Insider Reveals the Leaks in WH and Trump’s Hidden Secret

He's basically said, "Could you put the cameras down?" Yeah. And we kept talking. And he said, "I'm thinking I'm gonna have to vote for a Democrat, for the first time in my life. We were talking about James Taylor Rico." And he's like, "It's one of those weird things where I know other people in my social circle. They're gonna do the same." He's like, "I got family members that are gonna do the same, but we're not talking about it." (upbeat music) (upbeat music) All right, joining me today in studio is national security expert in founder of defiance.org incredible organization, which we're gonna get into. Of course, I'm talking about Miles Taylor, who actually worked inside the death star at Trump 1.0. He resigned because he's not a dipshit and he didn't wanna do bad things. And now he is out fighting for justice and transparency and exposed and shining a light on all the corruption that Trump is doing. Miles, how are you? It's great to be with you. I love being here in person. It's the best. No more zooms, death to zooms and substats. I know, in person is better. Okay, before I get into more complex things, I wanna dive into when you worked in Trump 1.0. Psychology behind the scenes. So you have this man, Trump, who's got personality disorders out the wazoo, is not the sharpest tool in the shed. It's not a big, long, deep, methodical thinker is super impulsive. Behind the scenes in 1.0 was everybody like, "God, this guy's nuts." - Yeah, absolutely. Look, this is one of the things that was so confounding to me. I shouldn't have been the person who needed to quit and come forward from the first Trump administration. There were a thousand people more interesting than Miles Taylor to come say the things that I've said. Virtually every cabinet member in the first Trump administration that I interacted with on a daily basis felt precisely the same way I feel. Now, you've heard that from some of them after the fact or close to the 2020 election, I spent like two years begging people at coffees and lunches and dinners, please come forward with me. We have to go say this before the election, but a lot more of them, you have seen stay silent because they wanna continue to remain in the party, they don't want to be on Donald Trump's enemies list, but they all felt this way. They either felt like the man was one of the stupidest people they'd ever met in their lives without exaggeration. I mean, those are things you would hear the Mike Pompeo types say, I wish you would say it publicly, is this guy is so dumb. Or things like my former boss John Kelly said, which was towards the end, he said to me, Miles, this is a very, very evil man. That's what he said of our boss, Donald Trump, and I agreed with that assessment. Is John Kelly the one that reported that Trump wanted generals like Hitler's generals? - Yeah, he did. He had shared, of course, the story about the Trump's comments about suckers and losers. - At the 17th. - Over there at the cemetery in Europe, but also on multiple occasions, Trump had raised with John Kelly, Hitler being perhaps not as bad as people said he was, or that he had obedient generals, or he'd said to John Kelly at one point, you know, Hitler did some good things too, didn't he? But these things would shock anyone, okay? Just anyone could listen to us right now and put themselves on the couch with a grandparent and say, this is some real weird shit. Talking about how Hitler might have been a good guy. - Yeah. - We're talking about the American president, and while he's in office, and I think those things, again, they would have rocked anyone, they certainly rocked John Kelly, but that's why you saw four-star marine generals who hold their tongues and don't usually come forward and don't talk politics, come out and say, look, this guy has the heart and soul of a fascist. You didn't just see John Kelly say that. You saw Mark Millie say that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I did not know these men to engage in hyperbole. I wasn't even coming out in 2020 and saying Donald Trump was a fascist. I felt like people wouldn't take me seriously if I used that language, but that's the language that these men chose. And I think now in the second term, we understand more precisely why. So I always think that one good thing, one thing that Trump excels at is self-preservation. So Trump 1.0 delivered the most narcissistic injury he's ever experienced in his life, and that was the defeat of the presidential election when Joe Biden beat him. And then these people he worked with, these very respected, weathered, learned men patriots in every sense of the word, dismantled him and exposed him for the fraud that he is, the people who worked in his cabinet, and Trump 2.0 fast forward, and he has learned, I need to be around losers, and he said it. He said it, I love hanging out with the losers, was though I feel like I'm the smartest person. So now he is surrounded by losers. And when you talk about Millie and John Kelly, these people who served and genuinely really care about the United States of America in a true patriotic sense. But I don't know that I really feel that, but I think these people who serve in the military have that experience where they really feel that. And now you have the Secretary of Defense, I refuse to call it Secretary of War, the Secretary of Defense, firing seasoned, weathered, learned, non-impulsive people from the Department of Defense. I'm terrified right now that he learned a lesson from that narcissistic injury in 2020. But now he is inside the death star. Anybody who was a miles Taylor or a Millie or a John Kelly, hit the bridge, you're out. And now he has all of these morally defunct, emotionally stunted people that are cultists, that whatever the election results are of the midterms, he has things in play where he's gonna mess with it. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewey hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. - Maybe it's Mavily. - Well, there's this illusion, I think, in American politics that our institutions are this literal brick wall that protects us from bad things. The institutions are only as strong as the people. Only as strong as the people. And what that really meant practically, brass tacks, people in the first term who were willing to say no to the president's face. Now, a lot of them weren't. A lot of them would sidestep a crazy thing Trump said and try to find a way to turn off the bad idea without pissing off the president. But some folks realized after a year or two, saying no was no longer enough, you really had to get the lawyers involved, tell the president, you will be impeached if you do this. You're gonna lose massively in the elections if you do this. There were a lot of behind the scenes, confrontations with the president of the United States because there were people willing to tell him no. Those were the institutions that held. Now I get the folks who cast a side eye at people like me or Kelly or John Bolton or anyone who came forward after the first administration said, okay, you guys are saying you saved the world and that the sky is falling. Sure, why should we believe you? Look, I'll be the first to say there were no heroes in the first Trump administration. There were only survivors and witnesses. And we were trying to bear witness to what we had seen and say, believe us. If he gets elected to do a second term, he's already tried to systematically get rid of the people who said no, he's going to be able to do all of these batshit crazy things if he packs his cabinet with the people who will say yes. And now we see that, we see what that looks like. I mean, Jen, the White House council will sharf the man who's the president's chief lawyer. That job should be the chief