‘Anonymous’ author gets a Washington Post rehab

Friends in the right places.

It’s tough out there for a “Never Trump” guy who is nowhere near as interesting as he thinks he is.

Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security staffer who authored an anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 claiming he was part of an anti-President Trump resistance inside the White House, has resurfaced as the subject of a Washington Post profile. The article, which reads like a hagiography, is a bizarre mishmash of glowing praise for Taylor, advertisements for his political services (he is more or less unemployed at the moment), and various defenses for his rotten behavior throughout the “anonymous” episode.

The profile also features an awful lot of hand-wringing from Taylor, who says he is scared and uncertain about his future. The story likewise features Taylor bragging about how proud he is for having opposed the Trump administration while also drawing a paycheck from the Trump administration.

Unsurprisingly, the article makes no mention of the fact that Taylor stood by silently as former National Security Council official Victoria Coates took all the heat for his op-ed, including her eventual demotion and reassignment to the Department of Energy.

Instead, the profile includes passages such as this:

Of course, he went to an elementary school set in a Midwestern cornfield. Of course, the future fast climber at the Department of Homeland Security came to Washington as a teenage page in the House of Representatives. Of course, he landed the most-coveted page assignment: Working for then-Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican. Of course, he dazzled, and sometimes put off, his new friends and the higher-ups with his energy, all-too-apparent ambition and overachiever’s enthusiasm — for everything. … The future shaper of Washington policy nerded out as a sixth-grader researching the intricacies 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. ... They’re practical folk, these Taylors. When Taylor went off to study philosophy and international relations at Oxford years later, his father bought him a pair of clippers so he could save money by cutting his own hair. Taylor figures he’s saved $4,000 over seven or so years.

The report then goes on to detail Taylor’s supposedly heroic efforts to thwart the president’s agenda, including an attempt to limit the number of countries affected by a proposed travel ban. Really, though, the article, like Taylor’s stupid book, is mostly an excuse for self-promotion and butt-covering (“Proximity to Trump’s policies would haunt Taylor,” “Taylor says he delegated most immigration policy work to underlings,” and “he envisioned a dramatic en-masse resignation, including Cabinet secretaries and their top aides, to prove the point that Trump was unfit for office,” etc.).

Oddly enough, the profile is also careful to mention, repeatedly, that Taylor is on the run because he has allegedly received numerous death threats from the Left and the Right since outing himself as the author of the anonymous op-ed. Though one would be foolish to doubt this claim, as any political position these days tends to inspire some form of threat online, Taylor’s reported attempts to conceal his identity and whereabouts seem both unnecessary and even self-indulgent.

Consider the following passages:

“I’m so spooked,” Taylor, a former Trump Homeland Security Department official, recalls during an in-person interview that he agreed to participate in only after many assurances that the location be kept secret. ... In the weeks since Taylor’s self-induced unmasking, he has shuffled between at least 10 undisclosed locations, he says, bunking in private homes and hotels after receiving a deluge of death threats. Haters on the political right despise him, nudged along by Trump calling him a “traitor.” Haters on the left demean him for staying more than two years in an administration they consider corrupt and amoral, and for working at a Department of Homeland Security notable 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 security. 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. ... When he ventures out of his hiding places, Taylor favors baseball caps pulled low and sunglasses. A mask serves the dual purpose of shielding him from infection by the coronavirus and concealing an identity that has become ever harder to camouflage as he’s upped his public presence by serving as a CNN contributor and talking head.

I write about this stuff for a living. I have seen Taylor’s face all over cable news. I would not notice him at a supermarket even if he stood right next to me. He has that sort of “generic white guy” quality about him that defines most Washington, D.C., careerists. If I can’t pick him out of a lineup, then I guarantee Joe Public can’t do the same. All of this is to say: These security measures he has taken seem unnecessary — unless, of course, feeling important is the point, which would be consistent for Taylor.

As for legitimate criticisms of his sleazy behavior, including exaggerating his credentials for the op-ed and lying on CNN about whether he is the “anonymous” author, the Washington Post is Johnny-on-the-spot with defenses.

“As a device,” the profile says of Taylor’s decision to go unnamed for his New York Times op-ed, “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,” the report adds.

Well, yes. That is part of the problem, though, isn’t it? Both Taylor and the New York Times grossly exaggerated his credentials as a “senior” member of the Trump administration. We were lied to, but now, we are being told that it was a pretty “genius” device.

The article continues:

The New York Times took a little heat for calling him a “senior official,” though Taylor was able to mostly swat that away by pointing out that he was, after all, the deputy chief of staff, at the time, 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 Colors”?

Is this a paid advertisement or a news profile? It is hard to tell.

Anyway, in case you are still interested, the report concludes with a maudlin anecdote about Taylor crying with relief after President-elect Joe Biden was announced the winner of the 2020 election.

“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,” the report reads. “Taylor, a man of oceanic words, was speechless. Moments passed before the silence broke.”

It adds, “Miles Taylor was sobbing. They were tears of joy.”

I will leave it at that. There is no criticism I can add that is more insulting than those final lines.