C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2 , 2020
“We’ve got to get back to what
it stood for — free minds, free
markets, free people — and to
give Americans a more hopeful
vision of the future.”
Yet a question lingers behind
the smile and the telegenic glossi-
ness: Will the people who lis-
tened to Taylor when he was
Anonymous listen to him now?T
here’s an of-course-he-did
thread that runs through
the evolution of one Miles
Taylor.
Of course, he went to an el-
ementary school set in a Mid-
western cornfield. Of course, the
future fast climber at the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security came
to Washington as a teenage page
in the House of Representatives.
Of course, he landed the most-
coveted page assignment: Work-
ing for then-Speaker Dennis Has-
tert, the Illinois Republican. Of
course, he dazzled, and some-
times put off, his new friends and
the higher-ups with his energy,
all-too-apparent ambition and
overachiever’s enthusiasm — for
everything.
“He takes you off-guard. Is this
an act?” Taylor’s longtime friend
James Barnes, a fellow page who
is now a noted digital campaign
strategist, remembers thinking.
“It’s not an act.”
T aylor had grown up a child of
divorce, with a bifurcated exis-
tence, in the northwestern Indi-
ana town of La Porte. A bottom-
less repository of historical, liter-
ary and philosophical minutiae,
he helpfully points out that thetown took its name from the
French for “door” — because it led
to someplace else.
His father, Ted Taylor, was a
prosperous insurance agent; his
mother a struggling school nurse.
At dad’s, life was comfy; at mom’s
it wasn’t. Her house occasionally
went dark because she couldn’t
pay the electric bill, Miles Taylor
says.
T he future shaper of Washing-
ton policy nerded out as a sixth-
grader researching the intrica-
cies of policies related to extreme
poverty. He got a job writing
scripts at a tiny radio station; one
day his dad tuned in, and to his
surprise, heard his son’s voice.
The next thing he knew, Ted
Taylor was driving his precocious
son to news conferences.
Taylor and much of his family
are Republicans, but their blood-
lines trace to the other team. His
grandfather, William Taylor, was
a moderate Democrat who served
in the Indiana Senate in the
1960s. (Miles Taylor, though an
avowed conservative Republican,
donated to Democrat Barack
Obama’s 2008 campaign, a deci-
sion he made, in part, because of
the history-making prospect of a
first African American presi-
dent.)
They’re practical folk, these
Taylors. When Taylor went off to
study philosophy and interna-
tional relations at Oxford years
later, his father bought him a pair
of clippers so he could save mon-
ey by cutting his own hair. Taylor
figures he’s saved $4,000 over
seven or so years.
When Taylor got married a few
years ago, his then-fiance gave
him an ultimatum, he says: Get a
professional haircut or she
wouldn’t show up at the altar.
He did what he was told.T
aylor wasn’t a Trump sup-
porter, still, he parlayed his
experience on the House
Homeland Security Committee
into a job in the Trump adminis-
tration, first serving as a counsel-
or to one of his biggest boosters,
the president’s chief of staff, re-
tired Marine Gen. John Kelly, and
then at the Department of Home-
land Security.
Among Washington strivers,
lofty aspirations often crash into
ugly, maddening realities. Taylor
found himself quickly enmeshed
in the turmoil surrounding
Trump’s legally flimsy fixation on
banning travel to the United
States by people from an array of
predominantly Muslim nations.
In Sept. 2017, Taylor — then a
DHS counselor — told reporters
the plan being recommended to
Trump by acting DHS secretary
Elaine Duke would be “tough”
and “tailored.”
Taylor earned a reputation
within the department as bound-
lessly ambitious, rankling some
of the more experienced hands,
and pushing for promotions, ac-
cording to two former high-rank-
ing DHS officials who spoke on
the condition of anonymity to
relate private conversations. Oth-
ers admired his initiative, as he
rose to deputy chief of staff, then
chief of staff.Behind the scenes, Taylor ar-
gued for limiting the number of
countries affected by the travel
ban, Taylor and his-then col-
league Olivia Troye say in inter-
views. In meetings, he sometimes
clashed heatedly with Gene Ham-
ilton, an attorney working on
security issues at DHS who is now
at the Justice Department, and
had a reputation as an immigra-
tion restrictionist. Taylor argued
for relying on data about which
countries cooperated with the
United States to determine who
was banned. Troye, who would
later make news by resigning and
accusing Trump of putting his
reelection effort ahead of public
safety in the pandemic, remem-
bers walking away from one dust-
up and thinking, “Okay, Miles
isn’t crazy.”
“Bless the heart of anyone
claiming that Miles and I ever
had a heated discussion about
anything or an actual disagree-
ment about any particular list of
countries,” Hamilton says. “Any
such claims are totally false.”
In private, Taylor says, Trump
was pushing DHS to recommend
expanding the countries covered
in the ban from around half-doz-
en “to double, triple, quadruple
the number.”
While fighting to frustrate that
effort, Taylor felt like he and
like-minded DHS staffers had
become the much-hoped-for
guardrail on Trump.
