In his forthcoming book, former Donald Trump administration official Miles Taylor writes that the former president wanted to tap the telephones of White House aides who he believed were leaking information to the press, Axios reports.
Taylor makes the claim in Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy From the Next Trump, which will be published later this month by Atria. A critic for Kirkus called the book “another rousing plea to all Americans to stand against authoritarianism.”
John Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, pushed back against Trump’s phone-tapping idea, which he said would be illegal, Taylor writes.
Taylor worked for the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, serving for seven months as its chief of staff. In 2018, he wrote an anonymous op-ed for the New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”; the column formed the basis for his 2019 book, A Warning, also published anonymously.
Last month, it was revealed that Taylor’s book claims that Trump had speculated “what it might be like to have sex with” Ivanka Trump, which led Kelly to remind the former president that he was talking about his own daughter.
Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, responded to the phone-tapping allegation by saying, "Miles Taylor is a loser and a lying sack of shit. His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper."
Blowback is slated for publication on July 18.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
