On Wednesday's Amanpour & Co. show on PBS, NPR's Michel Martin provided a forum for CNN contributor Miles Taylor to bash President Donald Trump and Governor Ron DeSantis from the left as the disgruntled ex-Republican promoted his book fretting over a possible second Trump administration.
Taylor is the former official from the Homeland Security Department who famously published an anonymous article in the New York Times to reassure anti-Trumpers that there were career civil servants who were trying to block President Trump's policy decisions from the inside.Taylor then was rewarded with a book deal...as "Anonymous."
Martin recounted that in his new book Blowback, Taylor accused President Trump of trying to "weaponize" the Education Department, and asked him to elaborate. Taylor began by recalling a push by President Trump to pressure local schools to kick out illegal immigrants, and then pivoted to throwing shade at Governor DeSantis for limiting discussion of gay issues in schools.
Using the left's loaded and inaccurate "Don't Say Gay" label of DeSantis's policies, Taylor commented:
...we've seen in Florida how Ron DeSantis and his administration implemented what's the -- what's being referred to as the "Don't Say Gay" law, forbidding teachers from talking about same-sex couples even if a student's parents are a same-sex couple. Department of Education officials explained to me that that policy would be federalized on a nationwide scale using the same tool -- is that school districts would be threatened that they won't get federal funds if they don't implement "Don't Say Gay" policies.
Taylor added: "That's something that a second Trump administration could do without consulting Congress at all, and it's a really chilling implementation of the culture wars, in my view." PBS isn't going to explore how much the Biden administration has "weaponized" or politicized the Education Department in their direction, like agitating to curtail parental activism at school board meetings. The Left never wages "culture wars" when it tries to make the world safe for "abortion care" and "gender-affirming care."
Toward the end of the interview, Martin ignored the violent and deadly rioting by left-wingers in 2020 as she claimed that violent political actions are mostly done by the right:
There have been people who identify as progressive or as liberals who have engaged in terrible conduct, but the reality of it is, is that this kind of behavior is very much more on the right. And I just have to ask you: Why do you think that is?
In spite of his earlier hitting Trump and DeSantis from the left, Taylor described himself as a "lifelong conservative," and agreed with the premise of her question.
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Transcript follows:
PBS & CNN International
July 26, 2023
MICHEL MARTIN: All right, so I'm going to go right to the Department of Education. And the reason I'm going there is, is that I don't think people really necessarily think about the ways that the Education Department could be "weaponized," as you put it in the book. So could you talk a little bit about that?
MILES TAYLOR, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: I'll give you two anecdotes that really shocked me, and one was on immigration, is I was told by Trump's chief of staff at the Department of Education, Josh Venable, that there was a policy that they tried to implement -- that the White House tried to implement to force migrant children out of public schools. In other words, if their parents are here in the United States and they were undocumented, to punish those families by kicking the kids out of public school.
"Well, how could that possibly happen?" you ask. Well, Venable explained to me that all the Department of Education would do was say to public schools that they would no longer receive funding from the Department of Education if they were teaching undocumented immigrants. And a lot of public schools don't have the ability to go without the federal funding that they need. So this would be a way to coerce them to kick these innocent children out of school.
In fact, Venable said the White House was so serious about this, he called it, quote, "the cockroach that wouldn't die," and that they resisted the policy. But, in his view, in a second term, they would implement that policy.
And another one was on LGBTQ issues. You know, we've seen in Florida how Ron DeSantis and his administration implemented what's the -- what's being referred to as the "don't say gay" law, forbidding teachers from talking about same-sex couples even if a student's parents are a same-sex couple. Department of Education officials explained to me that that policy would be federalized on a nationwide scale using the same tool -- is that school districts would be threatened that they won't get federal funds if they don't implement "don't say gay" policies. That's something that a second Trump administration could do without consulting Congress at all, and it's a really chilling implementation of the culture wars, in my view.
MARTIN: Let's go back to your kind of first life in the Trump administration. I mean, people who have followed you, you know, even a little bit, may remember that you kind of outed yourself as "Anonymous." You wrote a piece for the New York Times where you talked about the fact that there were other civil servants who were trying to keep the President, in their view, sort of from acting on his worst impulses and, in many ways, from sort of violating the law. Why wasn't that enough? Because it clearly wasn't.
(...)
MARTIN: There have been people who identify as progressive or as liberals who have engaged in terrible conduct, but the reality of it is, is that this kind of behavior is very much more on the right. And I just have to ask you: Why do you think that is?
TAYLOR: The Republican party that I joined -- and I'm a lifelong conservative -- was not like Donald Trump. It just wasn't. It was a very, very different party. And, as he took it over, the mistake many of us made was thinking that he was an aberration, and that his character defects, his proclivity towards violent rhetoric, his misogynistic and bigoted views, would not imprint themselves on the movement. But we were wrong about that.
And you don't have to take my word for it if you look at the data and the cross tabs in the data, GOP voters changed dramatically in the Trump years, and they became much more amenable to Donald Trump's world view, and that includes violence as a legitimate tool of politics.
