Miles Taylor was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security when he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times about the resistance inside Donald Trump’s administration. Taylor resigned in 2019 and published A Warning before finally revealing his name in the fall of 2020. His second book is Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, and his podcast is The Whistleblowers.
AP: You were brought into the Trump administration with John Kelly, someone who you admired, not because you were a Donald Trump supporter. What was your impression of the news coverage back then?
MT: One of the things that was unhelpful is there were folks on the left in the media who were trying really hard to amplify Donald Trump and to some of them, Trump was a really convenient way for them to say, “See, the Republican Party’s crazy and it’s dangerous.” And it backfired spectacularly. It gave Trump this huge platform.
After Trump took office, some people refused to take the bait, but others allowed their coverage to become more partisan. That ended up fueling his narrative of a corrupt mainstream media. That did a lot of damage to our democracy.
You’ve been both a source for the news media and a subject, so you have this dual role.
Yeah, and it’s the worst!
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