America facing existential ‘fight or flee’ moment under Trump: Ex-Trump official

Miles Taylor, the former Trump administration official turned vocal critic, issued a stark warning to Americans on the eve of the nation's 250th anniversary, arguing the country now faces a fundamental choice about its future under President Donald Trump.

In an op-ed published Friday, Taylor wrote that the traditional "pillars" of American democracy — the rule of law, free dissent, separation of powers and the loyalty of public officials — are buckling under Trump. However, he also argued that beneath those pillars lay something else: "popular sovereignty," the idea that governing power belongs to the people alone.

"When a free people find that democracy's pillars appear at risk of collapsing, they must decide whether to fight or flee," Taylor wrote. "There's only one right answer in my view."

Taylor built his argument around the story of Todd Beamer and the passengers of United Flight 93, who voted to storm the cockpit of their hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001, ultimately crashing it into a Pennsylvania field rather than allow it to reach its intended target in Washington.

Taylor wrote that the passengers' vote, cast with "no court" and "no president or army" able to save them, proves that in America, "authority runs upward, from the people."

He warned that Trump's actions — jailing critics, deploying troops domestically — are consequences of a deeper failure, writing that "an autocrat is downstream of the abdication" by voters who returned him to power.

"Nature destroys everything it creates, but it creates from everything it destroys," Taylor wrote. "Perhaps we’ll lose the whole building. That would be quite a trial. Yet from the rubble, a free people can always, always, always build again. If we choose to. That’s the promise beneath each personal ruin in our own lives or a once-in-a-century national catastrophe. We’re not doomed. We’re never doomed. We retain the option to rebuild."