Punishing President Donald Trump for his worst transgressions once he leaves power might "feel good," but Democrats must go further and enact "monumental" changes to stop another president like him, according to Miles Taylor, the former official and first-term whistleblower who served inside the administration.

Taylor worked as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term, rising to the office of chief of staff before leaving in 2019. He first made headlines, however, for penning an anonymous New York Times op-ed about being part of the "Resistance Within the Trump Administration." Since departing the White House and going public with his identity, he has emerged as a vocal critic of his former boss.

In his latest piece for The i Paper on Wednesday, Taylor cited a recent report from The Washington Post detailing how "Trump's opponents are drawing up the most sweeping overhaul of the presidency since the Watergate scandal," involving "bills to rein in emergency powers, insulate the Justice Department from the White House, bar a president from taking foreign payments and more clearly outlaw the punishment of people for their speech." The Watergate reference points to the 1970s, when the scandal that ended Richard Nixon's presidency prompted Congress to pass a wave of new legal checks on executive power.

As Taylor explained, he is "one of the reasons why it's necessary."

"On 9 April last year, Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office and signed a piece of paper with my name on it. The memorandum stripped me of my security clearance and ordered the federal government to investigate me. As he signed it, he told reporters he thought I was guilty of 'treason,' a crime punishable by death," Taylor wrote. "Of course, my real offense was quitting his administration and speaking out about his penchant for corruption. The irony — of a man abusing his power to punish someone who warned that he'd abuse his power — was not lost on me."

He added: "In nearly 250 years, no American president had ever put his signature to a written order directing the machinery of the state against a named private citizen for what he or she had said."

Taylor noted, unlike many of his friends, he is not so eager to see "the favor returned" on Trump — to see "the next Democratic president to pick up the same pen on day one and sign orders directing the Justice Department to investigate Trump, his family and his enablers, by name, for alleged corruption." While he is strongly in favor of investigations, he argued "they should come about according to the rule of law, based on evidence of crimes — not because a president says someone is guilty first and investigates them second."

Turning Trump's own "weapon" around on him would do nothing to stop the next president like him, Taylor explained, which is why he instead supports the "sweeping" reforms quietly being drafted by Democrats. Unlike a memorandum aimed at a single individual, such legislation would seek to entrench limits for every future president — an attempt to turn assumed guard-rails into statute rather than leaving them to convention. The open question is whether those drafts can clear Congress, the body Taylor notes that pardons cannot stop from investigating or from writing new limits into law.

"If the next president can do to Trump what Trump did to me, then the one after that can do it to someone else, and the American presidency becomes a revenge machine that changes hands every four years," he wrote. "The lesson of the past two years isn't that the wrong man got hold of this power. It's that no one should have it, whichever party they belong to."

He concluded: "Trump knows what's coming. He has reportedly promised to pre-emptively pardon all his top administration officials before he leaves office. That tells you that he fears the tables turning and that he's already working on how to escape accountability. While pardons can shield his people from federal prosecution, they cannot stop Congress from investigating, and they cannot stop Congress from writing into law the guard-rails everyone assumed were already there. That's the mission. I want the order Trump signed against me to be both the first and last of its kind in American history. Punishing him would feel good. But making sure no president can ever do it again would be worth far more."