MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President Trump's aggressive moves on Greenland and immigration, among other things, has even some of his supporters questioning his priorities and tactics. So we've called someone who got a close-up view of President Trump in his first term to ask whether something has changed. Miles Taylor was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. He wrote anonymously about resisting some of Trump's impulses from the inside. That's before he revealed himself and backed Joe Biden for president.
He has since become a target. President Trump yanked his security clearance and told DHS to investigate him. He now leads a nonprofit called DEFIANCE.org that helps people push back against the administration. He's with us now. Good morning, Miles. Thanks much for joining us.
MILES TAYLOR: Good morning, Michel. How are you?
MARTIN: Good. So let me start with Greenland. Trump did talk about this in his first term. But during your time in the administration, was this seen as a serious discussion? I guess what I'm wondering is, is there something different now?
TAYLOR: Well, here's the thing. I mean, Donald Trump always says controversial things. And then aides come out and say that he's joking, but they're not usually jokes. These are trial balloons. And if there's too much blowback, he'll wait until a period where he can move something forward. And if there's not, he'll move forward on the controversial idea anyway and people will see it's not a joke. Greenland was one of those things.
When we first heard about it, I will tell you, 2017 was the first time I heard President Trump say he wanted Greenland. And he proposed swapping it for Puerto Rico because he didn't like spending hurricane recovery money there and he wanted to get rid of Puerto Rico. And we said, Mr. President, there are 3.5 million Americans who live in Puerto Rico. And he dismissed the idea until 2018, when he brought it up again. That's when, Michel, I was worried this was one of those things, that if he didn't have sensible people around him, he would try to do in a second term. He was hell-bent on getting the island.
MARTIN: Then to another point, the immigration move. Now, the president has always taken a hard line against immigration. I mean, that's been clear. But a U.S. official told NPR the president has put active-duty troops on standby for a possible deployment to Minneapolis. And he's threatened to use the Insurrection Act to put down protests there. And, you know, obviously, sort of there are some issues being mixed there. But this big surge of agents into these mainly Democratic-led cities to kind of support these immigration moves, even some of his supporters have questioned this. Is there something different about this?
TAYLOR: Well, look, I will go back to the joke schema. I mean, in, you know, the past 10 years, Donald Trump has joked about locking up his political opponents. He has joked about deploying troops to U.S. cities. He joked about not conceding the election in 2020. And we learned the hard way that these things weren't jokes. And any time he was talked down off the ledge, it was because of sensible folks around him who tried to keep him from going that direction.
Another thing he pushed for in the first term was invocation of the Insurrection Act. I remember, on the eve of the State of the Union in 2019, I got tipped off by aides at the White House that the president was thinking about slipping language into his speech to invoke that act. Of course, this was disturbing because we didn't think any circumstances in the United States justified that there was an invasion or a rebellion. So we rushed to the White House, met the president in the map room where he was practicing the speech and convinced him to drop those lines out of the speech.
But again, keep in mind, this is something he has wanted to do since the first term. He saw the Insurrection Act - this is his words - as his, quote, "magical authorities." He saw it as the apex of his power. And he has been looking for an excuse to implement it. The only difference is, in the second term, he's brought on people who are willing to carry out those orders.
MARTIN: So your - in your view, the president hasn't changed. It's the people around him that have changed. And they are unwilling or uninterested in tempering some of these impulses.
TAYLOR: You know, Susie Wiles said something revealing a month ago about the president's mindset. She said that he had an alcoholic's personality. But Donald Trump, of course, is a teetotaler. He doesn't drink. What I would say, and I don't mean this facetiously, the man is drunk on power. He is addicted to, he is deeply attracted to, demonstrations of power. And you can imagine that the greatest demonstration of his power domestically would be to send American troops into cities to enforce his edicts.
It is something he has, again, talked about for nearly 10 years. And he sees the opportunity to do it with limited to no pushback inside of his administration. The question will be, will the Article III courts do something about it? And I strongly suspect that this will be challenged, if he does it, almost immediately by the state of Minnesota, if not other states.
MARTIN: Let me ask you about something else. And this is a difficult thing to talk about because when you're ever talking about people's personal behavior, you know, this always raises questions of, you know, whose standards are we applying here? Who says or who cares? But the president's use of profanity.
I mean, he went to this auto plant the other day. He made this obscene gesture at a heckler who yelled something at him that he didn't like and was - seemed to have been heard to utter an epithet. You know, again, his staff continues to defend this, but it does seem that he is more unfiltered. We heard him uttering expletives in public comments much more frequently than I think we did in the first term. And I just wonder if you have noticed that yourself and what you make of it.
TAYLOR: Look, I'm not a doctor. But I think, observing this man from afar, you can conclude he is unwell. He is irascible. He is angry. He is quick to impulsive remarks and judgments, not that this was incredibly different from the first term. But it's, you know, a Donald Trump more unhinged than I think people saw in the first administration. And, you know, you're seeing that, as if there was any filter before, now it seems to be gone.
MARTIN: Well, again, I'm not a doctor either. Neither are you. You certainly haven't examined him in any professional capacity here. But I guess it makes me wonder whether, did he use that kind of language in private before in the first term? We just are now being exposed to it publicly because perhaps he just feels more comfortable in doing so? I mean, we know that - we know, like, from the Nixon tapes that, you know, people sometimes talk that way in private. And they forget, perhaps, that other people are listening.
TAYLOR: Yeah. I mean, I think...
MARTIN: But I'm just wondering if you - if it's as you said before, which is that this is the behavior that was the before behavior, and now we're just seeing more of it. Or has something substantively changed?
TAYLOR: Well, I'll give you two direct examples on that, Michel, is, you know, when he said s-hole countries in the first term, that was something he continued to repeat in private, even after aides denied that the president had called third world countries s-hole countries. He continued to say that in meetings. Or a second example would be Somalis. He called the Somali people, Somali Americans, garbage in private. He referred to them derisively. I don't know what the president's biases are towards people from Somalia. But these are things he said in the first term in private in the Oval Office. And in a second term, he's now said those things publicly and almost proudly. And that says to me that he's let that filter drop.
MARTIN: That's Miles Taylor. He's former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. He now runs a group called DEFIANCE.org. Thanks so much for joining us.
TAYLOR: Thanks, Michel.
MARTIN: We reached out to the White House for comment on Miles Taylor. As you might imagine, they replied by insulting both his work and him personally. Their statement ended with, quote, "no one should believe anything he says," unquote.
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