person saying no to bad ideas and illegal ideas and unconstitutional ideas. That same person is the head of Donald Trump's Monuments Commission in Washington DC. The man literally approving monuments to a living president of the United States is supposed to be the lawyer that tells him no. He's not. And so you're right that Trump has, he learned that lesson. He built a cabinet that would say yes instead of no, even if something was illegal. But I think if we look back at history, we identify that pattern. I always cite back to a guy named Friedrich Hayek, Austrian economist and philosopher. He wrote a book called The Road to Serfdom in the 1940s about what he had witnessed with Nazi Germany. And I think it's chapter eight or nine of the book is called something like, why the worst rise to the top. He could not understand how in the German federal system, so many people who'd been coached in democracy and the origins of free society could end up doing whatever Adolf Hitler wanted. And his ultimate conclusion was, when you have an autocrat at the top, there is one selection criteria. And that's loyalty and not the law. And if you're loyal, that means you're willing to do anything, that means you'll say yes to anything. That means the worst will rise to the top. We saw that in Stalin's Russia. In fact, people have written volumes about how the little Stalin's were worse than Joseph Stalin because the little Stalin's would do anything, even beyond Stalin's imagination, 'cause they had to to win his favor. And now you see that with Trump, the little Trumps around Donald Trump in some cases are even more. worse than this man is because there's nothing that they won't do. So that makes me think a little Marco obviously. You know, but I, okay, I want to ask it's the best example. I used to work on the hill with Marco Rubio. I used to look up to Marco Rubio. I used to want Marco Rubio to be president of the United States. He has sold his soul to Trumpism. It's so hurtful to see this, Jen, because the months before Donald Trump won his second term, I went to a private event with Marco. And we were talking about, we were talking basically about the universality of freedom. And spreading freedom around the globe. And you know, he would talk in these broad brush terms in ways very similar to Hillary Clinton. You could have said Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton shared a lot of the traditional, what's called the Washington consensus about the need to help spread liberalism around the world. Not necessarily at the barrel of a gun, but that this was our mission as America's, like let's open up free societies wherever there's not free societies. Same Marco Rubio months later goes into the Trump administration. And now is presiding over the destruction of our alliances with the free world and the opening of relations with the worst autocracies on the planet. I mean, it's got to be the most humiliating thing to him when he goes to bed. Everything he spent his career railing against, Marco Rubio now owns. It's really, it's incredible. It's incredible to watch the capitulation. What is surprised you most from leaving Trump one point out being a whistleblower, seeing where this was heading with your colleagues. You all saw where this was heading, waved your hand, do not do this. We're telling you this is what is going to happen. Trump 2.0 has it gone faster than what you thought it would go. Is it about the same as what you thought it would go? Do you think he's planning to go further? Because you have a unique insight that so many Americans don't. So what's your take on analysis on 2.0 thus far and how far do you think he's going to take this thing? 2 things, one's bad news, one's good news. He did go further and faster. I wrote this book that almost no one read, 2023, I wrote a book that a lot of people read in 2020 about why not to re-elect the guy. It was great. And I'm not saying the book kept it from getting re-elected, but a lot of people paid attention to those warnings. In October of 2020, I think Jake Tapper, when he had a bunch of us on this program called the Insiders, said it was the largest group of American officials in US history who had turned against a president that they had served. There was an outpouring, and a lot of Republicans voted against Donald Trump for the first time in their lives voting for a Democrat. By the skin of our teeth, we prevented a second Trump term. Then in 2023, I was like, I think we're going to forget the lesson. I think we're going to forget the lesson. And I went on this Odyssey to try to paint as lucid of a picture as possible of a second Trump term. I went and spoke to a hundred of my former colleagues from the Trump administration and in the Republican Party. And I asked them all one question. I said, what did he want to do in a first term that he wasn't able to do and that he would do in a second? And I wrote the entire thing into a book and I said, this is what the second term of Donald Trump will look like. Now, at the time in 2023, Trump and his minions came out and said, this is horseshit. One of the quotes from his ugly ass spokesman was, this is toilet paper to wipe yourself with. Just on and on and on. All lies, all lies. Did the analysis three months ago, 90% of the predictions in the book have come true, not 60, not 70, not 80, 90%. But that's because these were the things he had already wanted to do, that he had already directed AIDS to do, that they said, no, Mr. President, this is illegal. And that happened a lot faster than I thought. They got to 90% a lot faster than I thought. That doesn't mean that all the danger has passed. It means they've put it in place, the foundation, to continue this autocratic experiment for the duration of his presidency. That's the bad news. They've moved a lot faster and a lot further than I thought they would. The good news is, I think we have to. I have been surprised at the level of defiance in this country. I have been surprised at the resistance coming together societally against this guy. And a way that I didn't feel like at the beginning of last year, when he came back in, the level of social fear, you remember this, I felt it. It was off the charts. Celebrities who used to speak out against Donald Trump for a decade went silent. And I said, I can't talk about this guy. Business leaders who had spent millions in their own pocketbooks against Donald Trump said, I'm going to go donate to his inaugural fund. I mean, up and down, where it was most visible to me and shocking to me, was at the grassroots level. So in April, when Trump came back in, he signs this executive order opening a federal investigation into me for treason, okay, a crime punishable by death. For having spoken out against him, the president felt like I should be executed, not an exaggeration. I was told at the time that was the first point in 250 years of this republic that any president had opened a federal investigation into a critic with the stroke of their pen. That's never happened before. That's called a bill of a tinder. It's one of the reasons we separated from Britain because the king was literally taking his pen and ordering trials of his critics. It's in the Declaration of Independence that this is one of the reasons we separated. Donald Trump last year broke that norm, American president directing investigations. Same day, he signed one into my former colleague, Chris Krebs, who had said that the election was not stolen in 2020. Another fellow Trump appointee, he fired Chris by tweet for that. But the point here is Trump opens that investigation. One of the first things that I try to do is go fundraise for my legal defense. My wife and I were thinking about do we have to sell the house to defend ourselves against this guy and we were planning a great organization