Trump wages war on the "enemy within"

0:01Pete Hegseth:This is a Global Player original podcast. Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within. We're under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don't wear uniforms. At least when they're wearing a uniform, you can take them out. These people don't have uniforms. But we are under invasion from within. We're stopping it very quickly. How dark is that getting? The U.S. president talking about an invasion from within.

0:44Pete Hegseth:He said he wants to use American cities as training grounds for the military. And he's addressed his speech to a room full of generals, military men and women, America's top brass to order them to follow what he's going to ask them to do next. But the law of America is very clear. The military should not be used for domestic law enforcement purposes, a restriction that dates from 1878. And what Donald Trump seems to be saying is, you don't follow the Constitution, you follow me. Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Emily. And today you're going to be hearing a pretty extraordinary voice, a man who has become one of Trump's political enemies.

1:37Pete Hegseth:His name is Miles Taylor. He worked in Trump's first administration and he's now been accused by the president of treason. We're going to hear just what it's done to Miles Taylor's life And just what it says about America's leanings towards authoritarianism right now and the rule of law. And we had fixed up to speak to Miles before Donald Trump made that speech yesterday to the army generals at the Marine headquarters in Quantico. But it's all part of the same story, in a sense, because what Donald Trump was announcing yesterday was that not that the military follow the Constitution and that their oath of loyalty is to the Constitution.

2:18Pete Hegseth:It is to him and that he wants them to be used to fight on the streets of America to this enemy that doesn't wear a uniform. I mean, you know, Antifa or whatever it is that he thinks are the enemy that need to be slain by his armed forces. Yeah. I mean, this comes, what, two weeks, two and a half weeks after the murder of Charlie Kirk, after which Trump declared that there was a domestic terror network that he was going to hunt down and find. And the jokes at the time were that he was going to go after Antifa as if it was like a body, an organisation with a hotline, with, you know, a head or a chief.

2:58Pete Hegseth:And actually, what has emerged since then is just how totally serious Trump is about pursuing his political enemies or anyone he even perceives to be a political enemy. He's talking about invading and disrupting US cities. Now, there has been pushback, not least from the Illinois governor, J.B. Pritzker, who's accusing Trump in that speech of using military troops and indeed the ICE, the immigration and customs enforcement guys, to act for him as a petty tyrant. In other words, there are people who can see clearly what is going on here. He's given up on the wars that he can't control. What he can control is what is happening in America's own backyard.

3:44Pete Hegseth:democratically elected America. What they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places and we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. So again, telling his own military that they're where they've got to field the theater of war is in America itself. Of course, the cities that he singled out there are all run by Democrat controlled administrations.

4:26And you wonder what this means going forward for the midterm elections or the presidential election in three years time.

4:33Pete Hegseth:are there going to be troops on the streets putting off certain people to go and vote i mean you don't need to cancel elections to win elections you can keep power by just suppressing the turnout in certain key places and you kind of start to wonder is this what this is all about this is just the warm-up act for next november's midterm elections where you have enough troops and ice officials on the streets that mean that people are scared to go to the polls and donald trump keeps control of the House and the Senate as a result of it. Maybe that is just going too far, too fast, too quickly. But why is he doing this?

5:12Pete Hegseth:Yeah, I don't think you need to look that far for a plan. I think it's a very simple vindictiveness on the part of the president, who has never disguised the fact that, as he said at the Charlie Kirk Memorial, he hates his opponents. Over the weekend, we saw the indictment, the charging of James Comey, the former FBI director, A man who, in our first interview seven years ago, told me that the thing that kept him up at night was this threat by Donald Trump to pursue ordinary American citizens, his own political enemies. But remember that what lay at the heart of the falling out between Comey and Trump was that Trump demanded from Comey a swearing of loyalty to him.

