A Trump administration official penned an anonymous essay in The New York Times Wednesday claiming that many senior advisers to President Trump are deliberately taking part in a resistance within the government “to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
“I would know. I am one of them,” the official wrote.
The article quickly prompted a furious response by the president, who called the anonymous writer “gutless.”
The author, who was granted anonymity by the Times because the paper said it was “the only way to deliver an important perspective,” wrote that the government officials conspiring against the president “have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
“Ours is not the popular ’resistance’ of the left,” the official wrote. “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”
Less than two hours after the article was posted online, Mr. Trump blasted the article’s author as cowardly.
“An anonymous editorial, can you believe that? Meaning gutless. A gutless editorial,” Mr. Trump bristled in front of TV cameras at an event with county sheriffs, who cheered his words.
The president said defiantly, “When you tell me about some anonymous source within the administration who’s failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons….”
He also blasted The New York Times as “failing.”
“If I weren’t here, I believe The New York Times probably wouldn’t exist,” Mr. Trump said. “Someday when I’m not president, which hopefully will be about six and a half years from now, the New York Times and CNN and all these phony media outlets will be out of business.”
The president said he agrees with the anonymous author only in the sense his administration’s policies are “different from an agenda which is much different from ours.”
“And it’s certainly not your agenda,” he told the sheriffs. “It’s about open borders, it’s about letting people flee into our country, it’s about a disaster of crime. So they [opponents] don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them, because they’re very dishonest people.”
The anonymous official said Mr. Trump often exhibits “erratic” behavior in meetings, raising concerns about his fitness for office.
“Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the official wrote. “Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
The author pointed to Mr. Trump’s actions on Russia and President Vladimir Putin as an example of his advisers working against him.
“The president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain,” the official wrote. “He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
The author said, “This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state…. There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.”
The essay mirrors some of the accusations in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward, who describes top aides characterizing Mr. Trump’s White House as “off the rails” and claiming that advisers sometimes steal documents from the president’s desk to prevent him from taking rash actions.
Mr. Trump called those accusations “false.”
“It’s false. Made up,” he told The Daily Caller in an interview. “Disgruntled employees or just made up, could just be made up by the author. It’s just nasty stuff.”
He said the incident in question, of an aide stopping him from signing documents on a South Korean trade deal, didn’t prevent anything.
“That was on the South Korean trade deal, which I’ve completed just recently,” Mr. Trump said. “And we’re going to be signing it, I think we’ll be signing it during United Nations week in a couple of weeks in New York. But it [previously] was a Hillary Clinton deal where we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. And I voided the agreement, made a new one.”
In the New York Times op-ed, the author said of Mr. Trump, “The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”
“Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people,” the official wrote. “At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.
“In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the ’enemy of the people,’ President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.”
The official said there also are “bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”
“But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” the official said. “From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”
The president added later on Twitter, “If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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