step forward and offered a legal defense fund and we were planning a fundraiser for it in Chicago. We went to three different venues to try to get them to host this fundraiser. We're talking restaurants, catering companies, each of them said no. The final organization, I was like, what is happening here? We just literally want to pay you to serve coax and diet coax at an event. Does it matter what kind of an event? And the owner of this catering company said, I'm worried about my employees being targeted by ice and potentially deported if I do something like this. And that was a watershed moment for me. I realized, wow, the social fear in Trump too is off the charts. Ordinary folks are scared to associate with you because the president might come after them if he's already coming after you. I say that because here we are more than a year later and there's been a 180. It has become chic to defy this man. It was scary even to progressives when he came back in to defy him because people were worried about being investigated. People were worried about going to prison. Now we are seeing numbers that are off the charts, including from his own movement who are turning against him. I did not expect that. That gives me a lot of encouragement. Now I agree. And I think you probably saw the poll that came out, his approval rating is at 29%. I think we can do better. I'm looking for that to be in the single digits. We can do better. America, I want to talk about his authoritarian moves. You know that right now he is laser focused on his arch. And now he's claiming the arch will be a military complex with snipers and drones. And he's using these vanity projects. And now looping the military in it, is he trying to prime, is there a constant effort in the fascist project to prime the public for living in a hyper militarized state? If only he had that sort of foresight and intention and design and intellect. I mean, is the one thing that's difficult about Donald Trump is we have to talk in terms of like this is the authoritarian playbook, but the guy's never read a book in his life, but alone a playbook of autocracy, right? He's just sort of reflexively falling into it. And I mean, that literally, like we could not get the guy to read in the first term. This is one of the first experiences I had with Donald Trump is I kept getting told we can't send anything with a staple in it to the White House. We can't send anything with a staple into the White, if it's more than one of these, more than one page, it's too much for him to read. And if it's one page, it better be half the page of words at most and the other half better be a picture. It's a real instructions on engaging with the president of the United States. I go into that from having dealt with previous presidents like Barack Obama and George W. Bush where they could handle a 50 page classified brief on a very complex sensitive national security issue. They could handle it. They might not read the entire thing end to end, but they would digest it. They would skim it. The guy couldn't even do that. Okay. So he doesn't understand the playbook of autocrats. He is carried out the playbook of autocrats. I think when it comes to the arch, it's the most obvious thing here, which is he's realized his vanity projects are much harder to get through if they're just vanity projects, because his own side has a tough time defending them. And he watched that with the ballroom, like he wanted them to all say, yes, the president needs a ballroom. He realized that's where the line was. They were having a hard time going to their constituents and to the microphones and saying the president really needs a ballroom. So he discovered through trial and error, as he always does, fumbling, shifting his justifications, that if he said it was a military complex and a bunker that they could defend that. Now he's done the obvious thing an idiot would do and he's just copied it and pasted it onto the next issue and said, here's what we're going to do with the arch. You know, I had a call with my team yesterday and we were talking about this and someone on my team said, you know, do you think there's an underlying conspiracy here with the arch? Do you think he's planning something bigger in DC as literally no one I agree with in the White House? No one in the Pentagon heard about this or knew about this until he woke up had a big Mac in his bed in the White House. residents decided this was the cleverest thing anyone had ever come up with and then tweets this idea out into the world. Let's just start with the snipers for a second. Under what conceivable theory would you put snipers, a mile outside of Washington D.C.'s center to take out threats to the federal government? Wouldn't you just put them in the city because the arch is like outside of the city at the end of this bridge near Arlington, it doesn't make any sense to put snipers there, right? I mean, that we're engaging with it is shocking enough, but it's stupid on its face. The same thing with the emergency drones. If you're trying to protect places like the White House and the Capitol, why would you stick the drones outside of town across the river? Why would you do that? Why would you delay? So, it was cooked up by the president in his microwave mind in some random morning and pushed out into the world, but this is what's really scary. Because now what happens is everyone around him scrambles to say it's the most genius strategy ever. He's the best military strategist in the world. The Pentagon is going to put real human beings and spend real taxpayer dollars on assessing this toy structure that opens up and lets drones out that has no real national security purpose. And then they're going to go piss away taxpayer dollars to create this useless toy at the edge of town for the thing we all know it's meant for is just to make it easier for the president to sell the creation of a monument to himself. And I also think he's realized legally this might give him more cover. He saw with the ballroom that when this went up to the Supreme Court, the fact that there was a bunker element gave him more to stand on that as president. He's got greater authority with his commander in chief outfit on than he has with his ballroom dancing outfit on. So he's putting that commander in chief uniform on now hoping that will allow the arch to survive. But here, I'm going to tell you one thing, Jennifer, that no one else has said about this yet. Okay. Potentially four or five months from now, there's going to be a litigant that can take this thing down. The most powerful litigant there could be because right now you or I can't sue about our taxpayer dollars being pissed away to create a monument. You don't want. I don't want hardly anyone in America wants, but you know who can protest this. The U.S. House of Representatives. The U.S. House of Representatives by majority vote can sue the president of the United States. Now, that can't happen on anything. It can't just be any time the president breaks a law. But if Congress has really strong standing that they didn't, for instance, authorize money for something that the president does anyway, they can sue. Now you haven't seen this Congress sue, but if Democrats retake the House majority, you bet your ass. They're going to sue over this arch they should and they can win in the courts. And I have not heard anyone talking about that. I haven't heard Democrats talking about that literally just today while I was on the flight in, I started thinking through here are the different legal areas where the House needs to bring lawsuits where the president hasn't been stopped. And I think on January 4th, we should see a flurry of lawsuits from the House of Representatives against this administration for things that they've done which are patent legal. I