After President Donald Trump authorized the deployment of National Guard troops in Chicago, Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the first Trump administration, said the people around Trump “know that the city of Chicago has a history of protest. Chicago has a history of riots. And they’re looking for cities where they can create unrest.”
As seen below on CNN, Taylor said when he was working in the first Trump administration, the President described the Insurrection Act as his “magical authorities.”
Note: Taylor first signaled alarm about Trump’s “magical authorities” when he wrote the anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed titled, ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.’
NEWS: Trump is inching closer to illegally invoking the Insurrection Act.
If ever there was a moment for America’s governors — especially in Blue States — to hold an emergency summit, it’s now.
The federal government is plotting invasions of their states. pic.twitter.com/BC8spxHZuz
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 14, 2025
Taylor said that during the first Trump administration the President wanted to use the Insurrection Act “at the border, we said it wasn’t legal. He wanted people like Mark Esper to use it against protestors in 2020, they told him it wasn’t legal. Now he has those people out of his administration, now he’s got people who are willing to use it without cause in major cities.”
Note: Esper served as Trump’s Secretary of Defense before he was dismissed by Trump days after he lost the 2020 presidential election.
Taylor is now urging Democratic governors including California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker “to call an urgent meeting of America’s governors. Maybe it’s just the blue state governors, but this is it. This is the moment all the governors need to get together and say ‘we should talk about mutual aid pacts and joint boycotts and ways to get leverage over the federal government because the Trump administration is coming for them. This is an urgent moment of national security.”