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

23:10Miles Taylor: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've 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 patently illegal.

23:42I 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 is an 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 trad wives. And I'm talking about Marco Rubio. I'm talking about Stephen Miller.

24:20These are submissive trad wives and how painfully unoriginal their behavior is. But in that, they think they're so universally unique and 10 foot tall and bulletproof. And so Donald Trump has a constant companion by his side, Natalie Harp, 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 MS Now, no Politico. Well, it was leaked that the bunny boiler made a presentation for him with charts because this backs up yours that he can't read it. These are all the mean stories that Politico did on you.

25:03Here's all the mean stories that CNN did. Here's all the mean stories MSNOW did. So he said, okay, they can't be around me anymore. She's like, oh, good. Yeah, we can't have them anymore. Her job is to print flattering stories for him only. So imagine she's scraping 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.

25:36Somebody 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 this 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?

26:19Miles Taylor: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. 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.

27:02Miles Taylor: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 we're like, 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-haired in office. We watched George W. Bush get gray-haired. 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.

27:34I noticed he didn't age in Trump 1.0.

27:37Miles Taylor:That's right. It was 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. And 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 is supposed to operate. This man is breaking laws. This man is doing very dangerous things.

28:12Miles Taylor: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 peg. That's what I think. They want that next spot. They're the little Trumps, like the little Stalins, like the little Hitlers, jockeying for position and trying to oust one another. And who is on a pedestal above almost everyone? Natalie Harp. I take issue with some of the bedwetting Democrats who said, don't disparage Natalie Harp. Don't go after this young woman. That's beneath us. People I respect in the Democratic Party who'd said, this is tawdry. No, this is not tawdry.

28:52Miles Taylor: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 ours than they are right now because he's giving them an absurd remit. The US Congress never created the authority for the Natalie Harp cabinet secretary position to go destroy the First Amendment and kick White House – kick outlets out of the White House. But now things like that are happening with great effect. And so I think we do need to zoom in on these people.

29:29Miles Taylor: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. as 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.

30:09Miles Taylor:You literally grow the movement to fight you. Think about his biggest diehard loyalists, the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, the Thomas Massey's, the Tucker Carlson's whose text messages we had after January 6th, where he basically said, this is insane. This wasn't real. This guy's got to go, yet still goes on TV and self-flagellates and licks the president's shoes. Like those people he went after and they've joined the political opposition. Are they perfect? No, there's 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 scary that she allegedly coerced the – or convinced the president to kick three mainstream media outlets out of the White House and take a chip out of the First Amendment?

30:55Miles Taylor: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 your take 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. You used to be a Republican. would the Republicans for a second blink, hesitate? I know exactly where you're going. No, they wouldn't. If Barack Obama had a 35-year-old that was with him at all times of the night while he is posting AI slop, printing out favorable stories of him, they wouldn't blink for a second.

31:43They 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 MAGA fascists, have machine guns and grenades and all sorts of weapons. And we're over here 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 6th, what we have seen from the Epstein files, what we know the judge in the E. Jean Carroll 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.

32:31Anybody who says, I'm good going to work there is completely disqualified in my eyes. And we should browbeat the 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. They capitulate to right-wing framing. And it makes me crazy because the Republicans never do that. I mean, Hakeem Jeffries being here in New York City and

33:05Miles Taylor:meeting with Jared Kushner. Unacceptable. Come 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 in 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 backdoor 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.

33:47Miles Taylor: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 a 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 sit, 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. There's not a time for backdoor meetings with the president's kids to talk about how we can make it better and work together.

34:25Miles Taylor: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. I agree. 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 second in line to the US presidency, we should put forward a figure that can stand toe-to-toe with Donald Trump and dismantle him completely.

35:11Miles Taylor: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. I mean, 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. This ain't 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 whistleblow all the time, And I agree with you.

35:47I'm 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. And 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. Totally. Because it was behind the scenes. It was secret. He wasn't transparent about it. And when I find out that Hakeem is taking money from these same PACs that are funding fascism, I see that he's corruptible.

36:25Because my argument right now is we need politicians that are incorruptible. Bernie Sanders for years has been branded this, you know, 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 has 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.

37:02And I just see so many people in the Democratic establishment. And my fear is they're going to Merrick Garland this thing. I'm making the Merrick Garland thing a verb, by the way. They're going to Merrick 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.

37:42It'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. Mm-hmm. Likewise, right now, we're seeing the same thing happen with the Democratic Party. You see, the establishment did not want Zoran Mamdani.

38:23Mm-hmm. 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.

38:34Miles Taylor:Which is crazy. The guy makes like$93 ,000 a year or something like that. He won. Yeah. He took them all on in one 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 hire consultants to 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. As you see people like Angie Nixon rising up in Florida, which I love her as a candidate, had her as a guest. Abdul El-Sayed and others that are not beholden to corporations rise up.

39:15I think the Democratic Party is having its 2016 moment, but in the inverse, but for good. What do you think?

39:24Miles Taylor: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 at 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. is not inherently good or bad, but it starts with identifying what it is and shaping it that direction.

40:09Miles Taylor: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, Jen, Bernie Sanders, and I would have gone off 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.

