A (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

B (0:10)

I was a young person who was very inspired by seeing members of Congress walk across the literal aisle to work together on legislation to protect this country. But times change. Things fade. Everything fades.

A (0:24)

In today's talk, former senior US national security official Miles Taylor shares a personal account that raises a broader civic concern, the growing cost of dissent in American public life. Drawing on his experiences living the consequences of speaking openly, he says that the real threat to US Democracy isn't politicians or hardliners. It's the two thirds of Americans who don't speak up. And a quick heads up. This talk contains mature language. It's all coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the Day.

B (1:04)

Not long ago, I was giving my dog a walk. His name is Martini. That wasn't even a joke. My wife was out of town and I left my phone inside so I could get away from the incessant buzzing and took him on a nice long walk. And I came back inside and I had one of those moments where your stomach sinks because I looked at my phone and I had a lot of of missed calls. And my first thought was, my wife is pissed about something. It's a lot of calls. But then I looked and it wasn't just a lot of calls. It was hundreds of phone calls and numbers I didn't recognize, some of them unknown numbers. And I decided to figure out what this was. And I opened my phone and I opened the voicemails to see if these people had left messages.

C (1:57)

What you're doing to President Trump is disgusting. You're disgusting people. You're evil and you're going to go down. You, my friend, are a piece of. You are a traitor. You pushing for anti Trump. You dumb.

B (2:15)

We will squash you like a peanut.

C (2:19)

You're done.

B (2:19)

You're done.

C (2:21)

So eat a dick and die. Miles, we're gonna dox you. You're not gonna be able to walk down the street. You're an anti American. Leave the country. You're not welcome here anymore. You're anti American. You hate your country. Get out. Because you will deserve the lap of hell. And I think you will get what's coming to you.

B (2:44)

God willing, if you can believe it, those were the nice ones. So anyway, before I get to that, let me take you back in time. Why did I end up in Washington D.C. like a lot of people after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I wanted to come to D.C. to make sure a day like that never happened again. That was going to be the full focus of my career. And I came into Washington the lowest place you can possibly come in on the totem pole as a young messenger on Capitol Hill, a page messenger delivering envelopes during my junior year in high school. But despite being the lowest rung on the totem pole, I had the best desk in Washington, D.C. and I'm not joking about that. Better than the Resolute desk inside the White House, because my desk was in the back of the chamber, the back of the citadel of democracy, where I had a perch to see the comings and goings of Congress in the wake of a catastrophic attack. I'm going to tell you what I saw in Washington in that time period. I saw unity. I was a young person who was very inspired by seeing members of Congress walk across the literal aisle to work together on legislation to protect this country. But times change. Things fade. Everything fades. Fast forward in time. I find myself in 2017 as the Chief of Staff of the U.S. department of Homeland Security. It's not a time of unity anymore in Washington. I took that job because of the worst sales pitch anyone's ever made for someone to join their office in history. My boss, John Kelly, said, miles, it's not as bad as it looks. Inside the Trump administration, it is so much worse. And I still took that job because I understood what he meant. I understood he meant we need people who understand how government functions, how national security functions, real conservatives to come in and help steady the ship of these agencies. But I soon saw what he saw and what others saw, which is that in meetings with the president in the White House Situation Room, in the Oval Office, on Air Force One, I met a man who I had not known previously, and I found him to be reckless and impulsive at best. And at worst. On days, members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries, walked out of the Oval Office with ashen faces, and they said things like, the man is a threat to the fabric of a republic. I knew there was something more serious going on. Now, I will tell you I'm not going to talk about the first Trump administration, but if there was one theme I had to spend most of my time not focused on the 250,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security. I was responsible for helping oversee. But one man who was regularly engaged or attempting to engage in illegal acts. There was no deep state inside the Trump administration. There were people willing to speak truth to power. There were. And prevent the president from doing illegal Things not to prevent him from implementing a lawful agenda. But I grew very frustrated because these conversations were happening among us. A group of unelected bureaucrats, navel gazing, wringing our hands, complaining about how unfit the President was for office. It was not our job to decide if the President was unfit for office. We would not decide if he got reelected in a second term. That's what you would decide. And I felt like it was very important if these gray beard wise men wouldn't go out and say it in public. That someone needed to. So I decided I would go say what we were talking about in private, in public. Now, I did that at first, anonymously, as many of you know. And I put on that mask not because I was afraid to stand my opinions, but because I'm a student of history. And my favorite book is a compendium of essays called the Federalist Papers. Total best seller. All the authors are dead. And the founding fathers wrote anonymous essays to sell the American public on the Constitution. Not because they were scared to associate themselves with those words, but because they knew it would create a spectacle and it would draw attention. And to them, it was the most important issue of their time. To get the American people to pay attention to this conversation, I did the same thing. I'm not comparing myself to those founders, but I used the same device and it worked. You paid attention. We started a national conversation about how the President's own lieutenants didn't think he was fit for office. That was an important conversation to have. Whether you agreed with us or didn't agree with us. One person also noticed. And in a seven letter all caps tweet, he said, treason. And I was grateful that there was a question mark, because treason is punishable by death in the United States. So at least if there was a question, I had a chance. The President of the United States subsequently said he wanted the author found and turned in for national security reasons. But as I later find out, the White House gave up the search because lawyers in the White House said this article was First Amendment protected speech. We can't pursue this person. It's not treason. We're not going to arrest them. But that was not enough for me. In 2020. I felt like I needed to take off the mask because behind the mask, I was sending the signal that it was okay to sit in the dark and put your opinions out there and not take accountability. Before that election, I needed to go out there and tell you the specific things, things that I saw to buttress those claims I made in that piece. And Let you make up your damn minds about whether this guy deserved to be re elected once again. He noticed. We'll get to that in a second. And he said at campaign rallies, bad things are going to happen to Miles Taylor. And he was right. They did. His supporters made sure of it. As a consequence of his rhetoric, as a consequence of accusing me of treason, I had to leave my home on Capitol Hill. I lost my job that I had taken in the private sector. After I left the administration, I lost my life savings spending it on lawyers, my security friends. And on election night 2020, I found myself in a safe house in Northern Virginia under armed guard with a pistol under my pillow because so many of my fellow Americans believed I should die for criticizing the President of the United States. Fast forward to April 9th of this year. Of course, Donald Trump lost that election in 2020. He won. He came back to power. And on that day, I was out and about again with Martini, which means, you know, something bad's going to happen. He was a dirty martini. I had to take him to the groomers. We got him cleaned. I came home and I got a message from a journalist who said, you need to turn on the news. The President of the United States is talking about you in the Oval Office. And I pulled it up on my phone, and there was Donald Trump, and there was Donald Trump declaring not that I might be guilty of treason. The question mark was gone. He told the American people in the world that he believed I was guilty of the highest crime contemplated in the United States Constitution. A reminder. A crime punishable by death. And as legal scholars later told me, it was the first time in 249 years of the American republic that a President of the United States has issued an executive order to investigate one of his critics for First Amendment protected speech. Now, you would be right to ask a question. If treason is tantamount to murder, why am I standing here right now? Why am I not in handcuffs? Why am I not in a jail cell? And whether you agree with me or not, I will tell you the answer. The answer is because the US justice system has not caught up to the President's view that criticism of a president is subversive, that criticism should be criminalized, that you need a permission slip to criticize the president. The justice system hasn't caught up to that yet. But you know who did? The same people before that followed his dog whistles. They were paying attention.