Over two years after an anonymous Trump administration official described an internal "resistance" to President Trump, their identity has been revealed.
Miles Taylor, former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff under Trump, in a statement provided to The New York Times and CNN on Wednesday revealed himself as the anonymous official who wrote a 2018 op-ed about being part of a "quiet resistance within the administration." Taylor also later anonymously published a book critical of Trump called A Warning.
"Too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives," Taylor writes in his statement. "I witnessed Trump's inability to do his job over the course of two-and-a-half years. Everyone saw it, though most were hesitant to speak up for fear of reprisals."
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Taylor goes on to defend his decision to remain anonymous until this point by saying that "issuing my critiques without attribution forced the president to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling." He also urges other Trump administration officials to speak out, writing, "it's time to come forward and shine a light on the discord that's infected our public discourse."
Though it was not known that Taylor was the anonymous official behind the Times op-ed and book, he has previously criticized Trump and endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Taylor denied he was the anonymous official in an August interview with CNN, telling Anderson Cooper, "I wear a mask for two things, Anderson. Halloween and pandemics. So no."