40:46Miles Taylor: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. Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, you're seeing these people who conservatives like me would otherwise say, get them out of my news feed. We're saying these people are being heroic because they are standing up for those American values. I disagree with both Mamdani and Bernie Sanders on a lot of things on economics.

41:29Miles Taylor: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 El Sayed 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. Now, 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.

42:07Miles Taylor:The fact that he is embracing an El Sayed tells you a lot about what's happening in our politics. Now, El Sayed probably feels like that's – maybe that's the kiss of death. Maybe it's not. Maybe it gives him some voters 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.

42:43OK. 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 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 laissez-faire economics, wants the government out of people's businesses. no regulations, wealth trickles down, this type of stuff, right?

43:18Miles Taylor:You're not wrong. I just need a country club membership. I'm still... If someone out there wants to donate a country club membership, you can 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 invite list and they were cool. But they would never admit the way they vote because they know it's impolite. 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.

43:59And 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. And 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.

44:41And 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 rubes, the cultists, in 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 just going to say I've been in a lot of white circles where I've heard it. But they offer them money. You're not going to let these immigrants take your money.

45:19You earn 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. I'm kidding. Do you think –

45:56Miles Taylor:Ex-Republican. Still a conservative. 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 D.C. 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.

46:50Miles Taylor:It's gone from a rarity to just endemic in Washington, D.C. And we were at the White House and we were filming B-roll footage of the cranes building 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 to, 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?

47:24Miles Taylor:He's got like tortoise shell glasses like me. He's taller, swooped back hair. He's probably in his late fifties or early sixties. He's got the towel from his sweat, like already exuded country club Republican before we even heard 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, 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 him feel more comfortable.

47:55Miles Taylor: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 it. He said, it's just 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 in the swamp. And he's basically said, could you put the cameras down? 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.

48:27Miles Taylor:We were talking about James Tallarico. 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 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.

48:58Miles Taylor:I know that. You said 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 into 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 signaled 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.

49:34Miles Taylor:Now I remember why he sucked. But I was still baffled he was at 40. I was like, he is breaking 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?

50:10Miles Taylor: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, banking crisis. I mean, just a complete foobar administration beyond. But we would take him in a heartbeat right now. Oh, God. 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.

50:55And 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 neighbor's yard, tried to convert everybody on my street. My kids and my dogs wore Obama T-shirts. Kind of sounds cultish, but I was really into it. And I remember so many of my friends said, I did it.

51:32I 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 their, it's like right around the Facebook, Facebook was first coming out. I did it. I voted for Obama. It's the first time I ever voted. My parents did. 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.

52:19And time and time again, both parties end up voting for prostitutes that whore 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.

52:36Miles Taylor:Yeah. So after Trump, look, after Trump came after me last year, I had retreated from public life. I wanted to go back to what I went into government for 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. 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.

53:20Money.

53:20Miles Taylor:Is money. You know, what's the answer to 99 out of 100 questions? Money. I know. Okay. And, you know, 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 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.

53:59Miles Taylor: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 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.

54:33Miles Taylor:Democracies don't make good friends with autocracies in the long run, period, full stop. And while there's been alignment of interest on some things, a reckoning is coming on that front. All right. Thank you for that answer. Now, 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 and continuing to speak out and they tried to silence you in the name of your organization called Defiance. I love it. They still may come for me. I mean, I say half facetiously. I mean, 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.

55:15Miles Taylor: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 MAGA stalkers who had been going after me and my wife and our daughter. I mean, I had to 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?

55:58Miles Taylor:And if it's the government, are they even the good guys? What do I do? Because if you think there's a bunch of magaloonies 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 feds? There's no good answer to that question, by the way. That's why we saw, unfortunately, we've seen Melissa Hortman 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.

56:33Miles Taylor:Everything in me said, fight this guy. This is wrong. But everyone around me said, protect your family, lay low, reconstitute your business. In 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 spine of steel who was like, let's just be real.

57:07Miles Taylor: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, there was – and it started at the – It's time for the matriarchy. That's right. It was starting in 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 did we launch? I didn't even know what we were going to do. But I looked up, I was like, defiance.org's available.

57:40Miles Taylor: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 Bookmobile.

58:14Miles Taylor:I was a reader. 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. This 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 nowhere away from people.

58:40Miles Taylor: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's something you can do to fight back against the latest corruption you've seen.

59:12Miles Taylor: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 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.

59:49Miles Taylor: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, 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. To do what's right. 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.

1:00:23Miles Taylor: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, it's probably going to 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 around. 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 ex-DOJ prosecutors, total badasses who are ready to take those cases on for free.

1:00:58Miles Taylor:And we're using this fund to make sure that we can subsidize that, make it possible. It's so empowering. That is just so important. I am 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. Anna is – she's the coolest person I have ever met. I dig that. 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, D.C., lead singer of 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 got to listen to the show.

1:01:39Miles Taylor:Because I was like – he'd asked one question about her. I was like, coolest person I've ever met. Yeah. Everyone in the world could die. I would stay with her for 3 ,000 years and I would not miss any people. But 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 want to try to spread that to other people if I can.

1:02:10Miles, 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.

1:02:24Miles Taylor:Thanks, my friend. It's great to be with you.