Dissent against Donald Trump is bubbling within his administration—but people are too scared to act on it.
Some White House staffers no longer believe that Trump is fit to be president, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during Trump’s first term. They believe that the president is “still the same man, but worse and emboldened,” Taylor said on the Court of History podcast. He noted that staffers described Trump as “deeply impulsive, but impulsive without checks and balances around him.”
“If I was sitting with Donald Trump right now, I would say, ‘I have friends in your White House, and some of them are … [lying] very, very low, but share some of the same concerns that I had during the first Trump administration,’” Taylor said.
Taylor drew national attention in 2018 when he anonymously penned an op-ed for The New York Times claiming to be part of the internal “resistance” against Trump’s agenda, lumping himself in with a group of senior officials who did not believe Trump was fit for the nation’s highest office. He has since written several books assessing Trump’s behavior in the White House that revealed intimate insider accounts.
“The people around [Trump] aren’t trying to talk him out of doing bad things—if anything, they are demonstrating fealty at every turn to the leader, and that’s resulting in a lot of bad decisions getting made,” Taylor said.
This has proven true since the inauguration: The president has developed a real soft spot for public deference, whether it’s receiving ultra-lavish gifts from Qatar to warm trade negotiations, a $45 million military parade to jointly celebrate his birthday and the Army’s 250th anniversary, or Cabinet meeting round-robins focused on gushing about Trump’s performance.
The president’s second-term quest to nix Washington’s so-called “deep state” and replace it with an army of MAGA yes-men has so far been successful, and the result is a Trumpian loyalty more akin to a religion than a political ideology. It all became particularly evident in April, when Trump wheeled out his “Liberation Day” tariff plan using figures that nobody in his vicinity had dared to notify him were founded on bad math.
And the problem may only get worse as time goes on.
“Now, most of the folks I know are on, of course, the national security side of the [White] House, and some of them still think that they can keep their hand on the wheel. And I would prefer some of those people in the posts I’m thinking about than others who might replace them,” Taylor noted. “But I think people of conscience in this administration know that they are an endangered species.”
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