep some of the pandemic response better than it could have been. But if Trump won reelection and the pandemic continued, it could be catastrophic. So Olivia resigned, and I’m very proud of her to this day. She came forward publicly. Yascha, you’re right to highlight that these are really messy moral decisions that, when you have a would-be autocrat in power, folks have to make.
Mounk: I agree with you very much that one obvious thing to do in that kind of situation, which is not easy and certainly not easy to coordinate, is to resign publicly on principle. How effective that is is also open to question. I’ll just note how serious the stakes were in the first Trump administration, and how serious they are now. I personally disagree with analogizing it in any way to the Holocaust, but we can debate that sometime over a beer.
In the rest of the conversation, Yascha and Miles explore why Trump’s second administration has been more efficient than his first, and the impact his presidency will have on rule of law in the United States. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
