The New York Times Profiled Trump’s New Artist. I Knew Him Before He Sold Out.

Matthew Taylor saved my life in Albania. Now he works for Donald Trump.

New York Times journalist Zachary Small recently wrote an article with the headline, The Artist and Filmmaker Helping Trump Reshape Washington. The subject was Matthew Taylor, a conceptual artist and filmmaker who worked for my political media firm for over a decade. Back then, we knew him as “Yoshi.”

Now Taylor serves as a senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities and Donald Trump has appointed Taylor to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. The New York Times reports Taylor consulted on the White House’s report accusing the Smithsonian of left-wing bias.

Reading the piece was one of those depressing, searing moments, like reading about an overdose death of a high school friend. It is another moment in the Trump years I never could have imagined happening.

The piece prompted me to write Zachary Small the email below that I’m sharing with you:

Zach,

I read your article about Yoshi, and it made me want to throw up. (Does Matthew still go by Yoshi, or did he drop that along with everything he said he believed in?) I’m the guy who hired him to cut his first political ads for my firm, then we brought him over to Bush World, back to my firm, and we moved him to Boston for Mitt Romney 2012. We set up a full video editing suite in the Romney campaign headquarters that was Yoshi’s domain.

Along the way, I took him to Albania, where I was working for the prime minister, whom we had helped elect. I hired a lot of editors over the years, but Yoshi is the only one who saved my life.

I had just spent the weekend ski racing in Italy and apparently took too much Advil. I returned to Albania on Sunday night and didn’t feel great. But Tirana is terribly polluted, and everybody smokes, and they like to meet at midnight, and well, it’s not a super healthy place. But a couple of days later I woke up in the Hilton covered in blood. Yoshi was in the next room. I called Yoshi and he called an ambulance, which was an old panel van. On the way, the paramedic was about to give me a massive injection. I was pretty much out of it but could hear Yoshi asking him, “Hey man, what is that?” It was morphine and Yoshi told him not to inject it. As it turns out, I had lost two-thirds of my blood, and there’s a near certainty that the morphine would have killed me.

In those days, the blood supply in Albania was sketchy, and Yoshi helped coordinate with my office to arrange an air ambulance to take me to the University hospital in Zurich. On the tarmac, Yoshi asked the paramedics if he could go along because he wanted to visit the Dada museum in Zurich. They thought it was a little strange, but said sure. It was classic Yoshi.

In all the years I knew Yoshi, he hated everything Donald Trump stands for. My firm helped elect mainstream Republicans like Bush, Romney, Bill Weld, Tom Ridge, and Larry Hogan. Yoshi had qualms about working for those guys, who were far more conservative than his own ideology. When Trump endorsed Romney in the Nevada primary, Yoshi thought it was a disgrace and gave me a hard time for letting it happen. (He was right. I should have stopped it.)

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By the time of the 2012 Romney campaign, Yoshi had done a little work with Steve Bannon, but he thought he was an idiot. And we laughed about Bannon’s relentless and clumsy efforts to glom on to a Republican presidential race. I had been pushing Bannon away since the 2004 Bush reelection. Nobody would let him in.

So now Yoshi is a Trumper. How utterly disgusting, pathetic, and creepy. He’s one more reason I will never wonder how 1930s Germany happened. It’s evil. Yoshi is probably like a lot of these Republicans who think that Trump will come and go and their role will be forgotten. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

The Marcel Duchamp infatuation is cute, and doubtless Yoshi hopes this will define him as a true lover of art, not a Trump fascist. Sorry, Yoshi, Duchamp smuggled his art out of Paris and fled the Nazis. But had he stayed, I’m sure he could have made some money from art projects, as you have from Trump.

Matthew Taylor post on Facebook

Character is destiny. And Yoshi is a Trumper. What a waste.

Thanks for writing the piece. I hope it haunts him for the rest of his life. I certainly will do what I can to make sure his role is not forgotten.

All best,

Stuart