Earlier this week, Taylor appeared on camera with cheeks scrubbed clean enough to sell 76 trombones and told new versions of old stories about the president. Trump, he said on CNN, wanted to trade Puerto Rico straight up for Greenland because the former territory was “dirty” and its residents “poor.” "Some of the President's closest advisers did not think he had the mental acuity to do the actual job," he assured his TV audience.
 
In an ominous op-ed he penned for The Washington Post, which kicked off his big week, Taylor described Trump as an erratic danger, focused on his own short-term political gain, unconcerned with national security, and bent on a misrule with far-reaching consequences. “After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration,” Taylor wrote, “I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions.”
 
There’s not much new or novel information here, so journalistic value is debatable. But consider that Taylor says he worked “for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security.” More specifically, he served as chief of staff for former DHS Secretary Valkyrie Kirstjen Nielsen, who oversaw the separation of migrant families at the border. Taylor might look back now at his time with some small amount of rue, but he served the president’s anti-immigration policies for long after they were revealed to be morally cretinous; he even promoted a “tough” but “fair” version of Trump’s despicable Muslim ban.
 
Taylor’s first attempt to leave the Trump administration behind brought him to Google, who initially hired him to be a government affairs and public policy manager (or “lobbyist”). Googlers quickly discovered, possibly by using Google, what Taylor had been doing prior to his arrival at their firm, and when it came to light that he was Nielsen’s aide-de-camp, it touched off a hue and cry in a company filled with employees who had been touched by Trump’s cruel policies.

Google’s P.R. team initially interceded on Taylor’s behalf, making assurances to the firm’s rank-and-file that Taylor had never had any involvement in Trump’s family separation scheme, but Buzzfeed’s Ryan Mac and Jason Leopold subsequently reported that the company had “misled” their own aggrieved employees; that in reality, Taylor was actively involved in “prepping [Nielsen] with reports and talking points ahead of public appearances between April and June 2018, when the family separation policy was in effect.” Taylor reportedly was in Nielsen’s “tight inner camp,” from which he assisted in preparing the “Protecting Children Narrative,” which was the “department’s spin on a policy that horrified Americans when images of abandoned, caged migrant children in squalid camps emerged.”
 
Now on leave from Google, Taylor has begun the second act of his karma laundering: cutting ads for Republican Voters Against Trump and slowly emptying his burn book in cable news hits. None of these efforts are going to shift many votes in the election. But it’s worth pointing out that Taylor’s brief against Trump largely fillets the man, his personality, his erratic tendencies, and his unreliability. It leaves plenty of room for a different sort of president to enact the same sort of despicable policies. It leaves room for Taylor to maybe, at some point down the line, pick up where he left off.
 
As we come to the possible end of Trump’s presidency, many of his enablers will continue to hang around Washington, looking for their next gig, hoping to eventually hold some authority over our lives again. That’s how This Town works: Yesterday’s deadbeats are tomorrow’s Machiavellis and vice versa. The only way to break this cycle is to cast them out for good.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor