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Miles Taylor anonymously wrote 2018 NYT op-ed, Trump supporters say, 'Seen more exciting reveals in Scooby-Doo'

In the aftermath of this reveal, there has been considerable debate (especially among conservative pundits and Trump supporters) over whether the New York Times inflated Taylor’s status to give more weight to the anonymous op-ed

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, on Wednesday, October 28, revealed that he was the anonymous author of the famous 2018 New York Times op-ed that described President Donald Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective”. In a statement released on Medium, Taylor made this reveal.

While talking about his decision to publish the essay anonymously for the Times, Taylor wrote in his statement, “I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed,” adding that “too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.” He said that he had witnessed Trump’s inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. “Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals,” wrote Taylor.

Taylor was also the anonymous author of ‘A Warning’, a book he wrote in 2019, and in which he described Trump as an “undisciplined” and “amoral” leader whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy. In the book, he described Mr. Trump as a “12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway.”

Taylor joined the Trump administration in 2017. He served as former United States secretary of homeland security Kirstjen Nielsen’s deputy chief of staff before being promoted in 2018. Taylor resigned from the Department of Homeland Security in June 2019. Following that, he has publicly criticized Trump but up until now, he had denied writing the op-ed. Just before the start of the Republican National Convention, Taylor released a video declaring that the president was unfit for office and endorsed Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee. 

In the aftermath of this reveal, there has been considerable debate (especially among conservative pundits and Trump supporters) over whether the New York Times inflated Taylor’s status to give more weight to the anonymous op-ed. At the time, the Times published the essay with a note that said: “The Times is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous op-ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.”

White House Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows took to Twitter and wrote, “You have got to be kidding me. Miles Taylor? That’s who the New York Times granted an anonymous editorial article? I’ve seen more exciting reveals in Scooby-Doo episodes. What a monumental embarrassment.” Meadows added in another tweet, “Laughable as the ‘Miles Taylor Anonymous’ episode is, it’s every bit as damaging to the media. The New York Times amplified a no-name agency deputy with no access to President Trump and misled Americans into thinking he was an influential senior official. Absolutely ridiculous.”

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization, wrote on Twitter, “It's disgraceful to watch the media praise Miles Taylor, the ‘Anonymous’ whistleblower with no real insight into the Trump administration while completely ignoring Tony Bobulinski, the credible whistleblower with hard evidence of Biden Family corruption.” Conservative political commentator Mollie Hemingway wrote, “For whatever it is worth, rumors swirling that NYT's famous ‘Anonymous’ person is literally someone named Miles Taylor, but I don't think that is true because that would be even lamer and lower-level than many dreamed imaginable.”

The criticism for the Times continued. Sean Davis, the co-founder of the conservative news outlet called The Federalist said, “LOL at NYT lying to everyone and pretending ‘Anonymous’ was anything other than a no-name agency bureaucrat trying to get revenge and get rich through illegal leaks to corrupt media.” And of course, Trump himself went ahead to tweet about it and wrote, “Who is Miles Taylor? Said he was ‘anonymous’, but I don’t know him - never even heard of him. Just another @nytimes SCAM - he worked in conjunction with them. Also worked for Big Tech’s @Google. Now works for Fake News @CNN. They should fire, shame, and punish everybody....”

The NYT, in its report about the reveal, noted, “The disclosure of Mr. Taylor’s identity is likely to renew the debate over his motives and raise questions about whether his position in the Trump administration was senior enough to justify the decisions by The Times’s Opinion desk and the book’s publisher to keep his identity secret.”

This debate is only just beginning.