Opinion | I Quit the First Trump Administration in Protest. Principled Conservatives Must Serve in the Second.

In 2018, as a member of the first Trump administration, I anonymously published an opinion essay in The Times warning that President Donald Trump was unstable and a danger to “the health of our Republic.”At the time, I was a senior official in the Department of Homeland Security grappling with Mr.Trump’s worst excesses.

(I eventually became chief of staff for the department.) I quit the administration in 2019 and openly campaigned against Mr.Trump, a decision that resulted in a flurry of threats to my physical safety that required me to relocate to a safe house with an armed guard.My advice to fellow conservatives ahead of Mr.

Trump’s return to the presidency is not to run from him, as some might say they should.Instead, I urge them to join him, as I once did.Republicans with integrity cannot turn away from the difficult years ahead.

They should step forward and serve in the executive branch out of dedication to the principles that hold this country together, however tenuously.I can assure future staff members that working in a Trump administration will not be as turbulent as the media makes it out to be.It will be rockier.When I worked at the Department of Homeland Security, Mr.

Trump’s unpredictable impulses often upended the department.I was in the room when he demanded that we withhold federal aid from disaster-stricken states that had voted against him.

I listened as he proposed partnering with Russia on cybersecurity.And I saw him lose control in a fight with North Korea because of personal insults — a crisis that sent us scrambling to prepare for a possible nuclear war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....