Sure, Trump’s advisers aren’t the first to push back against a president — but what’s happening now is completely unprecedented. A senior official’s op-ed will change no one’s mind— but it will make the president even less likely to listen. The unnamed op-ed writer can’t be pleased: An op-ed that didn’t achieve its aim. The anonymous administration official’s NYT op-ed is a study in reputation-saving. If Anonymous Times Contributor had any guts, he or she would quit and tell the truth about Trump in public. The rogue White House official who wrote that Times op-ed is a moral coward. Zack Beauchamp writes in defense of the New York Times’s anonymous Trump official.
Margaret Hartmann on all the theories on who wrote the anonymous anti-Trump op-ed (and more). Here are the administration officials who deny they wrote The New York Times op-ed (and more). White House aides turn on each other in hunt for op-ed author. The snakes are everywhere: “Two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths”. “We see ourselves as rebels”: Trump’s internal resistance celebrates. Trump’s paranoid rage is getting worse — but the White House “resistance” is a sham. “Anonymous” is another word for “complicit”: Republican insiders tell one another that Trump is an abomination — what they tell his voters is something else. Republicans: Trump is a mad king — vote for us to give him unchecked power. It’s time for Republicans to walk away from Trump.
Republicans are preparing to disavow Trump if he fails — then come back and try the same policies. It’s good to be stirred out of complacency about Trump’s dangerous presidency, but only if we grapple with the true nature of his enablers. There’s no coup against Trump: American democracy is imperiled by Republicans enabling the president’s authoritarian impulses, not by self-aggrandizing op-eds from anonymous bureaucrats. The crisis isn’t Trump — it’s his Republican enablers. The constitutional crisis isn’t coming — it’s here.
I am the real Resistance, the Resistance within the Trump administration. That New York Times op-ed may not have given us hope — but it did give us memes.