5:57Pete Hegseth:And Comey said, no, I will swear an oath of loyalty to the US Constitution. That is my servant, not you. And that was the breach in the relationship where it became irreparable. So with James Comey, there are others now who have criticised Donald Trump, who find themselves in the legislative crosshairs where a weaponised Department of Justice is going after people who are on the list, who have crossed Donald Trump, who have criticised him. And now they must face vengeance. Yeah, in two words, this is the criminalisation of dissent. And we're going to speak to somebody right now who's in those crosshairs, Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term and is now the subject of an executive order.

6:47Pete Hegseth:I want to say a historic executive order by Trump directing federal agencies to investigate him and accusing him of treason. Miles, I cannot imagine what it's like to be in your shoes right now. So why don't you give us a sense of what that edict has meant to you and done to your life?

7:09Miles Taylor:Well, I mean, it's been extraordinary, to be honest. I mean, you know, without overstating it, from the moment that the president signed this in the Oval Office, it has detonated our lives. So, you know, just to bring you into the room, when the president signed this order, he, of course, as you noted, declared to the country that he thought I was guilty of treason, which is the highest crime in the United States, a crime punishable by death. Said that without evidence and said it because I have engaged in a multi-year campaign of protected speech against the president, telling people he should not be elected, telling people about the dangers I saw in the first Trump administration.

7:52Miles Taylor:Then in his order, he, of course, directs his agencies to go find the evidence. Well, the process of that has resulted in the company that I built blowing up the financial security for my family. I'm the sole income earner in my household. I have a young one-year-old daughter and a wife who are dependent on me. We no longer have the business that I was previously running because it was detonated in the wake of this. And I can remember that day the president signed this order standing at the kitchen counter in our house, and my wife looked at me and said, what are we going to do? Are we even going to be able to afford to hire the lawyers to address this?

8:33Miles Taylor:And the answer for me was, I don't know. We might have to sell the house. But it's not just our financial security. Our personal security has been massively affected by this. We now have restraining orders against stalkers across this country, MAGA individuals who, even if the president doesn't take the term treason seriously, they do. They take it seriously, and they want to carry out the president's edicts on his behalf. And so we've had violent threats from individuals who've sent horrific things to me, my wife, about our family members, pictures of our young daughter. It's gotten very, very ugly.

9:14Miles Taylor:And keep in mind, this is just from the stroke of a pen. The president decided he was mad at me for criticizing him. So with the stroke of a pen, he signed this executive order, and it's had all of these consequences. He hasn't indicted me yet like James Comey. He hasn't put me in jail. This is just the beginning of the process, and it's already been catastrophic.

9:35Pete Hegseth:Have your friends stuck by you? Have lawyers stuck by you?

9:39Miles Taylor:We've lost some of the most important people in our lives. That's the bad news. I mean, I've had friends that were in my wedding say to me, we're going to have to lay low and keep our distance from you and your wife until this blows over. Why? Because they either have security clearances and work in the U.S. government. They have businesses that maybe do engagement with the government. That's devastating to have your social circle that you're dependent on scatter. That's intentional because what you've seen with this administration is when they put out these orders, they put language in them to restrict any security clearances for your associates.

10:18Miles Taylor:They know people like me who've come up in the national security community primarily have friends who are also government or ex-government employees. And if they say, if you are an associate of Miles Taylor, we can revoke your security clearances, they create an extraordinary act of intimidation to push away your social circle. So that's been a huge challenge. And of course, as you note, on the legal front, it's very hard to get legal representation in the United States right now if the president is coming after you because he has intimidated so many of the law firms. I am fortunate in that some of the best lawyers in the country who watched this happen stepped forward and said, we've got your back.

10:58Pete Hegseth:That's so interesting because at the moment, as you say, James Comey has been indicted. John Bolton has had the knock on the door from the FBI. And presumably, anytime someone knocks on your door, you think, is this it? You know what?

