Former 'Anonymous' Trump Aide Miles Taylor Calls for Unity to Make Politics Boring Again

Miles Taylor was chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen when she ran the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump. In 2018 he published, as "Anonymous," a New York Times op-ed titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." It told horrified Americans that patriots at the top of the government were working to restrain the president's worst instincts. Taylor later put his name to the piece and wrote a book, "A Warning."

In an interview with Salon, published in late November 2021, he described what followed. He became a personal target of Trump and has received numerous death threats. He calls the aftermath of the op-ed and the book a "self-detonation" of his personal life. His most recent piece, "Inside the fight for the GOP's soul," appeared in the Deseret News. The interview was edited for clarity and length.

Asked how the Republican Party became a personality cult that purges dissenters, Taylor said the conditions existed before Trump entered the race. He divides the GOP's internal war into three phases. The first was open hostilities: the Tea Party rose from the far right as a libertarian insurgency, fought the party's center, figures such as Paul Ryan and John Boehners, and over nearly a decade was taken over by Trump. The second was submission, when Trump won, pushed moderates into silence, and governed for roughly four years with little internal opposition. The third, which he calls rebellion, began near the end of the administration, when people who had served around Trump, including former chief of staff John Kelly, former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary Jim Mattis, publicly called him a dishonest man.

Taylor stressed that the rebels are only a fraction of the party. Most of it is still led by people who follow Trump's orders, and he offered Kevin McCarthy's trip to Mar-a-Lago as an example. He said Trump has given a permission slip to those who want to inject violence into politics to intimidate opponents. He thinks a rational insurgency could counterbalance this, but that it would take several election cycles, perhaps ten years, and he said it is unclear how the rebellion ends. He traced some roots to the Obama years, when he believes both parties failed to reach across the aisle and Republican voters concluded their leaders were weak and ineffective, feeding the Tea Party.

Salon's interviewer pushed back, placing the origins in the white backlash of the post-civil rights era and the Southern strategy, and asked who the "rational" Republicans really are. Taylor allowed that some decent people remain in the party, but noted that Republicans in Congress voted for Trump's policies nearly 100 percent of the time. He said those who helped create the situation must be held accountable even as he wants an alliance against Trump and what he called the neofascist movement. Many Republicans, he said, privately explain that they backed the agenda because the administration was governing to the right, which does not mean they endorsed his belligerent politics. Taylor argued Trump was not truly a conservative but an anti-conservative, and that how lawmakers treated the man matters as much as how they voted on bills.

He recalled that he once hoped Trump would at least produce conservative policy. But up close, he said, Trump struck him as someone you would avoid at a bank teller's window, yet this was the man with access to the nuclear codes. Most Republicans, he said, hoped to ride Trump out, and Taylor, who watched McCarthy grapple with Trump's rise, said that was never possible.

On why so few colleagues spoke out, his answer was fear. He quoted Alexander Vindman: the objective of intimidation is to silence, and the only counter is not to be silent. In the administration's first year, Taylor said, he urged officials to publicly say Trump was wrong on specific issues, and they feared losing their jobs. As Trump's appetite for personal destruction became clear, they feared for their future careers. Toward the end, the fear turned into worry about violent retribution. Former Cabinet secretaries and sitting members of Congress told him they could not join him because of their families' safety.

Taylor's conclusion is grim: even if Trump vanished tomorrow, the country would be grappling with what he represents for a generation. What to watch is whether the Republican rebellion he describes grows beyond its current fraction.