A Trump administration insider who waged war against the president under the moniker “Anonymous” said he considered suicide on election night 2020 when it appeared the former president was going to win.
Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security chief of staff who turned on his boss in a New York Times column and then a book under the byline “Anonymous,” said he nearly pulled a pistol from under his pillow to shoot himself that night.
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In an interview to promote his latest book, Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, he said indications that President Donald Trump was going to win were a failure of his efforts to torpedo the 45th president’s reelection.
Under fire for his criticism, Taylor said that by Election Day, his life was in shambles, his marriage was over, his bank account was empty, and he was forced to live in safe houses.
In the Columbia Journalism Review interview, he said, “I reached rock bottom close to Election Day. I was in a marriage that fell apart. I had to leave my home. I got fired from my job [at Google]. I had to spend most of my personal savings on lawyers and other security measures. And my family was getting attacked. So I found myself on election night 2020 alone in a safe house with a bodyguard outside and a pistol under my pillow. As I’m watching the news, drunk, it looked like the election was trending toward Trump. I thought, ‘Wow. I’ve literally given up everything, except my life, to stop this guy from being president again, and it looks like he might be president again. So maybe I take my life, too.’”
To the surprise of many watching the trend on election night, Trump lost late to Joe Biden, and that triggered a recovery for Taylor.
“My wife now, Hannah — I credit her with saving my life and am proudly almost 18 months sober. But building back from that was very, very difficult,” he said.
The interview focused on his experiences as a “whistleblower” and how he felt he was treated when he finally identified himself as “Anonymous.”
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“It’s a very lonely place, and I still don’t know how I feel about the term whistleblower or whether I am one,” he said.
“In almost all the cases, these are people who, one, believed they witnessed wrongdoing, and two, knew that exposing it would destroy their lives. They did it anyway. And every single one of them said that they didn’t regret it despite losing almost everything,” Taylor said.
