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“ANONYMOUS” CAPER ENDS IN DISGRACE FOR WRITER, NEW YORK TIMES. Do you remember “Anonymous”? On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed headlined, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” Its author was “Anonymous,” identified by the Times as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.”
In the op-ed, “Anonymous” wrote that he was working every day to thwart President Trump’s efforts to enact his campaign promises. “Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” “Anonymous” wrote. “I would know. I am one of them.”
The op-ed hit Washington like a bomb. This wasn’t some mid-level functionary — a top Trump insider had joined the Resistance!
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Who was it? The guessing began immediately — and so did the denials. Within hours, a huge number of high-level administration officials said it wasn’t them: Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Jim Mattis, Steven Mnuchin, Jeff Session, Kirstjen Nielsen, John Bolton, and Dan Coats. And then, “the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs as well as the CIA and FBI directors, the president’s trade representative, acting chief of the Environmental Protection Agency and his ambassadors to the United Nations and Russia,” according to a Times follow-up.
The Trump White House vowed to find the culprit. And then the questions arose. Why did the New York Times allow the author to write anonymously? Why didn’t it require him to identify himself by name? It was a “rare step,” the Times conceded, but “we believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.” “Anonymous” remained anonymous.
Until now. In the final days before the election, “Anonymous” has come out. He is Miles Taylor, who at the time he wrote the op-ed was a policy adviser in the Department of Homeland Security. (He later became chief of staff.) The first reaction of nearly everyone was to ask, “Who?” Taylor, a mid-level bureaucrat, was not the top official the Times suggested he was and all of Washington assumed him to be. He didn’t have the sort of daily contact with President Trump that readers guessed. In short, “Anonymous” was far less than he seemed.
And why did he write anonymously? Because he knew that if he identified himself, people would see who he was. He might even be criticized! “I understand why some people consider it questionable to levy such serious charges against a sitting president under the cover of anonymity,” Taylor wrote in a Medium post revealing his identity. “But my reasoning was straightforward, and I stand by it. 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.”
So Taylor wrote anonymously, and the Times let him get away with it. Now, people on all sides feel deceived. Of course Trump supporters see the whole thing as a scam. But members of the Resistance are disappointed, too. “To me, the crux of the issue is that readers would have been less inclined to take the specific substantive claims seriously had they been informed of the identity of the author at the time,” wrote constant Trump critic Susan Hennessey of Lawfare. “To grant anonymity in that circumstance without giving way more context was a disservice.”
So now what? Taylor will enjoy a bit more attention, and then return to his new job at Google. (Yes, he works for Big Tech now.) The Times will move on, having done even more damage to its reputation — a Washington Post critic wrote that the Times was “sullied” by the whole “charade.” And one other media organization — CNN — will also suffer damage. In September, the network hired Taylor as a contributor after he denied on the air that he was “Anonymous.” Now that it is clear that its new contributor lied to viewers, CNN says it will keep Taylor in his position.
What was it all about? Getting Trump, of course. The past four years have seen many in the press change their reporting standards and take an unprecedented adversarial stance against the president. It’s no surprise to see it continue right up until election day.
