On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published a highly controversial opinion editorial titled ‘I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration’ with a note at the top 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.” 

The paper of record later defined “a senior official” as meaning someone in the “upper echelons of an administration.”

On Wednesday that official revealed himself. Miles Taylor, who once told CNN he only wears masks at Halloween and during pandemics, removed his Taylor-made mask right before Halloween to claim he is ‘Anonymous’. 

Never mind his twice-told tale to CNN that he had no idea who Anonymous was.

In spite of Taylor’s lies as a paid contributor to CNN, the network is keeping him on. Apparently, the New York Times’ source is the kind of resource CNN likes.

Now that he’s come out, we can see why the Times published him as ‘Anonymous’. The name gave him that Deep Throat mystique he needed to gain attention. Without that scary mask, Miles Taylor was a virtual unknown. 

The Times could not have claimed he was a “senior official” when he was, in fact, a relatively minor player in the Trump government. Taylor didn’t attain a leadership role within his own department until months after the Times published his op-ed.

How scary would Ghostface be in the movie Scream without his mask of anonymity or Jason in Friday the 13th? As with QAnon, the name ‘Anonymous’ inflated Miles Taylor beyond what he deserved. 

While he rose after his op-ed to become second-in-command of Homeland Security as chief of staff, he was merely a “policy adviser” when he wrote his hit piece.

Taylor chose anonymity so that he could enjoy the specter of everyone wondering if he was a senior cabinet official who engaged with the president on a weekly or even daily basis inside the White House. Of such minor repute was he that, once the true identity of A. was revealed on Wednesday, one of the fastest rising Google searches became “Who is Miles Taylor?” Apparently a complete unknown until he became Anonymous.

Even the president says “I never knew him.”

It’s unlikely, as a HS adviser, he saw the president in person much. What he claimed to know as an insider was hearsay through those he interacted with who did spend time in the White House.

The Times’ Deep-State Throat insider turns out really to be a smarmy, baby-faced boy who boasted heroically of working to thwart the president’s agenda in order to save America from the leader it voted for. Deep-State Throat said others in the president’s administration, like himself, “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations…." That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”

In light of Wednesday’s revelation of Taylor’s minor stature, Matt Winlock, another senior adviser, tweeted, “What did he do to frustrate the President's agenda? Refuse to deliver the Secretary's coffee? Hide the toner? Use 2 spaces after periods?”

Raising himself above the great unwashed who elected Trump, Taylor self-righteously wrote, “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.” By writing his op-ed, he proved the deep state is more than a conspiracy theory. He proved that mere policy wonks do work in the deep recesses of government to thwart the moves of presidents if they step out of line with the deep state motives of unelected careerist insiders.

Miles Taylor is a neocon. He was upset that the president was not going by the playbook. Taylor revealed his bias when he railed against the president’s apparent proclivity to be too soft on Russia – always the favorite hobby horse for neocons to beat.

Taylor specifically noted that his associates in the deep trenches “of the administration [are] operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly.” The president, he noted, was too reluctant to expel Russian spies, and “he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country.” Taylor let us know that honest patriots like himself were undermining the duly elected president to “hold Moscow accountable.”

In his defense, he argued, “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.” However what does “steady state” mean but the state that never changes because it constantly works to thwart any elected leader who tries to bring change. That, of course, is the very definition of the “deep state.”

Curiously, the Times, knowing full well who its own Deep-State Throat was, published another article on February 20, 2020, calling out the White House for “transferring a senior national security aide who fell under suspicion of writing an anonymous insider account of dissent within the Trump administration, the latest of several senior personnel moves stemming from questions of loyalty to President Trump.” This slash-and-burn article against the White House named Victoria Coates as Anonymous.

“Current and former administration officials," said Ms. Coates … "had been targeted by a whisper campaign among some pro-Trump conservatives that she was Anonymous.”

Here we have an example of the Times knowingly publishing fake news about its own fake news about its own, shall I say, Trumped-up anonymous author? Stranger still, it now has the audacity to let us in on the fact that the Times knew full well when it published the Coates’ article that the White House was absolutely right when it said, as noted at the top of that article, “The White House ‘does not put any stock’ in the rumor that Victoria Coates, the aide, wrote an Op-Ed essay in The Times in 2018.”

Want some fake news with your fake news? The Times doesn’t even blush telling us they served up this mush of half-baked conspiracy against Coates! It could have either killed the Victoria Coates' story or dispelled the rumor right there by confirming the White House’s position. It didn’t have to out Anonymous to simply confirm Coates was not Anonymous.

Such journalistic integrity, however, would have deprived the Times of another opportunity to smear the White House by making it look like the White House was carrying out the revenge of the Donald against Deep-State Throat.

In defense of his anonymity, Taylor now piously claims the decision cost him income. I don’t see how. He advanced rapidly to chief of staff a few months after going rogue. Then he got a lucrative contract as a talking head on CNN and he wrote a book. Protesting a bit too much, Taylor claims, “I declined a hefty monetary advance and pledged to donate the bulk of the proceeds.” Yeah, but to whom? Your children’s education funds? Giving up “the bulk” still means a good sum will go to him directly, and the advance would have only counted against those later gains anyway.

Ironically, by coming out just before the election, Taylor is not dealing Trump a death blow at the last minute as he hoped, but may even give him a boost. Now everyone can see what a pathetic, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, lying little weed the writer of the Times’ warning to America really was all along.

Taylor’s conclusion that “the country cannot rely on well-intentioned, unelected bureaucrats around the President to steer him toward what’s right” because “he has purged most of them anyway…” almost makes me want to vote for Trump just to pull the weeds out, and I didn’t vote for him the first time.

* David Haggith is an author published by Putnam and HarperCollins. He is publisher of The Great Recession Blog and writes for over 50 economic news websites. His Twitter page of economic humor is @EconomicRecess.