“If we weren’t there,” Taylor
says, “there would have been a
travel ban on dozens of coun-
tries.”M
iles Taylor wanted out.
But he wanted company.
He envisioned a dra-
matic en-masse resignation, in-
cluding Cabinet secretaries and
their top aides, to prove the point
that Trump was unfit for office.
Two months before the mid-
term congressional elections,
Taylor was infuriated when
Trump wanted flags that had
been lowered to half-staff after
the death of iconic Republican
Sen. John McCain of Arizona to
be lifted. While on a work trip to
Australia, he dashed off a short
op-ed that the Times agreed to
publish anonymously, a condi-
tion Taylor wanted because he
hoped the focus would be on the
issues he raised rather than him.
Even the headline made head-
lines: “I Am Part of the Resistance
Inside the Trump Administra-
tion.”
Taylor is coy about how many
people knew it was him.
“Fewer than the fingers on
your hands,” he says.
He didn’t even tell his wife
until “many months later,” he
says.
After finally resigning in 2019,
Taylor ensconced himself in his
grandmother’s condominium on
Marco Island, Fla., to write. His
family wondered what he was up
to.
By Nov. 2019, he had a book
that, despite its mostly pedestri-
an writing and tangents about
philosophers, became a bestseller
because of its content. The book’s
examples reinforced everythingthat Trump’s opponents feared
about him, including calling out
Trump’s “truly insane” sugges-
tion that people detained for
illegally crossing the border be
sent to the U.S. prison at Guan-
tánamo, Cuba, a facility that
houses notorious terrorists.
The book is generally hyper-
cautious about singling out
Trump administration officials,
other than a few, such as immi-
gration extremist and presiden-
tial sidekick Stephen Miller. Tay-
lor didn’t want it to be tell-all, but
he takes a few shots, including an
obvious bolt against his former
boss, the much-criticized former
DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen,
who had defended Trump’s policy
of separating families detained at
the border. Without mentioning
her, Taylor writes with disdain
about “homeland security lead-
ers who in a sickening display of
bad judgment, conceded to a
policy that increased the number
of children ripped from the arms
of their parents at the US-Mexico
border. It left a stain on their
reputations, their department,
and the country.”
Taylor was furious that
Trump’s White House “threw
Nielsen under the bus” by talking
her into publicly defending the
policy, which she’d been privately
arguing against.
Taylor says he delegated most
immigration policy work to un-
derlings and focused instead on
national and international secu-
rity issues, including — foreshad-
ow much? — “dangerous drones.”
But he doesn’t entirely absolve
himself.
“I wish I’d gotten more invest-
ed,” he says.
Proximity to Trump’s policies
would haunt Taylor.
When he later landed a nation-
al security-related job at Google,
a Muslim advocacy group, MPow-
er Action Fund, posted an open
letter urging the company to fire
him, and calling him “racist” and
“xenophobic.
Google, it seems, was un-
moved. Taylor kept his job.O
n the evening of Oct. 28,
Trump took to Twitter and
did what he has done so
often during his time in office: He
lied.
Taylor had just revealed him-
self as Anonymous, and Trump
told his tens of millions of follow-
ers that he’d “never even heard
of” Taylor. (Trump had, in fact,
mentioned Taylor by name in
August when he wrote a critical
op-ed in The Washington Post
and e ndorsed Biden for presi-
dent, tweeting that Taylor is “said
to be a real ‘stiff.’ ”) At a campaign
rally, Trump called Taylor a “slea-
zebag” and a “low-level lowlife”
who should be “prosecuted.”
The revelation of Taylor’s iden-
tity came as a surprise to his
father. One of the first things he
did was order a copy of his son’s
book.
The New York Times took a
little heat for calling him a “sen-
ior official,” though Taylor was
able to mostly swat that away by
pointing out that he was, after all,
the deputy chief of staff, at thetime, for a department with more
than 200,000 employees and that
the Trump administration had
tasked him to give background
briefings to the media as a “senior
official.”
He also got slapped around a
little for having denied being
Anonymous in an on-air CNN
interview, the network where he
is now a contributor. It’s not the
first time, however, that an
“Anonymous” has falsely said he
wasn’t Anonymous. Remember
the denials from author Joe Klein
when he anonymously wrote the
buzzy book inspired by Bill and
Hillary Clinton, “Primary Col-
ors”?
Defeating Trump became an
all-consuming endeavor for Tay-
lor. He co-founded an organiza-
tion dedicated to reinventing the
GOP called, the Republican Polit-
ical Alliance for Integrity and
Reform (RePAIR), which boosts
some boldface conservative
names, such as prominent for-
eign policy veteran Richard Ar-
mitage, former acting attorney
general Stuart Gerson and an
assortment of onetime members
of Congress.
Taylor envisions the group “un-
doing the damage” of Trump’s
tenure in office, and “advancing a
more compassionate and ideas-
based GOP platform.” Now, he
says, “folks see the party as soul-
less, greedy and inhumane.”
Spooling it out, he sounds a
little like a future candidate for
public office. Asked whether he’d
run, he doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t
say no, either.
