Last week, Miles Taylor, the former deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, outed himself as “Anonymous,” the pseudonymous author of A Warning. “Anonymous,” if you’ll remember, was granted the rare gift of anonymity from the New York Times in September 2018 and falsely labeled a “senior official in the Trump administration” to write about how he was “A Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Flash forward to the present, where Taylor is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame by making the rounds on CNN.
On Cuomo Prime Time, Taylor defended his use of a pseudonym and his direct lies about his authorship by likening himself to no less illustrious figures than Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Beginning in 1787, these Founding Fathers authored 85 essays in defense and support of the not-yet-ratified Constitution, collectively writing under the allonym “Publius.” These essays, of course, would come to be known as The Federalist Papers.
Hamilton, who used the Publius moniker as early as 1778, chose the name in reference to the Roman consul Publius Valerius Poplicola, one of the four Roman patricians who overthrew the last of Rome’s seven kings, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, or Tarquin, and helped establish the Roman Republic in 509 B.C.
Names are important things and can carry great significance. In adopting his name, Hamilton et al. honored the Roman’s project of republicanism, and in using it to establish the Constitution of these United States, they propelled that project of republican self-governance to its greatest heights. For a former midlevel bureaucrat to claim the mantle of that grand tradition for his self-aggrandizing tattletales is as preposterous as it is narcissistic. President Trump, for all his innumerable and inexcusable faults, is not the tyrant Tarquin. And using a fake name does not make Taylor like Hamilton or Madison any more than writing a bawdy joke makes me like Shakespeare.
