Public disclosures about the first Trump administration
In August 2020, Taylor took a leave of absence from Google to support Joe Biden's presidential campaign. He made an advertisement for Republican Voters Against Trump, denouncing Trump and endorsing Biden in the 2020 presidential election. That same month, Taylor also wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post. Columnist Jennifer Rubin said the op-ed added "detail to what we could have only surmised was the story behind chaotic policy rollouts" and that the advertisement he released "may be the most compelling of the 2020 election cycle". The next day, Taylor appeared on multiple news and analysis shows saying that other former members of the Trump administration were considering speaking out similarly. On August 24, Taylor confirmed to NBC News that he was co-founding, with two other unnamed Republican officials, the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR), a group that aimed to oppose reelection of Trump and to reform the Republican Party after the 2020 election.
Taylor's attacks against Trump were extensive. Among other anecdotes, he revealed that Trump was too distracted to pay attention to intelligence briefings, that Trump refused internal recommendations to punish Moscow for interference in U.S. affairs, and that Trump wanted to "swap" Puerto Rico for Greenland because it was "dirty and the people were poor". Taylor also said that Trump tried to block emergency aid for California wildfire victims because it was a Democratic state, and that Trump told his homeland security secretary to take marching orders from cable talk-show host Lou Dobbs.
In 2020, Taylor, along with over 130 other former Republican national security officials, signed a statement that asserted that President Trump was unfit to serve another term, and "To that end, we are firmly convinced that it is in the best interest of our nation that Vice President Joe Biden be elected as the next President of the United States, and we will vote for him."
In September 2020, Taylor revealed to The Lincoln Project that, before he resigned from the DHS, a senior presidential adviser told him about a list of executive orders that had been prepared in case President Trump would win a second term, which Taylor alleged were orders deemed unacceptable during a first term presidency because they could harm the president's chances of reelection. Later, BuzzFeed reporter Hamed Aleaziz concluded that Taylor was implying Stephen Miller was that senior presidential adviser, with The Guardian reiterating this claim and reporting that Miller's biographer Jean Guerrero warned about a "wishlist" of his relating to immigration policy under a Trump second term.
Taylor also told news organizations that Trump ordered officials to have American flags raised back up when they were lowered in honor of Senator John McCain, and that Trump deliberately ignored warnings about the rise of domestic terrorism for political reasons. Taylor was also among those who appeared on a special that aired on CNN in October 2020, titled, "The Insiders: A Warning from Former Trump Officials". During the special, Taylor criticized Trump's singular focus on immigration, especially the border wall, saying that his "wall-or-nothing approach to governing meant the president ignored some of the most critical homeland security threats to our country, cybersecurity challenges, counterterrorism, manmade and natural disasters, and foreign interference in our democracy."
In an interview with MSNBC in June 2021 and subsequent public statements, Taylor stated that "the number one national security threat" to the United States was "extremist elements" within his own party, including those that resulted in the January 6th Insurrection. On his stand against the rightward trajectory of the GOP, Taylor told an interviewer at the Salzburg Global Seminar in December 2022: "I don't consider myself…courageous. I consider a lot of the people that were in the Republican Party with me as cowardly."