11:11Miles Taylor:I'm really glad that you put it that way, because I'll be honest with you all about something that I haven't said as frequently. this becomes an absolutely daily anxiety for your whole family in the way that when the mailman, when the postman comes down the driveway, when an Uber driver comes down the driveway, when the Amazon delivery person arrives, every single time you think it's a car full of government agents ready to arrest you in front of your wife and daughter and carry you away, that anxiety does not diminish. And we've, of course, have had to make extensive security upgrades to our property.

11:52Miles Taylor:We have layers and layers of sensors, cameras, and alerts. So at four in the morning, when the driveway alert goes off, when the perimeter alarm goes off, when the lights start going on, when all of that happens, yeah, I mean, your adrenal glands are shot. And then you look, and it's not the FBI, it's a deer crossing the property. And you're like, okay, we're fine. And you go back to sleep. But those are the little ways in which it consumes your life to be added to the president's blacklist.

12:20Pete Hegseth:I mean, standing back, Miles, you said you've got the best lawyers in the country on this. You shouldn't need to have super brains on something like this. If, in your case, the president has already accused you, I mean, literally accused you of treason or with Comey. He's already, I think, showed, what do they call it, vindictive persecution. Yeah. Doesn't that work against the whole premise of the legal case straight away?

12:48Miles Taylor:Well, hopefully it does. I mean, that's certainly something that Comey, myself, John Bolton, others have a great deal of evidence that we could bring into legal proceedings of selective and vindictive prosecution. In other words, in the United States under the 14th Amendment, you are protected by the Equal Protections Clause that says the law cannot be enforced against you for biased reasons of your political position or First Amendment-protected speech, etc. Yet Comey and Bolton and myself have this long list of tweets and statements and missives from Donald Trump over the past seven or eight years of him saying, we've got to go after these guys.

13:29Miles Taylor:We're going to prosecute them. Hopefully that will be helpful in the courts. But here's the thing. They can destroy your life before you ever get that opportunity to go make that case in the courts. And they know that. The president and his team know that very well. and that's why they've made great use of this modern day blacklist let's go back a bit because

13:50Pete Hegseth:i think for a lot of our listeners they won't remember that you wrote a scathing op-ed piece anonymously for the new york times and i was in washington as a correspondent at the time when it happened i thought wow this is dynamite i wonder who this person is new york times wouldn't have published it unless it was someone who was pretty damn well connected you were the chief of staff to General John Kelly when he was at Homeland Security. And then you outed yourself. And you did write in very frank terms about Donald Trump that he has proved he is a man without character and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.

14:30Pete Hegseth:I witnessed Trump's inability to do his job over the course of two and a half years. Now, of course, you're going to incur the wrath of the president. Could you have ever imagined that you would be having this conversation with us on the 1st of October, 2025? Well, here's the thing.

14:49Miles Taylor:Yes. And that's why I did it. I did it because my worry was if Americans reelected this man, he would be vindictive enough to create a federal government willing to accuse private citizens of the highest crime in the United States merely for criticizing the president. That was my worry. My worry is if we put this guy back in, his most vindictive and unlawful and unconstitutional impulses would not be stopped. And ironically, I became an example of that. I mean, I spent a lot of my time after I quit the administration and protest saying that Donald Trump was abusing his power for his own self-interest.

15:37Miles Taylor:And ironically, what he has done in response to that is abuse his power for his own self-interest to go after me and his other enemies. So I very much did envision that I would have to be in conversations like this if that happened. But I hope the American people would never put such an obvious want-to-be autocrat back into the White House. And now that they have, I think people are seeing what kind of Donald Trump they are getting without the so-called axis of adults that was around him in the first administration. And look, I'll be the first to admit that there was something almost obnoxious to American people about the notion that there was this group of unelected bureaucrats around the president keeping him from doing things he shouldn't do.

16:26Miles Taylor:And you had people on the political rights say, well, how dare you? That's not your job. Well, my rejoinder at the time was, look, I wasn't in that administration to keep the president of the United States from doing things he's lawfully allowed to do. I'm a lifelong Republican. I want a successful, strong, conservative president. I was there to tell the president, you can't do illegal things. You can't do unconstitutional things. That is the fundamental job of every public servant who swears an oath to the Constitution. You're supposed to speak truth to power. And there There was a big group of those people around Donald Trump who saw that he wanted to do illegal things and regularly pushed back against them.