completely agree. I think the Democrats have to have a strategy where they're walking and chewing gum undoing as much as they possibly can, stopping the bleeding while also aggressively, aggressively calling for accountability to this movement. And a couple of things that stuck out to me that you said, which everything you said is so intriguing, but he reflexively isn't authoritarian. And I talk about that a lot on my show. How painfully unoriginal this personality type is and how painfully unoriginal all of the submissive tradwives and I'm talking about Marco Rubio, I'm talking about Steven Miller. These are submissive tradwives and how painfully unoriginal their behavior is. But in that, they think they're so universally unique in 10-foot tall and bulletproof. And so Donald Trump has a constant companion by his side, Natalie Hart, which I refer to as the bunny boiler from the movie Fatal Attraction, which I think is totally appropriate and worthy. And recently he said, no CNN, no MSNOW, no Politico, what was leaked that the bunny boiler made a presentation for him with charts because this backs up years that he can't read it. These are all the mean stories that Politico did on you. Here's all the mean stories that CNN did, here's all the mean stories that MSNOW did. So he said, okay, they can't be around me anymore. She's like, oh, good, yeah, we can't have them. Her job is to print flattering stories for him only. So I imagine she scraped in the bottle of the barrel with this 29% approval rating. And then you have a lot of fissures in the MAGA movement, especially in the right-wing media ecosystem with Tucker and people realizing we're not going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic anymore. So this brings me to something I think is really interesting. It's the psychology of who is working in the oval right now. Somebody leaked that Natalie made this show and tell presentation for the president. Somebody leaked. And oftentimes you're hearing all of these leaks coming out from this regime that puts up this facade in these horrible circle jerks that we all have to watch, the cabinet meetings where Trump's sleeping and Marco's droning on about how great he is, all of this stuff. You've worked inside this stuff. How toxic do you think that this work environment is with people jockeying for his praise? And then who do you think, if you were to guess, is leaking this stuff to the press about Natalie? Who would want to get Natalie out of there? Not the hero any of us are hoping. I mean, really? I don't want to think any of them are heroic. Just the psychology behind how incompetent and toxic these people are. Like we're governed by people emotionally stunted, intellectually stunted people. In the first term, you saw a lot of people who had spent their careers in Washington who were behind the scenes in a full on panic because they thought the office might, might humble Donald Trump as disgusting as he was and it was obvious to everyone, any Republican who tells you we didn't know what he was going to be like, they're lying. Please, we all knew what he was going to be like. That's why I was working for Paul Ryan at the time when he got elected. That's why we tried everything to sink the guy's candidacy because he's not even an actual Republican. Get him out of the party. So they all knew who he was. But once he got in, there was a naive hope that I shared that the office might bring him down a couple of notches and make him more level headed, right? We watched Barack Obama get gray here at an office. We watched George W. Bush get gray here. All of them talked about the oval office having this effect on them. It didn't happen to Donald Trump. In fact, it was worse than anyone thought it was. That was the. I noticed he didn't age in Trump 1.0. That's right. And those were the. Incredible. That was the horrible recruitment message that John Kelly gave me to come into the administration. He said, "Miles, it's not as bad as it looks on the inside. It is so much worse." Now he knew that that would sell me because I wanted to keep bad things from happening. But it was so much worse. So a lot of the. Not all of it, but a lot of the leaking you saw out of the first administration was ordinary folks, bureaucrats who had been like, "This is not how the government's supposed to operate. This man is breaking laws. This man is doing very dangerous things. This go around when there are leaks from this White House. It's my supposition that it's from people who want to climb into that next spot. They're the little trumps, like the little Stalin's, like the little Hitler's jockeying for position and trying to oust one another. And who is on a pedestal above almost everyone, Natalie Harp. You know, I take issue with some of the bed wetting Democrats who said, "Don't disparage Natalie Harp. Don't go after this young woman. That's beneath us." Some people I respect in the Democratic Party who had said, "This is. This is tawdry." No, this is not tawdry. This is now national security. These little Natalie Harps are shaping the mind of a wayward president in very dangerous directions on a daily basis. Not only is she fair game, she and the other enablers should be more of a focus of hours than they are right now because he's giving them an absurd remit. The U.S. Congress never created the authority for the Natalie Harp cabinet secretary position to go destroy the First Amendment and kick outlets out of the White House. But now things like that are happening with great effect. So I think we do need to zoom in on these people. We do need to look at the phenomenon, but we also have, again, history as a guide for what happens here. And this is where I have another silver lining, is bad as these enablers are. They also are not smart enough to realize that their predecessors throughout history have been self-defeating the deeper they've embraced autocracy. Here's what I mean by that. When Donald Trump came back into office, as he started writing out investigative orders against people and censoring law firms and going after comedians, what he didn't realize, what his subordinates didn't realize is, the more people you go after, the bigger your political opposition becomes. You literally grow the movement to fight you. Think about his biggest diehard loyalists, the Marjorie Taylor Greens, the Thomas Massies, the Tucker Carlson's whose text messages we had after January 6 where he basically said, this isn't saying this wasn't real, this guy's got to go, yet still goes on TV and self-flagilates and licks the president's shoes like those people. He went after and they've joined the political opposition are they perfect nose very imperfect characters, but he has gone after so many folks that he has created the foundations for his own demise. So Natalie Harp is it's scary that she allegedly coerced the press or convinced the president to kick three mainstream media outlets out of the White House and take a chip out of the first amendment. Yeah, that's scary. But what Natalie Harp doesn't realize what Donald Trump doesn't realize is that in doing that, they are growing the resistance against them by an order of magnitude every single time unwittingly. I agree with everything you say and you're taken on that. I want to talk about something you said about the Democrats and where you said the Democrats were like, don't go after Natalie Harp and I share your outrage at that. Used to be a Republican with the Republicans for a second, blink, no hesitate. I know exactly where you're going to know that Barack Obama had a 35 year old that was with him at all times of the night while he is posting AI slot, printing out favorable stories of him. They wouldn't blink for a second. They would dismantle that person immediately and deservingly so and it's that hesitation that Democrats