The author behind the "eye-popping" (CNN) #1
New York Times bestseller A Warning presents an urgent look at how our deeply
divided nation is setting the stage for "The Next Trump."
Donald Trump will be president again, whether he is on
the ballot or not. That is because Trumpism is overtaking the Republican Party
and will mount a vigorous comeback, potentially in the hands of a savvier
successor--The Next Trump.
This prophecy will come true, according to Miles
Taylor, if we do not learn the lessons of the recent past.
With the 2024 election approaching, the formerly
"Anonymous" official is back with bombshell revelations and a
sobering national forecast. Through interviews with dozens of ex-Trump aides
and government leaders, Taylor predicts what could happen inside "Trump
2.0," the White House of a more competent and more formidable copycat.
What sounds like a political thriller--from shadowy
presidential powers and CIA betrayals to angry henchmen and assassination
plots--is instead America's political reality, as Taylor uses untold stories to
shed light on the ex-President's unfulfilled plans, the dark forces haunting
our civic lives, and how we can thwart the rise of extremism in the United
States.
Blowback is also a surprisingly emotional and
self-critical portrait of a dissenter, whose own unmasking provides a vivid
warning about what happens when we hide the truth from others and, most
importantly, ourselves.
Review
Blowback review: Miles Taylor on the dangers of a
second Trump term
The aide who was Anonymous writes, under his own name,
with an urgency the New York Times and others should note
Charles
Kaiser
Sun 23 Jul
2023 07.00 BST
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Miles
Taylor is a former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security who
catapulted himself to nameless fame in the fall of 2018, when he published an
anonymous op-ed in the New York Times under this headline: “I Am Part of the
Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”
Taylor
described himself then as one of many senior officials “working diligently from
within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations … To
be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the
administration to succeed … But we believe our first duty is to this country,
and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the
health of our republic.”
The article
set off a firestorm, Trump and his allies demanding to know the identity of
this “traitor” while some on the left questioned the morality of continuing to
work for an administration after you’ve realized it is a clear and present
danger to the health of the country.
In his new
book, Taylor reveals that debate was as vivid inside him as it was within the
rest of the body politic. He has now concluded that anonymity, which he carried
into a first book, A Warning, was a mistake, “a gift to authoritarians. They
thrive on fear and the suppression of dissent.”
The
subtitle of his new book is “A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump”,
and there is certainly plenty of that in its 300-plus pages. But there is also
lots about Taylor’s “mentally, emotionally and physically” painful “journey to
the truth”, which included the break-up of his marriage, bouts of alcoholism
and prescription drug abuse.
Even after
the scores of Trump books which have assaulted our bookshelves, Taylor still
manages to reveal a few fresh moments of astonishing evil or narrow escapes
from Armageddon. These include Trump’s musings to his then chief of staff, John
Kelly, “that he badly wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon”; the
president talking about his daughter Ivanka’s “breasts, her backside, and what
it might be like to have sex with her”; Steven Miller’s eagerness to eliminate
the judiciary (“Yes sir, a country without judges would help”); and Miller’s
equal affection for genocide, revealed when he interrogated the commandant of
the US Coast Guard about why he couldn’t use a drone with a missile to
“obliterate” a “boat full of immigrants” in “international waters”.
International law would be a problem, the commandant explained.
The
substantive part of Taylor’s book is devoted to waking up Americans to the very
real dangers of a second Trump presidency, including plans to “manipulate the
justice system to cover up corruption, punish political enemies and reshape US
courts”.
Taylor
reminds us once again of how completely the Republican party has been corrupted
by Maga ideology, with powerful allies of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy,
like Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling for “defunding the FBI” while the Texas
senator Ted Cruz wants “a complete house cleaning” at the same agency.
“They will
be unconstrained and untethered,” the former homeland security general counsel
John Mitnick says. “What little restraint was exercised in terms of respecting
the rule of law will be gone.”
Like many
other George W Bush Republicans, Taylor is weakest when he argues that Trump is
an outlier to “ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets
and free people”. This ignores the party’s historical affection for racism and
homophobia, which dates at least to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in 1968,
or Bush’s advocacy for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, a
cornerstone of his re-election campaign in 2004. When Taylor casually accuses
Barack Obama of backing away “from America’s allies” and “bowing down to its
adversaries”, we are reminded the author is indeed an old-fashioned Republican.
But his
book is still important because it rings alarm bells about the huge danger of
fascism and authoritarianism that would come with Trump’s return to the White
House, in a moment when many Washington reporters are silent. This journalistic
impotence was evident in two recent stories co-authored by the New York Times
reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman.
