Miles Taylor, a former republican official who served in both the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations and is best known for writing the “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” op-ed for the New York Times, announced that he is leaving the GOP after Republican leaders refused to condemn the racist “replacement theory” ideology evoked by the Buffalo mass shooter.
“I’ve been a Republican all of my life,” Taylor told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “Like you, I’ve wrestled with what that means, to stay a Republican in a party that is mainstreaming not just conspiracy theories but violence.”
Taylor, the author behind an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administation,” admitted that he “tried and failed to save the party in my own little way.”
“We tried to prevent Trump from rising in 2016. Some of us tried from within to contain his reckless impulses,” Taylor said.
After leaving his position as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, Taylor went public as the author. In the article, he asserts that he is one of “many of the senior officials in [Trump’s] own administration [who] are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
He went on to condemn the then-president for acting “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” and vowed to combat his “more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
But Trump’s failure to win reelection in 2020 did not bring about the end of Trumpism, Taylor said on Wednesday’s live broadcast: “Trumpism is alive and well and it’s fueling this.”
Taylor joined other panelists in a discussion about the Republican Party’s response to the mass shooting that took place in a Buffalo grocery on May 14, leaving 10 dead and 3 injured. Eleven of the victims were Black and two were white. Prior to the shooting, the gunman had published a manifesto outlining his plan to target Black people that cited the “white replacement” theory. Among the supporters of this racist ideology are Fox News’ top host Tucker Carlson, who has discussed related topics on approximately 400 episodes of his primetime late night show. GOP politicians such as Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) have defended Carlson and the theory in the past.
In the aftermath of the shooting, some Republicans failed to condemn the theory or acknowledge that it motivated the massacre. House No. 3 GOP leader Elise Stefanik was called out for “pushing white replacement theory,” while Carlson did not directly mention the theory during his Monday night show.
Earlier today, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell called racism “abhorrent” but failed to specifically address white replacement theory or its association with his party.
In response to this latest development, Taylor urged other Republicans to give up their membership.
“What conservatives need to do is convince other conservatives to quit the Republican Party,” he said. “I’m quitting the Republican Party. I’m done. This is it. And other poeple need to quit too. That’s how we send the message, is we show that tribe that the tribe’s going to shrink and it’s going to go away if they keep behaving this way.”
When Taylor outed himself as the op-ed’s author in 2020, he defended his decision to stay employed by Trump for so long, saying: “Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed. That’s why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it’s why I stayed on as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security. But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.”
However, according to internal emails and documents obtained by Buzzfeed it turns out that despite previously claiming otherwise, Taylor was instrumental in developing and promoting the Trump administration’s policy of separating refugee children from their parents. The UN has repeatedly said that policy is a violation of international law, and Amnesty International has classified it as a human rights violation.
Also, Taylor has also falsely accused refugee parents of abandoning their children.