Behind closed doors, many Republican insiders fear that the 2026 midterm elections will deliver a blue wave even larger than the one in 2018, when Democrats flipped more than 40 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But according to Miles Taylor, a Never Trump conservative and former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), President Donald Trump and his aides are "gloating" and feeling "emboldened" — and will not be deterred by any backlash, whether it comes from a blue wave or major lawsuits.

Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, first came to wide public attention as the anonymous author of the 2018 New York Times op-ed "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" — a piece whose authorship he confirmed in 2020. He was serving at the department when Democrats flipped the House in 2018 — an event that, according to Taylor, made Trump no less audacious. In 2026, the former Trump administration official warns, the president and his aides will not be discouraged by lawsuits or by possible Democratic gains at the ballot box.

"Anyone hoping the losses (in 2018) would humble him was sorely mistaken," Taylor recalls. "Donald Trump was on the attack. He fired his attorney general, spoke openly about ejecting his chief of staff and set his sights on Cabinet members who challenged his erraticism and frequent impulses toward illegality. He didn't want anyone around to say 'no' to whatever his warped conscience cooked up next. On the same day, Trump blew up at CNN's Jim Acosta during a post-election press conference for asking uncomfortable questions about the Russia investigation and the president's immigration policies."

Taylor continues, "Afterwards, Trump decided he would simply throw him out of the White House, breaking with decades of norms that credentialed members of the press are given access to cover the American presidency. That night, I was at dinner in the restaurant of the Trump Hotel with a member of the president's Cabinet and senior national security officials. A few tables away sat the White House communications chief with a group of aides. They were openly gloating and celebrating, before the story had even hit the news. They'd had the Secret Service stop Acosta and take away his pass. If the press didn't report on Trump the way Trump wanted, he'd censor them."

Eight years later, Taylor notes, Trump is banning three news organizations from the White House: CNN, MS NOW and Politico — a move that has prompted a major lawsuit. The exclusion cuts against a long-standing tradition in which day-to-day access for credentialed journalists has been coordinated with the White House Correspondents' Association, the independent body founded in 1914 to represent outlets covering the presidency. That lawsuit, according to Taylor, will no more discourage Trump in 2026 than he was discouraged in 2018.

"He didn't learn the lesson his critics thought he would after 2018's Acosta episode," Taylor emphasizes. "The reporter sued, the courts sided with him, and he got his White House pass back within days. Even Fox News backed its rival's case. But Trump was unfazed. The lesson he took from losing wasn't that there was a red line he should never cross but that crossing it had cost him nothing. He faced no real consequences. The media kept covering him, just as always."

"Emboldened, the president has referred to his latest action as an 'assault on the FAKE NEWS' and insisted: 'I don't have to let them into the people's house,'" Taylor continues. "This isn't a man who's worried about a court ruling over freedom of speech. He's wielding the weapon of intimidation to get anticipatory obedience — to send a warning signal to everyone still covering the U.S. government, domestically or internationally."

With the lawsuit still pending and the 2026 midterms ahead, the open question is whether any ruling — or any election result — will produce the kind of consequence Taylor says Trump avoided in 2018.

Taylor laid out these warnings in an essay for i. The original report appeared on Alternet.