have where when we show up to these fights with these fascists with no principles with plastic spoons and the Republicans, these mega fascists have machine guns and grenades and all sorts of weapons and wherever you're like, you know, with our plastic spoons, it makes me insane because I think anybody, anybody who witnessed what we all saw on Trump 1.0, what we saw on January 6, what we have seen from the Epstein files, what we know the judge in the E. Jean Carol case said that he is an adjudicated rapist. The way he speaks to female reporters, lying about starting a war, clapping like a seal in Alaska for Vladimir Putin, anybody who says, I'm good going to work there, is completely disqualified in my eyes and we should brow beat the ever living, ever living shit out of them from now and forever because they are fascists and/or fascist collaborators and sometimes Democrats do this and they seed ground to right wing talking points that capitulate to right wing framing and it makes me crazy because the Republicans never do that. I mean, he came Jeffries being here in New York City and meeting with Jared Kushner. Unacceptable. On, man, read the room, read the room. This guy is acting like he's secretary of state and attorney general and also Trump family member and trade and cash as a Jared Kushner and the House minority leader is going to take a meeting with him. The man who's probably going to be speaker of the House is going to take a meeting with him to do back door dealing. Well, that signals two things. One, it signals that Donald Trump is nervous as hell. He's going to lose control of Congress and be investigated into oblivion, which he will be. He will spend the rest of his breathing days on this planet under federal investigation of one form or another. There's no magic pardon power that's going to absolve him of all of it. He will remain under investigation. So will his family members. But it told us the second thing. It told us that Democratic leaders, a number of them are not equipped for this moment. They are operating in the Washington of like 2007 or 2008 where you said you cut a deal. You make things better. There is a fundamental assault on the Bill of Rights taking place right now. Hakeem Jeffries constituents are under siege. We are under siege by a lawless administration. It's not a time for back door meetings with the president's kids to talk about how we can make it better and work together. That's also why I think as Democrats look at the possibility of retaking power in the House and maybe the Senate that they need to consider drawing from outside of the body for leaders. I talked about the other week. The possibility that Democrats maybe should name someone like a Pete Buttigieg, a speaker of the House. They can choose someone from outside the body. You don't have to be an elected member of the House to be chosen to be the speaker of the House according to the Constitution. This is a moment for radical thinking like that for the Democrats to say, you know, if this person is going to be the leader of the party and seen as the leader of the Congress and third and second in line to the U.S. presidency, we should put forward a figure that can stand toe to toe with Donald Trump and dismantle him completely. Hakeem Jeffries is a nice enough guy. I like him personally. I don't think that's the type of person you put face to face with an autocrat to fight him. They need someone who's ready for this moment and I'm going to keep saying that until January. Democrats are going to get into this institutional bureaucratic thinking we won the House. Here's who's most senior. Here's what we do. This is not that moment. The same 2007, 2008, this isn't 2012. This is a fundamental moment for the survival of our republic and we need to act like it. I completely agree. I whistle blow all the time and I agree with you. I am a lifelong Democrat. I don't enjoy anything about being disappointed at Hakeem Jeffries because I want to feel like I'm a part of a team, like I'm part of an opposition and we all have a unified goal. When I hear that Hakeem is taking private meetings with Jared Kushner, which my personal belief is then Jared Kushner leaked that meeting to make Hakeem look bad to the Democratic base, which it did. It was behind the scenes. It was secret. He wasn't transparent about it. When I find out that Hakeem is taking money from the same packs that are funding fascism, I see that he's corruptible because my argument right now is we need politicians that are incorruptible. Bernie Sanders, for years, has been branded this. He's crazy. He's all of this stuff. Well, his message, in light of what's happening right now, unregulated capitalism is giving too much power to the top. This is not sustainable. Who was right? Go listen to Bernie Sanders on YouTube from 30 years ago. His message is aged the best. It turns out he wasn't crazy, nor radical. It turns out he was incorruptible. You can't corrupt him. Zoran Mamdani, incorruptible. And I want politicians right now that are not prostitutes. And I just see so many people in the Democratic establishment. And my fear is they're going to merit Garland, Marick Garland, this thing, I'm making the Marick Garland thing a verb, by the way. They're going to merit Garland, this thing. And they're going to be like, we just need to take it back to where we were. Without acknowledging that the Democratic Party also played a part in incubating this moment. Because why did Trump come about? Because both parties failed to deliver materially for the people and prioritize delivering for corporations. And it incubated this moment. And it's not just Trump came down the escalator and all this shit popped out. It's not even close to what happened. And I think this is something interesting, and I want to get your take on this. You said, in 2016, nobody wanted Trump to be president, most of which, the Republicans and Fox News. But something was happening in the space that we're in right now. And in this right wing media ecosystem, which was advanced at that point way ahead of the left doing one, people were organizing, weaning off of corporate news and getting their news from different figures. Like wise right now, we're seeing the same thing happen with the Democratic Party. You see the establishment did not want Zora and Mom Donnie. He beat Andrew Cuomo twice. He took on every rich billionaire, big swinging dick, Manhattan hedge fund guy. You can imagine every lobby you can imagine, and he won. It was crazy. The guy makes like $93,000 a year or something like that. He won. He took them all on and won because something is happening on the left that's happening in 2016 on the right. And it is that the establishment people who focus group and higher consultants figure out what the voters want are not in this space right now. They're still in this corporate news world. And I think that the Democratic Party is in the process of finding out, is you see people like Angie Nixon rising up in Florida, which I love her as a candidate had her as a guest, Abdullah Sayed and others that are not beholden to corporations rise up. I think the Democratic Party is having its 2016 moment, but in the inverse, but for good. What do you think? It can break the other direction, and I'll put it this way, populism can either be an extraordinary force for reform or one of the most destructive forces in the history of humankind. We've seen it be both. We've seen the worst despotisms on the planet Earth torn down by populism and remade into republics. Look, what happened in the United States of America, right? The civil or sorry, the Revolutionary War was a populist uprising against a monarchy. It worked pretty damn well for 250 years. We've also seen 2,000 years ago in Greek city states, populism destroyed democracy. It's not inherently