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Ex-Trump aide shows how Trump turned the GOP 'authoritarian curious’
Gideon Rubin
July 21, 2023

Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump

A former Trump administration official on Friday suggested it’s not just his former boss that pro-democracy advocates need to worry about.

Miles Taylor during an appearance on “MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” said that the Republican party has become “authoritarian curious,” a shift in American politics he called “enormously alarming.”

“I spent two years trying to map this out, not just in my name, but by talking to senior Republicans in Congress, former Republicans, senior Trump administration officials that I served with from the cabinet level all the way down to people who sat outside of the Oval Office, and the big takeaway Ali was that the GOP has become very authoritarian curious if you will, and that it's not just Donald Trump that's been flirting with fascism," said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff during the Trump administration who authored of the newly released book “Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump.”

"A lot of these other candidates in the race with him have actually taken Trumpism further than Donald Trump did. They've taken policies that Trump himself rejected and implemented them like Ron DeSantis with using migrants as pawns and flying them around the United States. Greg Abbott's done the same thing."

He added:

“Similarly, we've seen that, you know, Trump's fringe talking point about witch hunts inside the FBI and the need to cleanse that building become a mainstream talking point. So Trumpism has really grown beyond his control, and you said the operative words Ali, ‘vengeance and retribution.’"

“Donald Trump sounds like he's auditioning for a bad Batman movie, but that language has been embraced by the wider Republican Party.”

Velshi suggested that 40 years ago it would’ve been hard to imagine the GOP would distance itself so far from Ronald Reagan and asked Taylor what he thought it would take to return it to a more traditional Republican political party.

“First, I think folks need a wake-up call about how serious it is. I mean, the whole point of writing this down in Blowback was to try to map out the playbook of persecution that they want to put in place and by they, I mean, the broader MAGA movement, Trump’s allies here in Washington, who want to support whoever the Republican candidate is and stamp their administration and some of the anecdotes that these senior Trump officials gave me are shocking. I mean, there's playbooks for how to start using the levers of government to spy on political rivals, to deploy DHS forces into Democratic cities to intimidate the political opposition, to appoint special counsels to prosecute Democratic politicians and left leaning organizations."

“This is very systematic weaponization of the federal government with the most thin legal veneer of validity that they can put on top of it to justify what they are doing. It's enormously alarming and I don't think Donald Trump is the only one who would implement that playbook.”