Former Trump administration DHS official Miles Taylor, the anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed article in 2018 criticizing President Donald Trump, said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Donald Trump’s “big lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election is similar to the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Taylor said, “They make the mistake of thinking someone like a Donald Trump is an aberration that they can temporarily take advantage of, and it will go away. I continue to have conversations with Republican Congressmen who are there now who are still friends. I asked them that question, why are you going along with this? The answer is typically, look, I’m one of the not crazy guys, and I’ve got to stay in there to steady the ship. At some point, that just stops working when you realize a crazy man has taken over the ship and deputized everybody on it to work for him. At some point, you have to get off the ship.”
He continued, “It’s very clear who Donald Trump was from day one. All of us in the Republican Party knew who he was. So many people didn’t want him to get the nomination, certainly didn’t think he would get elected. When he did, just kind of willingly walked along with it. I think the violence here is really, really the crux of all of it.”
Taylor added, “We’ve seen this before in democratic societies, political intimidation leading to political violence, God forbid leading to political assassination. You know where we have seen it? We saw it in the Weimar Republic in Germany before the rise of Hitler. It’s not hyperbole to draw those comparisons. We saw very similar behavior happening founded on, guess what, on a big lie, on a big political lie that led to that type of violence. I worry, especially, about the Republicans retaking the House and the Senate in the fall and potentially the return of Donald Trump because he is going to be on a vindictiveness tour, on a revenge tour against his political opponents. We have seen it before in history.”
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