good or bad, but it starts with identifying what it is and shaping at that direction. I think you're right about the moment we're in now, and I'll give you a personal example. When you talked about Bernie Sanders that way, me of 10 years ago would have vomited on this table and said, "Gen, Bernie Sanders, I would have gone on a screed about how crazy he was, but what I wouldn't have disagreed with you about then or now is that the man believes what he says and he's committed to the United States." Constitution. I'm at a point in my life where I could give a shit whether Bernie Sanders and I agree or disagree on appropriations law and the size of the federal budget and welfare programs that is so secondary or tertiary to the fact that we have leaders right now who don't abide by the rules of the game, the US Constitution. My platform is the US Constitution. I think Americans are crossing political lines right now because they want someone just to say, "Isn't this the thing we all agreed to abide by?" And then we could debate within that. Mom Donnie, Bernie Sanders, you're seeing these people who conservatives like me would otherwise say, "Get them out of my newsfeed." We're saying these people are being heroic because they are standing up for those American values. I disagree with both Mom Donnie and Bernie Sanders on a lot of things on economics, but I am allied with them on wanting to preserve the fabric of our republic. And I think you see that a lot. I mean, I was both surprised and not surprised to see Tucker Carlson come out and endorse Elsa yet. I know. In Michigan. But at first it felt like the sort of strange bedfellows catnip story that the political press loves. But then you realize it's a similar thing for him. No, I'm not saying Tucker Carlson and I align either, but Tucker Carlson is a guy right now that's saying, "Look, I rode with this Maga movement for a long time. They're doing extraordinary damage to the country. Tucker's done his own damage. The fact that he is embracing an L.C.I.D. tells you a lot about what's happening in our politics." Now, L.C.I.D. probably feels like that's maybe that's the kiss of death. Maybe it's not. Maybe it gives him some voters. Right. He needs in blue collar Michigan. But there is a realignment happening and I think it's because of that populist fervor and that really can be steered toward good. And it couldn't come at a better moment because we will need reform more now than at any other point in our history after this administration. And that willingness to cross lines and create new political coalitions is going to give us the ability to do it. Okay. What do you think about when I think of Republican voters? I think about them in groups. I think about the working class as Trump refers to them poorly educated. I think about the cultists who their whole identity is the fight, fight, fight photograph. That's like that's their life. And then you have country-club republicans, which I grew up around in Oklahoma City. Country-club republicans would be like you. Somebody who likes a tax break, somebody who wants laws a fair economics, wants the government out of people's businesses, no regulations, wealth trickles down, this kind of this type of stuff, right? You're not wrong. I just need a country-club membership, I'm still. Someone out there wants to donate a country-club membership. Then you'll be a country. Slide into my DMs. And then these people value, this is always fascinating about the country-club republicans because they would come to New York. And if some gay person was having a fabulous party, they wanted to be on that end-violence and they really happened, they were cool. But they were never admit the way they vote because they know it's implied. They know it's obscene to vote for a governor in Oklahoma that banned abortion, to vote for a party that actively tries to make your life and your children's life less safe. And I lived in a republican supermajority for a long time in Oklahoma City. And republican policies actively make people's lives less safe because they value money over human beings 12 times out of 10. And I would see these women and these men that had daughters, beautiful daughters that they loved more than anything on the planet go and vote for the rights of the rapist over their own daughter because of a tax break. I don't know how you fix that. That just seems like such a cancer in the republican party that money is the value over everything. And I saw it time and time and time and time again. And these people had two things in common. They were Uber religious and they were white. And the republican party seems to be able to get the robes, the cultists. And because it's like you might not have anything but by God, you're American and you get to hate these brown people or you get to hate these queers. You can hate these radical lesbians or these white liberal women. And then they offer the country club republicans a little bit of that racism because I'm going to say I've been in a lot of white circles where I've heard it. And but they offer them money. You're not going to let these immigrants take your money. You earned that money. That's yours. And it seems to be this party that encourages white entitlement. We are entitled to all these things. And discourages any sort of collectivism that you see in Scandinavian countries. When you look at these countries that have the highest happy factors. And they don't have all the problems that we have. And people have health care and people can go to college. And the republican party from my view, bird's eye view living right up on it all the time seems to discourage that. Do you think these country club republicans, and I'm talking about you, and I'm kidding, do you think the tax republicans, ex conservative, ex, ex republican, do you think these country club republicans that triple trumped are going to go vote for republican candidates? This I think they were cycle after cycle. I don't think they are now. I'll tell you why. I'm so glad that you put forward that schema because I ran into, I don't even know this guy's name. But I swear to God, if you'd seen him, Jen, you would have said that is the archetype of the country club republican. Let me tell you where. So we were doing a documentary last week in DC called corruption land, a micro documentary. We're putting it out before the midterms to basically try to give people a distilled understanding at what has happened in the nation's capital in terms of whiplash open doors towards corruption. How much corruption has become endemic? It's gone from a rarity to just endemic in Washington, DC. And we were at the White House and we were filming b-roll footage of the cranes built in the ballroom. And I decided just to do some man on the street interviews. Just start talking to folks who are visiting the White House. And I asked them all one question, did Donald Trump drain the swamp? Or did he fill the swamp? Very interesting answers. Really a lot of characters. I don't even know if we're going to use it. The last guy I asked the question too, he was standing there. He had clearly just finished a run. Tall guy, he had like a white towel around his neck, which already tells you like a lot of the story, right? He's got like tortoise shell glasses like me. He's taller, swoop back, Harry's probably in his late 50s or early 60s. He's got the towel from his sweat. Like already exuded country club republican before we even offered him open his mouth. And I went up and I asked him that question and he thought about it for a moment. He didn't answer right away. And he said, I'm a three time Trump voter. He's like, and I'm from Dallas. And I said, oh, so we kind of got into small talks. A lot of people would walk away when you ask the question. They're scared to be on camera. And so I