LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Let's turn now to a former colleague of Stephen Miller. Miles Taylor served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration. He wrote an anonymous op-ed about resisting Trump from the inside. He later expanded that into a book, then publicly backed Joe Biden for president in 2020. During this Trump administration, the president revoked Taylor's security clearance and ordered DHS to investigate him. Miles Taylor, good morning, and welcome to the program.
MILES TAYLOR: Hi, Leila. Good morning.
FADEL: So when Stephen Miller was elevated to White House chief of staff, you posted online that the decision is, quote, "among the most dangerous personnel decisions in the history of our republic." You worked with Miller for two years. What about that time makes you issue this warning?
TAYLOR: Well, Stephen has about as an expansive view of federal power you could imagine. Now, let me foot-stomp the loyalty piece. He is unflinchingly loyal to Donald Trump. But the problem there is that, in my observation over 2 1/2 years, the president had an inclination toward illegality, to be generous. If you are unfailingly loyal to someone like that, it means you're going to search for ways to advance ideas that might be deemed illegal or unconstitutional.
I mean, I'll give you an example. I remember a meeting we had one afternoon in the Oval Office where the president had lost a case in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. And he went on a tear. And he said to us, I want to get rid of the judges - an obviously absurd thing to say in our constitutional system. You can't get rid of the judges. Stephen's response wasn't to push back against that. He responded - yes, sir. A country without judges would help - and then went on to work on ways to try to do judicial gerrymandering to try to remove and delete some of these courts, like the 9th Circuit. That's the sort of attitude Stephen brings into these conversations, and it's why I think he's not going to be a stabilizer. He's going to be an accelerant.
FADEL: How has Miller influenced President Trump's policies in his second term so far?
TAYLOR: Stephen always, always, always overreaches, OK. You think of the policies he was behind in the first term - Muslim ban, family separation - both of which had to be walked back. In a second term, he's been behind things like the troops on American city streets and the immigration crackdown in Minnesota and a whole host of other policies that have either been walked back by federal judges or by the president himself. His tendency is always to go to the extremes until he gets walked back. So he will get walked back. The problem is that first, we are headed toward the extremes.
FADEL: Were you surprised by the promotion, given that the president has also said immigration crackdowns maybe went too far, and he's the architect of that?
TAYLOR: You know, I wasn't. Just a week before the election, we had just finished and put out this documentary called "Corruptionland." And as part of it, we studied a hundred allegations of corruption in Trump's Washington. If you go look at the map - people can see the data for free at corruptionland.org, and they can stream the documentary. But we've got all hundred on that map, and it totals $377 billion in corruption.
When I looked at that map, to me, a lot of those dots had their genesis if not in Stephen's ideas, then in Stephen's execution on behalf of the president. To me, it made a lot of sense that he would choose Stephen. He's the type of person you expect to be with the leader in the bunker until the very, very end. And Trump sees what Stephen has done for him in putting those dots on that map. And so expect more of that. I mean, frankly, I expect a corruption spree in Washington.
And what do I mean by that? I mean, when I talk about corruption when it comes to Donald Trump, I mean the use of federal power for wrongdoing or for self-enrichment or for revenge, and especially on that third piece. It was already reported over the weekend that Miller and Todd Blanche had evidently discussed a plan to start arresting journalists to try to pressure them to reveal their sources. That's the type of thing Stephen's been talking about since the first administration.
FADEL: When we reached out to the White House about your appearance today, a spokeswoman wrote that you're a leaker with Trump derangement syndrome. What do you say to that?
TAYLOR: Well, look, I mean, at the end of the day, what I would say is anyone who's unwilling to tell the truth about this administration, I think, is probably a danger. There's one single expectation of every government employee in the United States of America, and that's you uphold the law. And if you're asked to break the law, you should go tell the country about it.
FADEL: Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Thank you for your time.
TAYLOR: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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