William Taylor—Career Member of the U.S. State Apparatus

Oct 28, 2019

William Taylor, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, testified in the impeachment inquiry against Trump. Taylor’s testimony was potentially extremely damaging to Trump, and it is being treated as the smoking gun that ensures impeachment is nearly inevitable.

Much of the news media made Taylor appear to be a knight in shining armor, which is not particularly hard when he is stood up next to Trump. So who exactly is William Taylor?

Taylor has worked for over 50 years as a member of the U.S. state apparatus. He has held various high-level government positions under seven presidents, beginning with Reagan.

He worked for the Department of Energy, on the staff of Senator Bill Bradley, as a deputy advisor to the ambassador to NATO, as an ambassador coordinating assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and later coordinating assistance to Afghanistan.

He has served twice as ambassador to Ukraine and coordinated U.S. policy in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria following the Arab Spring uprisings, carrying out imperialist foreign policy against the population of the world for decades.

Trump thought because he was elected, he had the right to run the U.S. state apparatus as he pleased. Taylor’s testimony and the media fanfare over it demonstrate that Trump, in trying to decide policies like military aid to Ukraine and the presence of U.S. troops in Syria, succeeded in turning against him a whole layer of the U.S. state apparatus: people like Taylor and others who have come forward to testify against him in the impeachment inquiry, and those who have yet to come forward. Taylor represents tens of thousands of others like him, and they are the people who really run the state apparatus—not a single politician like Trump, or any of the elected representatives.