tried to make them feel more comfortable. What are you doing in town? He's here for business. You know, he supported these guys for a long time. And he's like, but I don't know what's happening now. I don't know what's happening. And he was looking at the ballroom and we started talking about he said this stuff, the corruption. He's like, it's just gross. And then he started to get a little bit nervous because right, our camera guy's on him. I got the microphone. And I'm like, so what do you think about draining the swamp? And he's basically said, could you put the cameras down? Yeah. And we kept talking. And he said, I'm thinking I'm going to have to vote for a Democrat for the first time in my life. We were talking about James Taylor Rico. And he's like, it's one of those weird things where I know other people in my social circle. They're going to do the same. He's like, I got family members that are going to do the same. But we're not talking about it because there's something about talking about it. He's like, you know, I don't want my business partners to know. That's the direction I'm going because the circles I roll in, that's not okay. He's like, but I, how am I going to ever vote for Ken Paxton? And it was just, it was such an illuminating conversation because I know that voter is out there. I know that. I know that. I said it earlier. So that 29% Donald Trump only gets down to 29%. If he is statistically hemorrhaging, not hundreds of thousands of people, tens of millions of people in his own movement. I said when he came back in office, he was at 51% approval. I said, this can't be right. That's insane. And that's very scary. And then over the course of the first year, he got down to 40%. That felt like it was still way too high. But that signal to me, he'd lost all the independence, any independence that had broken for Trump largely by the end of the first year said, Oh, yeah, I forgot why this guy sucked. Now I remember why he sucked. But I was still baffled. He was at 40. I was like, he has broken all of his promises to the conservative base. He should be lower than that. And then comes the Iran war. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people who supported him three times through is, but you just kept saying no more forever wars. And now we've seen his support plummet going from 40% down to 29%. That 11% Delta is literally tens of millions of American adults who've said no more. And there's nowhere else to take them from in the electorate than from his own base. Is he going to get down to the single digits? I don't think so. I think he should be there. I really want him to. But it means he's lost so many of those country club Republicans that guy that I met in front of the White House. There are millions of him. And they will decide I think this election. I remember in Oklahoma when Barack Obama was running in 2008. And George W. Bush disaster. Iraq war mission accomplished. Thank you. I mean, just a complete fubar administration beyond. -But we would take him in a heartbeat right now. -Oh, God, I know you would. -I know you would. -I know you would. -Over Trump, I would. But I remember in my peer group, so many people are indoctrinated in red states in their churches to believe that Democrats are demonic and Republicans are the only way to vote. -Yeah. -In this Christians and Republicanism is so enmeshed in the South in religious states. It's just brilliant. It's been a long-term game that the Christian nationalists have played. And I remember so many of my friends wanted to vote for Obama. And they were, like, so stressed out about it. And I had Obama signs. I had, yes, we can, hope and change. I was like, I am the Obama-it girl of Oklahoma City. I put signs up in all my neighbors yard, tried to convert everybody on my street. My kids and my dogs wore Obama t-shirts. Kind of sounds cult-ish, but I was really into it. And I remember so many of my friends that I did it. I voted for Obama, but I didn't tell my parents because they would be so devastated. And I think that's going to be on steroids this midterm. And I remember so many stories of so many people, even on the, it's like right around the Facebook and Facebook was first coming out. I did it. I voted for Obama as the first time I ever voted my parents. And it was this big thing that people voted for a Democrat and a black one. You know, that was a really big thing for Oklahoma. And so I think the situation with the guy in Dallas, I think that's going to happen a lot. I hope that we can create a culture where we ask people outside of parties to vote for good people, vote for really good human beings. And time and time again, both parties end up voting for prostitutes that, that horror themselves out to special interests. And then here's where we are. Okay, tell everybody about defiance.org. And I think you have a project going right now, which is pretty fascinating. Yeah, so I, after Trump, look after Trump came after me last year. I was, I had retreated from public life. I wanted to go back to what I went into government four after 9/11, which was national security, technology policy. That's what I was focused on. Oh, wait, hang on. This is a super important question. I want to ask you national security after 9/11, then we'll get to defiance. Yeah. Why does the United States continue to play patty cake with Saudi Arabia after them funding 9/11 and killing Jamal Khashoggi and buying off Jared Kushner? It's baffling. I can't wrap my head around it. I think the easiest answer money is money. You know, what's the answer to 99 out of 100 questions? Money. I know. Okay. And, you know, I, but I think we're at a moment. This goes back to the populism. We're at a moment where elite institutions of all kinds. They are falling. They are being felt. They're coming, tumbling down. Whether it's legacy, businesses, and institutions or, you know, government structures or the fact that you can be in public life and be hypocritical and successful. Those things are, those things are ending. I mean, hypocrisy is having a really hard time right now. To the point you were making earlier about how could these Republicans live one life and then live another? In this day and age, it's really, really hard to be a hypocrite. Because the sunlight, it just withers hypocrisy. And there's more sunlight being shown everywhere. And I think that's the good news. And I think that's coming for the Saudi relationship. And look, I've sat across the table from the Saudis. I've negotiated deals to save American lives because of what the kingdom was able to do. It's not like they're all sitting there, you know, twiddling their fingers saying that they're going to kill Americans. There are parts of the kingdom that are. And there are parts that we have dealt with. But at the end of the day, we're talking about an autocracy. Okay. Democracies don't make good friends with autocracies in the long run. Period full stop. And while there, while there's been alignment of interest on some things. A reckoning is coming on that front. Thank you for that answer. Now let's, my listeners, we have to support. Obviously, I know you all are probably loving this episode. So we have to support this wonderful person, this hero. I mean, truly, you speaking out, continuing to speak out. And they tried to silence you. And the name of your organization called defiance. I love it. And they still may, they still may come for me. I mean, you know, I say half facetiously. I mean, we put up a, we put up a lot of security features around our property. But one of them was this security gate at the entrance to our property. And I'm going to tell you why quickly because it's just a sign of the times. I went through a dilemma last year after Trump put me under federal investigation, which was I had spent a number of years