The anonymous “resistance” official inside Donald Trump’s early White House administration unmasked himself as former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.
Mr Taylor was the writer behind a 2018 Op-Ed column in The New York Times that described the president as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective”, as well as the book “A Warning” that said Mr Trump threatened America’s democracy.
Mr Taylor went public with his criticisms of Mr Trump after resigning from the administration in June 2019, appearing in a video before the Republican National Convention to endorse Joe Biden.
But his identity as the anonymous administration insider behind early public rebukes of the president was not revealed until Wednesday, less than a week before the 2020 election on 3 November.
“While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government,” Mr Taylor said in his statement.
“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.”
A senior aide for former Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Mr Taylor left the administration after his boss was fired. He went to work for Google and has most recently been on leave to campaign for Mr Biden, according to the Times.
Mr Taylor’s original op-ed, published in September 2018, said the “resistance” in the White House vowed to thwart the president’s impulses until he was out of office.
“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,” Mr Taylor wrote.
Mr Trump responded with a one-word tweet: “Treason?”
After Mr Taylor first spoke out publicly in 2020, the president called him “a DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE named Miles Taylor, who I do not know (never heard of him).”