17:05Pete Hegseth:We'll hear more from Miles in a second.

17:19Miles Taylor:The News Agents USA.

17:21Pete Hegseth:Do you feel now, Miles, that you have a choice? I mean, you are showing a kind of force of resistance. James Comey issued something over the weekend, which was pretty similar. You know, we don't really have a choice. We have to fight this one. Is there a world in which you just roll over? Is there a world in which you just say, yeah, I can't stand living my life like this?

17:47Miles Taylor:Yeah, look, a lot of people have done that. I mean, you've seen that across industries in the United States, from people in media to people in business to people in educational institutions. You have seen folks unfairly and unlawfully put in the president's crosshairs who have said, and you almost can't blame them, I don't want to do this. If I fight back against this, they are going to come at me twice as hard, and they're going to make it so much worse. But when people do that, it enables the bully. Or to use another analogy, if you feed the alligator from the boat, the alligator doesn't go away.

18:26Miles Taylor:The alligator comes back until it eats you. I will confess, my wife and I did not immediately come to the conclusion that we were going to fight this thing full throttle. We didn't. We actually spent about two months after this executive order was issued realizing that if I fought back against this hardened public, it would be worse and probably vastly increase the odds that they would ratchet up the pressure on us. And like I said, we have a small family. We wanted to grow a family, lead a private life. We had built a very successful business. We were happy living off the grid and away from the public eye.

19:02Miles Taylor:But ultimately, we came to the conclusion that if we stayed quiet about this, it would happen to more people. And the order the president issued against me was, as you noted at the top end, the first time in American history, the first time in 249 years, a president of the United States has ordered an investigation into one of his critics for protected speech. That's never happened before in an executive order. And so our worry is if we don't fight this and prove it's unconstitutional, it will become the tool of a president from any political party from here on forward to persecute their adversaries.

19:38Pete Hegseth:So we spent the first half of this podcast talking about Hegseth and Trump yesterday at Quantico, the Marine base and telling them, you know, this is what I expect of you. And I wonder whether you think this is part of a piece, because it's almost like Donald Trump is saying to the military, to the generals, you answer to me, not the US Constitution. And if I want you to go after my enemies within America, you shall.

20:04Miles Taylor:Yes, he is saying that. He is saying that. And look, I always have to add this caveat. These things sound very hyperbolic. It sounds almost deranged to suggest that the president of the United States is making these claims and it's this dangerous and it's this bad. Look, I will tell you, as someone who spent his entire career since 9-11 working in the U.S. national security community, the biggest threat I've ever seen to American democracy is now coming from inside the executive branch because we are seeing an extraordinary corruption and weaponization of U.S. government power to go after political adversaries.

20:37Miles Taylor:And that includes the president's remarks yesterday to military generals. And I will tell you, I spent time with this guy in the Oval Office, the White House Situation Room, Air Force One. He was very frustrated that the military generals were so damn committed to their oaths to the Constitution. It was a lot harder to get them to do the things that Donald Trump wanted if they were unlawful than it was to go get one of his random political appointees, some 25-year-old kid in a department or agency to do something illegal. It drove him crazy. I knew and General Kelly knew and General Mattis knew that when he came back for a second administration, top of his list was going to be how do I make the military more subservient to me, not the Constitution, to me.

21:20Miles Taylor:And Donald Trump started that process with alacrity yesterday when he signaled to those members of the military their career was going to be dependent on their loyalty to him and that the enemy was not in Afghanistan or in Beijing. The enemy, as he said in his words, was within.

21:37Pete Hegseth:What is the crunch now? I mean, with the generals, with the top brass who heard that message, do you think, do they go against their commander in chief? Where does this go?