worried about magas stalkers who had been going after me and my wife and our daughter. I mean, you know, I sit there on the couch with my wife. As she reads messages about attacking our child, right? And you do everything you can to protect your family against that. But then after Trump puts me under investigation, I faced what I felt like was a very practical problem and a surreal one, which is if a couple of black SUVs with guys with guns come barreling down my driveway. How do I know it's the good guys or the bad guys? And if it's the government, are they even the good guys in it? What do I do? No shit. Because if you think there's a bunch of mogulunis coming to kill your daughter, you are well within your rights to defend your home. And I'm ready to defend my home. Believe me, be a mistake for anyone to set foot on that property. But what if it's the FETS? There's no good answer to that question, by the way. That's why we saw, unfortunately, you know, we've seen, you know, Melissa Hortman, you know, was killed by someone who was dressed up as a cop. We're in that kind of a scary moment. I give you that context because for a couple of months after that, I wasn't sure I wanted to come back into public life. Everything in me said, fight this guy. This is wrong. But everyone around me said, protect your family, lay low, reconstitute your business. And the wake of Trump coming after me, our business imploded, we were thinking about selling the house. We couldn't find lawyers. It was a catastrophe. And this had all happened to me the first time I came forward against Trump. It was like two implosions within my life in four years. And everyone, I mean to a person in our friend group and family said, please just don't poke the bear, lay low, he'll move on. But it was ultimately my wife who's got a spina steal who was like, let's just be real. This is wrong. He's doing this to more people. And if we just shut up about it, it makes it that much easier for the next person. The next person fucking fight. Let's go. I mean, that was and it started for the matriarchy. It was starting that little nucleus in our house. And we said, let's go. And then after a couple of phone calls with friends very quickly, I decided to launch this thing. Primarily, like all good decisions because the domain name was available. I was like, what do you want? I don't even know what we were going to do. But I looked up, I was like, defiance.org's available. We should do something around that. What we ended up launching was a nonprofit to crowdsource support for people fighting back against Trump's corruption. All we do is every single week we exist to go uplift another group that's fighting on the front lines. And then to help fund them to go bring lawsuits against the Trump administration to support the whistleblowers who have exposed illegal activity. To right now, we've printed all 3.5 million Epstein files with our friends, the Institute for Primary Facts. And we've got them on tour around the country on something called the Trump Epstein Memorial Reading Room and Book Mobile. I was a reader and you were a reader. You were a reader in New York. Yeah. And so now we're in Iowa. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we're in Chicago. We're going to be making our way into the Midwest and then down south. So I'm going to be with that throughout the year. But look, I put my career on pause. I'm going to do this until this guy's gone. I'll be real with you is not what I want to be doing. I like you. I don't want to be here in this chair. I don't want to be talking. I don't want to do any of this. I want to go back to the life. I want to be back in the middle of the woods and know where away from people. I'll do that when this is over, but I'm going to fight like hell because it's an honor to be in this fight right now. And that's why we wanted to build this group where folks could get answers every week to the question, what can I do? Because that's what people were saying to me after I decided to fight back against Trump and took legal action against his order and yada yada people said, well, what can I do? And I kept hearing that over and over and over. And I said, well, maybe there should just be a group that exists to only answer that question every week. And to give a new option here is something you can do to fight back against the latest corruption you've seen. And so that's what we exist for. The thing we're going to be announcing this week is we have created this fund called the real anti weaponization fund. So Trump tried to create this $1.776 billion fund to give taxpayer cash to criminals, the January 6th insurrectionists. So we've taken the name back and it's you can find it at awfund.org and we created a fund to be able to provide rapid support to folks who are in Trump's crosshairs. And I'll confess this would have been the type of thing that would have been great for me last year when we were going through this because we were worried we couldn't find lawyers, we didn't have the money, we were going to have to basically settle with this man because we might not be equipped to fight back. And so as an organization, we decided we should go out there and have a rapid response capability for poll workers, election workers, you know individuals who Trump tries to go after in the states across the country in the political opposition to make sure that they've got the legal support and the moral support. So they don't make the wrong decision. So they don't say maybe it's going to be easier to capitulate, we need to make it easy for them to do the right thing. And so we're going to be announcing some grants tomorrow. I'll tease it. We will be announcing a network of 500 pro bono lawyers who are ready to take on cases. for anyone who ends up in Donald Trump's crosshairs. And so I think this election cycle, that's probably gonna be poll workers. You think about the poll workers who were targeted in Georgia in 2020. Unfortunately, I think we'll see things like that this time. I think we'll see election workers. And so they're the ones I'm particularly worried about. And so this network of pro bono lawyers is like X, DOJ prosecutors, total bad asses who are ready to take those cases on for free. And we're using this fund to make sure that we can subsidize that make it possible. - It's so empowering. That's just so important. I just, I'm just so proud of all of the work that you're doing. It's inspirational. And as much as I love you, I think I love your wife more. I really do. - She's the coolest person I have ever met. - No one wants to watch a podcast where some guy talks about his wife. I just said the other night. I went to a Brandon Flowers concert in Washington, DC. Lead singer, the killers, my favorite artist in the world. And like three songs in, I was chatting up my neighbor at the concert about my wife. And he had to say, we gotta listen to the show. (laughing) 'Cause I was like, he'd asked one question about her. I was like, cool as person I've ever met. Everyone in the world could die. I would stay with her for 3,000 years. I would not miss any people, but Maga Slayer. - More than anything. She's got character and she's got courage. And I love that. - Courage as they say is contagious. And even when I was wavering, I thought I'd done this before. I thought I'd fought this guy before. I didn't think it'd be hard again to decide to stand up. Even when I was wavering, my wife was like, let's go kick some ass. That was contagious. And I wanna try to spread that to other people if I can. - Miles, thank you so, so much. Listener, we'll put all the link in the show notes for you to go donate to this wonderful, wonderful, kick ass, badass organization defiance.org. Miles, thank you so much. It was so lovely to be in person. - Thanks, my friend. (upbeat music)