BLOWBACK

An urgent alarm about the nation’s future.

In a New York Times op-ed piece in 2018 and again in his book A Warning, both published anonymously, Taylor exposed the lies, corruption, and craziness within the Trump administration—of which he was a member—and argued vehemently against his reelection in 2020. Now facing the 2024 contest, Taylor reiterates his dire predictions. “The MAGA movement—or Trumpism, which I use interchangeably—remains the fastest-growing political coalition in America,” he contends. Even if Trump himself is not the Republican Party’s standard bearer, “the rule of a savvier successor” will promote the same policies, authoritarian postures, vindictiveness, and hatred. Taylor had an inside view of the administration, serving as a national security adviser under John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security; when Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff, Taylor stayed on at the DHS. He witnessed a president who was impulsive, raging, and out of control, focused on building a wall on the southern border, to the exclusion of most else. Trump demanded protestations of loyalty, and he was quick to fire anyone who dared to cross him. Taylor predicts that “appointees in the next GOP White House will be heavily vetted for obedience,” and career civil servants will be ousted in favor of lackeys. There will be “what might be called the Two Houses of MAGA (the White House and a right-leaning House of Representatives)” that would “do each other’s bidding.” The culture wars—“guns, gays, and girls”—a GOP operative told Taylor, “will be the primary legislative agenda,” and the “Next Trump…will exacerbate political violence and push the nation to the brink of a Second Civil War.” The author urges citizens to speak out against extremism. “Social fear,” he writes, “is creating a mass bystander effect in our politics,” but “the final guardrail of our collective democracy,” he declares, is truth.

Another rousing plea to all Americans to stand against authoritarianism.