Was he lying then, or is he lying now?
Chris Cuomo rips into him:
He wasn’t Chief of Staff when the op-ed was published.Taylor was just a policy advisor.
“Just a policy advisor” - a policy advisor who gave policy advice directly to the President of the United States, as mentioned in the AP article:
He also states that he heard the President offer pardons to Homeland Security officials if they broke the law while following his orders:
The article also adds:
The book Anonymous: A Warning came out on November 19, 2019, with the by-line “A Senior Trump Administration Official”. He appears to have left DHS in the summer of 2019, so that description would be appropriate for the book.
The Washington Post is calling out the NY Times for their exaggeration of Taylor’s relevance:
“I would not describe him as a senior administration official,” said Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary in the Clinton administration.
You seem much more invested in proving him not-very-senior than in the substance of what he had to say. Isn’t that strawmanning?
Possibly but that’s a different discussion. NYT portrayed him as an insider and I think most people were thinking that was a cabinet level position or someone who worked directly with the President.
It is not strawmanning. While there is no textbook definition of a “senior administration official,” characterizing the writer as such has a strong impact on how much credibility readers afford his opinions and perspectives. In his opinion piece and his book, Taylor wasn’t asserting specific facts that could be verified or refuted no matter who he was. He mostly just spoke generally about Trump being erratic and impulsive (breaking news there) and that there was a widespread “resistance” to Trump within the Administration – even to the point of there being “whispers” about invoking the 25th Amendment. No mention of who’s in this resistance or making these “whispers” that could substantiate his story. The only basis for judging the veracity of these claims is how the NYT chose to identify the writer, so its more than legitimate to debate whether characterizing Taylor as a “senior administration official” was the correct decision.