It’s a really different environment. This is because of Trump in many ways. Trump is the person who has given a permission slip to the people who want to inject violence into American politics as a means of intimidation, to silence the opposition.
There is a possibility that a rational insurgency can counterbalance this. I think it will take several cycles. I think it would take us perhaps 10 years to rebalance the GOP toward that side of rationality and away from the radicals. And it’s tough to predict where it will end up. I think the roots of this were back in the Obama administration and began with a failure to make progress. . . .
That fear evolved, toward the end of Trump’s administration, into a much more visceral fear of potential violent retribution. And I’m talking about former Cabinet secretaries, sitting members of Congress and others who personally confessed to me, “I don’t think I can join you in rising up against this guy because I’ve got to worry about my family’s safety.” I didn’t see it going there with those people. I didn’t anticipate how much I was going to hear that as a response. They would say to me, “Look, I’ve got kids and this is too crazy right now.”
Trump has been successful in wielding fear to silence his opposition. There’s a much larger opposition to Donald Trump out there, and they are largely still silent because he’s shown so effectively that he will go after his enemies. I anticipated this when I wrote the op-ed in the Times, but I didn’t anticipate how fast it would happen.
https://www.salon.com/2021/11/29/former-anonymous-aide-miles-taylor-lets-unite-to-make-boring-again/