After speculating for two years about the identity of the "inner ghost" in the White House, now there is finally an answer.
According to the New York Times, on October 28, local time, Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, officially admitted that in 2018, he wrote an article under the pseudonym "Anonymous" in the New York Times to attack Trump as "impetuous, aggressive, trivial and ineffective". Taylor is also the author of A Warning (signed "Anonymous" when it was published), in which he describes Trump as an "undisciplined, unethical" leader.
Miles Taylor officially recognized the identity of "Anonymous". /Twitter screenshot
Taylor published a four-page statement online. In the statement, Taylor continued his past style and continued to attack the "incompetence" of the Trump administration, while explaining the reasons for choosing to expose the news anonymously in the first place, and explaining why he chose to take off his mask and face the public now.
Who the hell is Miles Taylor? What kind of divisions within the White House are reflected behind the anonymous criticism?
Who is Miles Taylor?
Miles Taylor graduated from Indiana University and is a Marshall Scholar in International Relations at Oxford University. He served for two years as a senior aide to House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCall.
Taylor joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2017, serving as a senior advisor during John Francis Kelly's tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security, followed by a deputy chief of staff following Ms. Kirsten Nelson's inauguration as secretary of homeland security, and was promoted to chief of staff in 2018. After Nielsen's resignation in April 2019, Taylor served as acting justice minister Kevin McCullis's chief of staff until june of the same year.
Taylor's work is largely related to issues such as immigration, cybersecurity and terrorism, and he has been involved in developing the Trump administration's controversial policies, including a travel ban on people from Muslim countries, a zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrants, and the separation of children from their parents at the border.
According to Taylor, he is a Republican party member, which is why he originally joined the Trump administration, "As a Republican party member, I want to see a Republican president succeed."
However, after two years in the Trump administration, Taylor apparently changed his perspective. "I've witnessed Trump's incompetence in a crisis too many times, his personal flaws that led to his failure in leadership, and now his failure requires Americans to pay with their lives."
After Taylor's identity was announced, Trump immediately released a Twitter response. Even though many photos of Trump and Taylor can be found attending a meeting, Trump still says he doesn't know Taylor. "Who is Miles Taylor?" He said he was 'Anonymous', but I didn't know him or even heard of him. Trump claims this is another New York Times scam.
Trump claimed not to know Miles Taylor. /Twitter screenshot
What kind of sensation has Anonymous caused?
In 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed written by Anonymous, "I Am a Resister in the Trump Administration," calling there "silent resistance" within the White House to protect the nation from the president's "reckless instincts."
According to the Washington Post, the article caused an uproar and sparked speculation about the author's identity in the years that followed. The White House, in particular, spent a long time unsuccessfully finding the "anonymous." At the time, Trump called anonymous on Twitter a "treason" and declared the article a matter of national security, hoping that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would launch an investigation to find anonymous.
In 2019, Anonymous returned with the publication of the book A Warning. The book details Trump's decision-making process on internal state management and foreign policy guidelines through daily meetings, and calls Trump's governing style like "a 12-year-old child in an air traffic control tower, randomly pressing government policy buttons and ignoring planes that deviate from the course."
A Warning. /Screenshot of The New York Times Twitter
In the author's description, Trump is disorderly in the governance of state affairs. Mr. Trump doesn't have a managerial mind and doesn't know much about the basic mechanisms of governing the country — for example, he asks the attorney general to do work outside of his mandate or Jared Kushner (Trump's son-in-law) to hold any number of positions. "He asked the secretary of defense to do the secretary of state thing, and he also asked the attorney general to do the national intelligence work," the authors write. Sometimes, he would let Kushner do all their work at the same time."
The authors argue that Trump has also been mostly "spontaneous" in the appointment and removal of officials, such as Trump's desire to cancel his nomination to Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court because he is perceived to lack gratitude. The authors point out that Trump also lacks basic respect for the jurisprudence of the rules, having witnessed Trump tell his aides, "Don't worry about Congress, just do what you need to do."
In foreign policy, Trump is more ruthless. According to the book, Trump proposed classifying all illegal immigrants as "enemy fighters," sharing them with arrested al-Qaida members and transferring them to a prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
While discussing the murder of Saudi journalist Khashoggi, the party was discussing whether to take action against the Saudi authorities, and Trump immediately turned to the oil issue, "Oil prices will rise to $150 a barrel, do you know how expensive it is to fight a war?" How stupid I would be to provoke a war."
In response to all the details in "A Warning," Stephanie Grisham, then White House press secretary, responded that it was a "fictional work" full of lies about the president, accusing the author of being a "coward" hiding behind the lies.
Why choose to make your identity public now?
According to Taylor, he chose his identity anonymously out of fear that by making his identity public, Trump and his allies would divert attention from substantive criticism. "I decided to publish this article anonymously because this debate has nothing to do with me," Taylor wrote, "removing my identity and depriving him of the opportunity to create interference."
As the US election draws nearer, Taylor chooses to expose his identity at this moment, hoping to attract voters to support Biden at the final stage. Taylor noted that now every American has an important decision to make, "and with that in mind, I don't think he's worth re-election, and we shouldn't go through that process again."
According to the Washington Post, Taylor not only urged Republicans to vote for Democrat Biden, but also urged other officials in the Trump administration to "get their conscience back as soon as possible."
US media pointed out that the "Anonymous" incident actually reflects the existence of voices opposing Trump within the White House and the Republican Party.
The New York Times believes that Taylor's first anonymous article was the beginning of a gradual split within the White House. Subsequently, a number of officials who had held key positions in the Trump administration came forward and publicly criticized Trump's leadership and personality traits, including former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Trump's third national security adviser, John Bolton.
Disagreements are not confined to the White House, and in fact, since the end of last year, there have been many voices in the Republican Party that have openly opposed Trump. On December 17, 2019, a political action committee called "The Lincoln Project" published an article in the New York Times titled "We Are Republicans, We Are Determined to Defeat Trump." They said that in the 2020 election, they will persuade disgruntled conservatives and Republican-leaning independents in swing states to switch to Democratic candidates and no longer fuel Trump's unconstitutional behavior, even if it means giving Democrats control of the Senate and expanding Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives.
The Lincoln Project published the article "We are Republicans, We Are Determined to Defeat Trump." / Screenshot of the New York Times website
"Even though we still have many differences on policy with Democrats, our shared loyalty to the Constitution requires us to work together," the article reads.
Time magazine wrote that the effect and influence of opposition in the Republican Party is unknown. Many Republicans, including the Trump campaign, are even more dismissive of them, believing that Trump is so popular among Republican voters that no one can shake him.
However, the US media pointed out that Taylor's move is to expose his identity as one of the "October surprises", which may have a certain impact on Trump's election.
Beijing News reporter Xie Lian
Trainee reporter Luan Ruoxi
Edited by Bai Shuang
Source: Beijing News