The first,
published last month, described Trump’s promise to appoint a special prosecutor
to investigate Joe Biden as part of “a larger movement on the right to gut the
FBI, overhaul a justice department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’
against them and abandon the norm – which many Republicans view as a facade –
that the department should operate independently from the president”.
The second
piece by the same trio described Maga plans to eliminate the independence of
all federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve board, and laid out Trump’s
“plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense
bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class
that hates our country’”.
These two
articles totaled 4,800 words but included less than a hundred words from anyone
questioning the morality or legality of these plans to politicize the justice
department and destroy the federal civil service. This single quote, from
Kelly, was the only significant balance provided in either piece: “It would be
chaotic. It just simply would be chaotic, because [Trump would] continually be
trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It
would be a non-stop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
The Times
reporters did not respond to an email asking why they thought a hundred words
of opposition to the Maga agenda were sufficient to make their stories
balanced.
With that
kind of laissez-faire attitude prevailing among too many journalists, books
like Taylor’s, which focus on the imminent dangers from a Maga revival, are
crucial to a broader effort to rescue American democracy.
Blowback: A
Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump is published in the US by Atria
Books
Miles Taylor, a Former Homeland Security
Official, Reveals He Was ‘Anonymous’
Mr. Taylor, whose criticisms of President Trump in a
New York Times Op-Ed article and subsequent book roiled Washington and
infuriated Mr. Trump, resigned from the administration last year and endorsed
Joe Biden this summer.
Michael D.
Shear
By Michael
D. Shear
Oct. 28,
2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/miles-taylor-anonymous-trump.html
WASHINGTON
— Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland
Security, was the anonymous author of The New York Times Op-Ed article in 2018
whose description of President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and
ineffective” roiled Washington and set off a hunt for his identity, Mr. Taylor
confirmed Wednesday.
Mr. Taylor
was also the anonymous author of “A Warning,” a book he wrote the following
year that described the president as an “undisciplined” and “amoral” leader
whose abuse of power threatened the foundations of American democracy. He
acknowledged that he was the author of both the book and the opinion article in
an interview and in a three-page statement he posted online.
Mr. Taylor
resigned from the Department of Homeland Security in June 2019, and went public
with his criticism of Mr. Trump this past summer. He released a video just
before the start of the Republican National Convention declaring that the
president was unfit for office, and he endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the
Democratic presidential nominee.
But Mr.
Taylor, 33, who had repeatedly denied being Anonymous, did not reveal himself
to be the author of the opinion article and book at the time.
On
Wednesday, Mr. Trump claimed not to know who Mr. Taylor is, despite the fact
that there are numerous pictures of the president with Mr. Taylor in meetings.
“Who is
Miles Taylor? Said he was ‘anonymous’, but I don’t know him — never even heard
of him,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Just another @nytimes SCAM — he worked in
conjunction with them. Also worked for Big Tech’s @Google. Now works for Fake
News @CNN. They should fire, shame, and punish everybody associated with this
FRAUD on the American people!”
The Op-Ed
pages of The Times are managed separately from the news department, which was
never told of Anonymous’s identity.
Mr. Taylor
served for two years as a top aide to Kirstjen Nielsen, Mr. Trump’s third
homeland security secretary, and wrote in The Times that he was part of a cadre
of officials around Mr. Trump who were quietly working to “frustrate parts of
his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
As a senior
administration official, Mr. Taylor often interacted with the president at the
White House, particularly on issues related to immigration, cybersecurity and
terrorism. He left government after Ms. Nielsen was fired and later became the
head of national security relations for Google. He has been on personal leave
from the company for the past several months after endorsing Mr. Biden and has
been organizing other Republicans to campaign against Mr. Trump’s re-election.
“More than
two years ago, I published an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times
about Donald Trump’s perilous presidency, while I was serving under him. He
responded with a short but telling tweet: ‘TREASON?’” Mr. Taylor wrote in his
statement.
“When I
left the administration, I wrote ‘A Warning,’ a character study of the current
commander in chief and a caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked
inside the Trump administration — it was worse,” he added.
The
disclosure of Mr. Taylor’s identity is likely to renew the debate over his
motives and raise questions about whether his position in the Trump
administration was senior enough to justify the decisions by The Times’s
Opinion desk and the book’s publisher to keep his identity secret. As chief of
staff to a cabinet secretary, Mr. Taylor was one of the top political officials
in the sprawling, 240,000-person department, with frequent access to Mr. Trump
and other senior White House officials.
At the
time, The Times published the essay with a note that said: “The Times is taking
the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the
request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose
identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.
