Author of 2018 'Anonymous' op-ed critical of Trump revealed - CNNPolitics
Category: News & Politics
Via: sister-mary-agnes-ample-bottom • 4 years ago • 25 commentsBy: Jake Tapper and Jeremy Herb (CNN)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Taylor, who was chief of staff to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wrote a lengthy statement explaining why he penned the 2018 op-ed declaring he was part of the "resistance" inside the Trump administration working to thwart Trump's worst inclinations. Taylor said that he wanted to force Trump to respond to the charges he was leveling without the ability to attack the messenger specifically. Trump called the op-ed treasonous.
"Much has been made of the fact that these writings were published anonymously. The decision wasn't easy, I wrestled with it, and I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting President under the cover of anonymity. But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it," Taylor wrote.
Taylor, who was chief of staff to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, wrote a lengthy statement explaining why he penned the 2018 op-ed declaring he was part of the "resistance" inside the Trump administration working to thwart Trump's worst inclinations. Taylor said that he wanted to force Trump to respond to the charges he was leveling without the ability to attack the messenger specifically. Trump called the op-ed treasonous.
"Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling," Taylor added. "I wanted the attention to be on the arguments themselves."
Taylor joined CNN as a contributor in September 2020.
Taylor's statement answers one of the biggest mysteries of Trump's presidency. Trump responded furiously to the op-ed when it was written in 2018, and urged then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the matter. There was an internal hunt at the White House to uncover the identity of the author, and it spawned months of parlor games in Washington guessing at who was behind the op-ed through the speech patterns and phrases used.
A year later, Taylor released the anonymously authored book titled, "A Warning," which included new details critical of the President from inside the Trump administration. He wrote that members of Trump's team considered sabotaging him to prompt Trump to resign, and that many administration officials kept their own letters of resignation in their desks or on their laptops.
Since leaving the Trump administration in 2019, Taylor endorsed Democrat Joe Biden in August and co-founded a Republican group that is opposed to Trump.
"I am a Republican, and I wanted this president to succeed," Taylor said in his statement Wednesday. "But too often in times of crisis, Donald Trump has proven 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."
The White House has criticized Taylor since his endorsement of Biden, and Trump called him a "disgruntled employee."
Taylor said he was hopeful that more people inside the government would speak out against Trump, noting that several senior officials have done so in different ways since leaving the administration.
"I witnessed Trump's inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years inside the administration. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals," Taylor wrote.
In the 2018 op-ed, which was titled, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration," Taylor anonymously wrote that "many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."
But Taylor said that original assertion was incorrect.
"The country cannot rely on well-intentioned, unelected bureaucrats around the President to steer him toward what's right," Taylor said Wednesday. "He has purged most of them anyway."
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When do the death threats come against him and his family? Anyone who dares to tell the truth about tRump/contradict, death threats are soon to follow.
The story broke about 45 minutes ago, so I would guess that the threats started 44 minutes ago.
It could have been hundreds of disillusioned bitter ex Trump staffers with their intimate knowledge of Trump's imany nadequacies and deficiencies...
The New York Times
@nytimes
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5m
Breaking News: An ex-Homeland Security official, Miles Taylor, reveals he was the anonymous author of a 2018 New York Times Op-Ed describing a “resistance” in the administration.
Treasonous???? The man has the right to speak his mind.
I don't think it was treasonous. Do you?
Of course not! But I think I'm a little more educated on what treason actually is compared to trmp
I hope Miles is in a safe place. Trump supporters will not take kindly to this news.
oh absolutely!
I'm wondering what made him out himself.
Here is the op-ed: (Thanks JR!)
I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
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. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here . [Update: Our answers to some of those questions are published here .]
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
[ The author of this Op-Ed will publish a book in November 2019 titled “A Warning.”]
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “ resistance ” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration
source
I'm sure that he will be getting death threats very soon.
He can handle it. I think this is why he has been "full frontal" up to now: to test how much severity a real person would face. As you can tell: he survived and its bearable. Michael Cohen survived the prison "RAT" stamp from Donald and has written a book too, for crying outloud! Scaramucci still has a thriving business and is still listed in appropriate social circles.
Haven’t you all heard? The ‘disgruntled’ label magically makes every bad or unflattering statement about Donald Trump untrue.
I actually had to remember this. Donald just surrounds himself with controversy. It kinda works in a way, puts himself in a fog of controversy and so much of it, it is hard to pinpoint specific ones...
I just found out why Miles Taylor outed himself. He said he would.
From Business Insider last November:
"As far as anonymity is concerned, I will not keep my identity shrouded in secrecy forever," the author said Tuesday evening in a Reddit post during an AMA, or "ask me anything," interview. "I am not afraid to use my own name to express concern about the current occupant of the Oval Office. Donald Trump has not heard the last of me. There is more to come."
The author of "A Warning," which was released November 19 and has been a best-seller on Amazon, offered a timeline of their self-reveal: "Trump will hear from me, in my own name, before the 2020 election," the person said in another comment.
"The anonymous senior Trump administration official who wrote a 2018 New York Times op-ed and a subsequent book critical of President Donald Trump is Miles Taylor, he revealed in a statement to CNN on Thursday."
But he wasn't a senior administrational official. Another lie by the New York Times!
So this was a huge dud, huh?