Taylor might “play a role” in
guiding the party’s new era, says a
former Republican member of
Congress who has worked with
him. But the former lawmaker —
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss candidly
his, and others’, expectations for a
colleague — is quick to relegate
him to a lower echelon in the
status-conscious political hierar-
chy, noting he was merely “a
staffer,” not an elected official.
Taylor had taken a leave from
his Google job during the cam-
paign as he hopscotched battle-
ground states urging Republi-
cans to vote for Biden. He won’t
be going back to Google. He won’t
go into details, but describes it as
an amicable departure.
He’s out of work, except for the
part-time CNN employment and
some consulting projects, and his
finances are in tatters — he has
said he’ll donate much of his
book royalties to organizations,
including the White House Cor-
respondents’ Association. And
he’s had serious marital prob-
lems.
On the Saturday after the
presidential election, Taylor says
a friend called him. The friend
had news: The networks had
declared Biden the winner of the
presidency.
Taylor, a man of oceanic words,
was speechless.
Moments passed before the
silence broke.
Miles Taylor was sobbing. They
were tears of joy.
manuel.roig-
[email protected]BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
M iles Taylor was chief of staff at Homeland Security when he wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump
Administration.” After Taylor i dentified himself as the author of the column and “A Warning,” President Trump called him a “sleazebag” and a “low-level lowlife.”He’d been a chief of staff at the
Department of Homeland Secu-
rity and forever Republican, but
was mostly unknown outside
wonky Washington circles until
then. Now people were recogniz-
ing him.
In late October, Taylor went
even further, revealing himself in
a Medium post, after more than a
year of furious speculation and
repeated denials, as “Anony-
mous,” the author of a much-dis-
cussed 2018 op-ed in the New
York Times describing a stealth
understory of resistance inside
the Trump administration made
up of officials bent on frustrating
the president’s most ridiculous
and dangerous instincts.
At the same time, Taylor fessed
to writing the 2019 book, “A
Warning,” which presented an
even darker portrait of a presi-
dent who had turned out to be
nearly impossible to restrain.
President Trump has talked of a
nefarious “deep state” conspiracy
of career government operators
determined to topple him. Taylor
has a different take, saying a
“steady state” of political appoin-
tees and career employees were
intent on stopping the president
from harming the country.
In the weeks since Taylor’s
self-induced unmasking, he has
shuffled between at least 10 un-
disclosed locations, he says,
bunking in private homes and
hotels after receiving a deluge of
death threats. Haters on the po-
litical right despise him, nudged
along by Trump calling him a
“traitor.” Haters on the left de-
mean him for staying more than
two years in an administration
they consider corrupt and amor-
al, and for working at a Depart-
ment of Homeland Security nota-
ble for its inhumane immigration
policies — positions that he says
he did not support and sought to
soften.
Worried that he’ll be attacked,
Taylor now employs private secu-
rity. One recent afternoon, a
large, stern man guarded the
entrance to the location where
Taylor has holed up for the day.
Inside, Taylor stuffs rolls of toilet
paper into a backpack because
he’s close to running out at one of
his other places of refuge.
Taylor, despite the drama, re-
mains the relentlessly affable,
eager-to-please charmer who
rose so absurdly quickly through
the ranks of staffers in Washing-
ton. At 33, he could easily be
mistaken as a mid-20-something.
His brown hair is swept back so
meticulously and abundantly
that it almost dares you to muss
it. His right eye is blue and his left
is green, he notes, cheerfully,
brandishing a toothy smile.
In his travels to battleground
states to nudge Republicans away
from Trump, Taylor laments that
he’s put on a few pounds. By all
appearances this claim is dubious
as he offers it up while perched in
a slender-fitted jacket.
“It’s all kale salads now,” he
says.
When he ventures out of his
hiding places, Taylor favors base-
ball caps pulled low and sun-
glasses. A mask serves the dual
purpose of shielding him from
infection by the coronavirus and
concealing an identity that has
become ever harder to camou-
flage as he’s upped his public
presence by serving as a CNN
contributor and talking head.
“There’s no better time to be
anonymous,” quips the man who
once was “Anonymous.”
The mysterious author named
Anonymous was a player, a self-
appointed early-warning system
about Trump’s presidency. People
listened to Anonymous.
As a device, it was genius. The
intrigue about who might have
written it — and the speculation
that it might have been someone
far above Taylor’s rank, perhaps
even a member of the Cabinet —
gave a then-shocking (though
now commonplace) revelation all
the sizzle that it would never have
received if he’d put his name on
it.
“Who the hell is Miles Taylor?”
he imagined people would have
said.
Now, come into the light, Tay-
lor would like to be a Republican
Party thought leader, he says,
offering, along with fellow Trump
dissenters, “a rational voice with-
in the party to steer the GOP back
to principles-based governing,
and away from the cult of person-
ality around Donald Trump.”
TAYLOR FROM C1
He gives
his name
and h ides
his location
“We’ve got to get
back to what it
stood for — free
minds, free
markets, free
people — and to
give Americans a
more hopeful
vision of the
future.”
Miles Taylor, on the future of
the Republican Party