We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an
important perspective to our readers.”
Mr.
Taylor’s decision to assail the president anonymously in the Times article
created a sensation in Washington because of its claims about the president’s
lack of character and inability to govern. In the book, Mr. Taylor described
Mr. Trump as a “12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the
buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding
across the runway.”
Mr.
Taylor’s essay has had less impact over time as an array of onetime Trump
administration officials have come forward with names attached to publicly
criticize the president’s leadership and character, among them the former
defense secretary, Jim Mattis, and Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser,
John R. Bolton. But Mr. Taylor’s essay was among the first cracks in the White
House defense and led to prolonged speculation about the writer’s identity,
with readers pointing to specific passages in it as evidence of who must have
been the author.
The White
House engaged in its own lengthy hunt to identify who had written the article.
In the days after its publication, Mr. Trump declared that he wanted the
attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to find the writer, saying, “I
would say Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was because
I really believe it’s national security.”
As late as
last November, the Justice Department demanded to know from the publisher of
the forthcoming book whether the author had violated any confidentiality
agreements related to classified information.
The
president last year called the author of the Times article a “gutless”
bureaucrat and tweeted “TREASON?” In a statement ahead of the book’s
publication last year, Stephanie Grisham, then the White House press secretary,
called the author “a coward” who wrote a “work of fiction” filled with lies
about the president.
“Real
authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact checked — but this
person is hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer
impossible,” Ms. Grisham said.
On
Wednesday, Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s current press secretary, called
Mr. Taylor a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer,” adding that he “is a liar
and a coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading. He was
ineffective and incompetent during his time as D.H.S. chief of staff.”
Ms. McEnany
said that “it is appalling a low-ranking official would be granted anonymity,
and it is clear The New York Times is doing the bidding of Never-Trumpers and
Democrats.”
In the
book, Mr. Taylor said he decided to remain anonymous because he believed
revealing his identity would have allowed Mr. Trump and his allies to distract
attention from the substance of the critique he leveled against the president.
“I have
decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” Mr.
Taylor wrote. “Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an
opportunity to create a distraction. What will he do when there is no person to
attack, only an idea?”
In his
statement on Wednesday, Mr. Taylor acknowledged that “some people consider it
questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting president under the
cover of anonymity.” But he said his decision was justified.
“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,” Mr. Taylor wrote. “I wanted the attention to be on
the arguments themselves. At the time I asked, ‘What will he do when there is
no person to attack, only an idea?’ We got the answer. He became unhinged. And
the ideas stood on their own two feet.”
Danielle
Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in a statement that “we take
seriously our obligations to protect sources.”
She added:
“Many important stories in sensitive areas like politics, national security and
business could never be reported if our journalists violated that trust. In
this case, however, the writer has personally waived our agreement to keep his
identity confidential. We can confirm that he is the author of the Anonymous
op-ed. We don’t plan to comment further.”
The book’s
publisher, Sean Desmond of Twelve Books, said in a statement that the company
was proud of the book, which he said “every day seems more and more prescient.”
He added,
“Miles Taylor has been a great publishing partner and we support him and the
true act of political courage it took to tell his story.”
The
publisher has said Mr. Taylor declined to take any advance payment for writing
it, and has pledged to donate a large portion of any royalties to nonprofit
organizations, including the White House Correspondents’ Association, the
membership organization for reporters who cover the president.
The book
topped the New York Times’s nonfiction best-seller list for the week of Dec. 8.
Mr. Taylor
joined the Trump administration in 2017 and eventually served as Ms. Nielsen’s
deputy chief of staff before being promoted in 2018. Previously, he worked for
two years for the House Homeland Security Committee, serving as an aide to
Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, who was the chairman of the
committee at the time.
As one of
Ms. Nielsen’s top advisers, Mr. Taylor was part of the administration during
some of the most controversial decisions of Mr. Trump’s first three years in
office, including the ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries, the
decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border and
the efforts to turn back asylum seekers.
His role in
those events prompted protests among employees at Google when the company
announced his hiring. At least one petition called for Google to fire Mr.
Taylor, calling him “complicit in helping Nielsen tear apart thousands of
immigrant families.”
Mr. Taylor
also witnessed many of the clashes between Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Trump as the
president demanded tougher action to keep immigrants out of the United States.
Ms. Nielsen’s resistance to some of Mr. Trump’s demands — including shutting
down the border with Mexico and shooting people crossing the border illegally
in the legs to slow them down — eventually led to her dismissal.
Michael D.
Shear is a White House correspondent. He previously worked at The Washington
Post and was a member of their Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the
Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. More about Michael D. Shear
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