‘Anonymous’ Falls Flat

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, October 29, 2020

 

“Anonymous,” the unnamed Trump administration official who claimed in an infamous New York Times op-ed that he was secretly trying to “thwart” Trump’s policies, turned out to be . . . Miles Taylor, a former policy adviser and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson, and eventually chief of staff in the department, although not until after the op-ed was published.

 

This revelation shouldn’t be a huge deal, and yet it feels like it just broke something important. It feels like the editors of the New York Times chose to play a massive prank on us. They watched the fervent Washington speculation that it was Mike Pence, James Mattis, Jared Kushner, Victoria Coates, and all along they knew it was . . . just some guy. We’ve seen other people conspire to try to pull off hoaxes and stir up frenzies and use the media to do it . . . but this time, one of the biggest voices in the media decided to facilitate the erroneous perception.

 

I speculated it was Jon Huntsman, ambassador to Russia, many times. I was wrong — wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry, Governor/Ambassador. You seemed like the most incongruous figure in the Trump administration, but from all available evidence, you served professionally and with dignity. I should not have casually suggested you would behave like this weasel.

 

The New York Times op-ed editors’ decision to keep Taylor anonymous, and describing him, not all that accurately, as “a senior official in the Trump administration,” deliberately created a misleading impression that the author was a much more prominent, much more influential figure than he was. (“Senior”? By my count, he was 30 when the op-ed was published; he was in college when Obama was inaugurated.)

 

The op-ed appears to have wildly exaggerated what Taylor saw, heard, and did. Did cabinet officials really sit around, discussing invoking the 25th Amendment with Miles Taylor? How much would Taylor be involved in policy regarding Russia?

 

If the Times wanted to write a news article reporting that a policy adviser to the DHS secretary or a deputy chief of staff had a scathingly low opinion of the president . . . the story would run on, what, page A8? A16? (Those with long memories are probably remembering David Stockman, who was at least OMB director.) By no stretch of the imagination is it a shock when someone at that rank thinks the big boss is an incompetent buffoon.

 

And if you think your boss is not merely a buffoon but is hurting the country with his policies, the right thing to do is quit and find another job. You don’t stay and try to secretly throw sand in the gears. You’re not a spy or saboteur, working behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany. (For starters, no saboteur working against the Nazis wrote an op-ed in Le Figaro entitled, “I am a part of the Resistance inside Hitler’s War Machine.” If you are part of a secret plan, a key element of the plan is keeping it secret.)

 

Taylor chose to apply for that job and to take that job. No one dragged him, kicking and screaming, to advise on homeland-security policy. Taylor wanted to be a hero of The Resistance while still cashing an administration paycheck.

 

Perhaps the most perfectly ironic statement in this whole mess came from Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, who declared back in August, “People should stop paying attention to ‘Anonymous’ and focus on the Trump officials who are willing to put themselves out there publicly like Miles Taylor.” This is like saying we should be paying less attention to Batman and more attention to Bruce Wayne.

 

In his op-ed, Taylor said he was “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” It seems fair to ask . . . was he really? Because it sounds like one of the big issues on Taylor’s plate was the child-separation policy at the border, an approach that even some staunch conservatives find morally unacceptable.

 

In his public identity, Taylor said he helped enact a policy he thought was immoral, and wished he hadn’t. “People like me should have done more; looking back, I wish I had laid my body on the train tracks and said, ‘we can’t implement this.’”

 

Taylor signed on to help the Trump administration, told the New York Times he was secretly trying to stop the Trump administration, and then helped enact one of its most controversial policies. Wait, whose side was he really on, again?