Former ‘Anonymous’ Trump Official Says ‘Radicalized Elements’ of GOP Represent ‘Bigger Threat to Our Democracy’ Than al-Qaeda, ISIS Did
Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official, said on MSNBC Wednesday that “radicalized elements” of the Republican party represent a “bigger threat to our democracy” than terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS did.
Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, and is perhaps best-known for being the formerly “anonymous” Trump administration official who penned the op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
Nicolle Wallace called out the former president’s stunning new statement ominously suggesting he knows who killed Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt. She asked Taylor if he believes “the insurrectionists were domestic terrorists.”
Taylor said he does, and claimed he spoke with “a very prominent former U.S. commander who said there are elements of the GOP that are starting to look like the jihadists that he used to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, spreading lies and conspiracy theories to radicalize a population.”
He elaborated:
I say this as a counterterrorism guy. If you look in time at terrorism movements, they don’t start usually immediately with violence. They usually start with a political grievance that leaders say cannot be solved through peaceful means. And then they move to violence. So after Trump started to propagate the big lie in November, a lot of us in the national security community said what he’s doing is actually tilling the fertile soil for extremists to pop up later on. In fact, we saw it as a ticking time bomb for an increase in domestic terrorism, and I think over the next two years I think you’re going to see that.
Taylor even said, “You’re going to see that because radicalized elements of the Republican party now represent a bigger threat to our democracy than organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS ever did.”
“Not necessarily to human lives,” he added, “but a bigger threat to our democracy than those terrorist groups ever did, because these are… political institutions that are attacking our democracy, trying to rewrite the rules, and irrevocably breaking our bonds as Americans, and they’re doing it all from the inside. It’s something that our enemies could never have even dreamed of.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.
