Kevin McCarthy secretly thinks Trump is 'a buffoon and a danger': former White House aide

Former Department of Homeland Security staffer Miles Taylor called out the "insane hypocrisy" of House speaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republican lawmakers for backing Donald Trump despite their serious concerns about his fitness to lead.

Taylor sounded the alarm himself about Trump's "vile" character and inability to lead in a September 2018 op-ed for the New York Times, although he now regrets remaining anonymous for so long and says that failure to come forward carried serious consequences to his own well-being, and he told The Guardian that GOP lawmakers were making the same mistake.

“The flirtation with putting another hyper-populist far-right person in the White House is effectively civic suicidal ideation," Taylor said. "In the course of writing this, the personal guardrails being ripped off in my life looked an awful lot like what’s happening right now where our collective silence, at least in the Republican Party, about this guy is leading us potentially towards self-destruction."

“Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t people sounding the alarm but, by and large, the leading figures of the Republican Party refuse to repudiate this man and continue to support him," he added. "We are doing this again, even though those people say privately he’s a threat.”

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Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under the former president, has written a new book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, that's out Tuesday, and he singled out the House speaker in particular for moral cowardice.

“He thought Trump was a buffoon and a danger, and I’m sure Kevin still thinks that privately," said Taylor, who met with McCarthy weekly during his tenure. "Those people publicly, because they’re afraid, are still supporting the man. That collective anonymity is putting us in pretty seriously great danger.”

Taylor said he spoke with many Republicans on Capitol Hill who expressed contempt for Trump, and a number of GOP lawmakers have spoken privately to reporters about their concerns, but few have been willing to go on the record to express their most serious concerns.

“Some of the people who were incredibly critical of me for publishing anonymous critiques of the president are the same people who, when I interviewed them, asked that I not use their names so that they could speak candidly," Taylor said. "They asked if they could be anonymous in the book. You can’t even make that sh*t up: that’s insane hypocrisy."

"After I submitted to the publisher, I went back to some of these people multiple times and said, ‘I really think you should consider letting me put you on the record here, let’s make this an opportunity for you to be on the record pushing back against this,’" Taylor said. "‘Oh, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t make sense right now. I’m better positioned in my job in Congress or within the party to steer the direction.’"

Taylor thinks the twice-impeached, twice-indicted former president can defeat President Joe Biden, which he believes would be the death knell for democracy, unless Republicans speak out against him.

“To them I would say: I thought the same thing and was completely f*cking wrong because we weren’t able to steer in the right direction," Taylor said. "Look, you guys aren’t having an effect. He’s still dominating. Stop fooling yourselves. The best impact you can have will be to speak out from within the tribe because it is air cover for other people to do the same. I’m afraid we’re sleepwalking back into the exact same mistakes we made last time and that’s why I called this Blowback.”