The last editorial I wrote for Occasional Planet was on the dangers of a potential post-Trump “unity government”. Consisting of centrists and ostensibly anti-Trump conservatives, it would retain Trump’s agenda while arguing for it in a way more palatable to the general public. The events of the last couple weeks have convinced me more than ever that a unity government of centrists and conservatives is a distinct possibility. After all, the two factions seem to be on quite friendly terms.

First, there was the establishment fawning over now-deceased warmonger John McCain. A particularly odious article in The New Yorker claimed that his funeral was “The Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet”, including Paul Ryan and George W. Bush in the “resistance” to Donald Trump.

Then, of course, came the anonymous New York Times op-ed from a high ranking official in the Trump administration claiming to be a double agent of sorts, preventing the more idiotic ideas of the administration while forwarding its generally conservative course. Wild speculation in the media surrounding the identity of the “heroic” official has been the parlor game of the week. Fortunately, I am here to put an end to such speculation. I have obtained the biography of the person in question, a Citizen of great note. A brief sketch of his life follows:

The Citizen was born in postwar America to a wealthy, white family in the suburbs of a coastal metropolis. They belonged to the first generation of post-sixties reactionaries, who learned to combat the social-democratic reforms of the mid-century via racist dog whistles and intimations of communist dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, in 1980 the Citizen, then a college student, cast his first vote for Ronald Reagan, impressed with his commitment to national security and his rhetoric of American renewal.

He was rarely disappointed with the Reagan presidency; during Iran-Contra the Citizen felt the President showed somewhat unbecoming behavior, but fundamentally believed the administration did the right thing. He considered Oliver North a personal hero to this day. At a conference he had the honor of shaking his hand.

After college the Citizen found work with a conservative think tank with the motto “free minds, free markets, and free people.” The think tank was mainly concerned with preserving and expanding American interests abroad. For their annual speaker series in 1985 they invited Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; in 1986 it was Angolan pro-American terrorist Jonas Savimbi.

During the Bush I years the Citizen was a White House staffer, focusing on issues such as “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.” George Bush, Sr. proved to be a bit of a disappointment for the Citizen: the tax hikes (despite the promise of “read my lips, no new taxes”) and Bush’s decision not to depose Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War were particular sticking points.

After the Democrats took the White House in 1992, the Citizen took a hiatus from politics and joined a venture capital firm that invested heavily in post-Soviet Russia. During the chaos in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the firm made a killing buying up privatized Russian state assets. The Citizen became friendly with the administration of Boris Yeltsin and subsequently that of Vladimir Putin.

In 2001 the Citizen returned to public life after 9/11; he was once again called upon to serve the country in the White House. During the Bush II presidency, the Citizen advocated expanded surveillance on domestic suspects, was a strong proponent of the Iraq War, and urged the president to consider a preemptive strike against Iran.

The Citizen was deeply suspicious of Barack Obama, considered him dangerous due to his association with foreign ideas. The Citizen felt Obama did not have the kind of upbringing and posture befitting an American president. Miraculously, however, despite the Citizen’s repeated criticisms of Obama in the right-wing press, Obama offered the Citizen a place on the National Security Council. The Citizen graciously accepted. He subsequently advised Obama to bomb Libya and invade Syria.

By 2016 the Citizen was a respected intellectual in the center as well as on the right. After exiting the Obama administration, the Citizen was invited on numerous talk shows as a guest, a noted “political expert”. He had his feathers ruffled by the candidacy of Donald Trump, but as a lifelong Republican, he held his nose and voted for him. He was a Cruz voter personally, but we all have to make compromises. After November of 2016 it quickly became clear that the victorious new Trump administration did not expect to win the election, and almost by default the Citizen was hired back as a White House insider.

It is unclear when the Citizen started to feel uncomfortable with the president. He did not seem bothered by ICE’s domestic crackdown, or the Trump administrations cozying up to Islamists in Saudi Arabia and Syria, or the revoking of passports of US nationals based largely on skin color. But one too many conversations with America’s most stable genius, and the Citizen decides enough is enough. He calls the New York Times and begins to type up a strongly-worded anonymous op-ed.

The above biography is obviously fictional, but the quote used above (apart from the Bush I snippet) are excerpts from the Citizen’s New York Times op-ed. I use them to indicate the kind of person who might have written the piece. I see no reason why such a person should be welcomed into the fold of respectable society.

The Citizen presumably knows that it is becoming taboo in elite Washington circles to be a diehard Trump supporter. It is my conjecture that the motive behind his article was not to castigate the president in good faith but to line up his next career move if the administration crashes. This kind of piece is catnip for centrists and moderate liberals who delight in seeing conservatives speaking out against Trump, however rare the spectacle.

Rehabilitation of war criminals and reactionary hacks isn’t without precedent. Take the Citizen’s hero, Oliver North, who in a just world would be mopping the floors of The Hague alongside the Citizen. Disgraced in the 80s for supporting right-wing terrorism and selling weapons to Iran, in the past few years he has run the talk-show circuit, recorded advertisements for Call of Duty (and, in one series entry, played a Cold War-era version of himself), and has now ascended to head the NRA.

The Citizen’s future is yet unwritten, but I have a prediction: When the Trump fiasco ends one way or another, or if the Trump administration becomes irreversibly unpopular, the Citizen will make himself public. First, he’ll appear on MSNBC, then Meet the Press, promoting a new book called “Honor: Four Decades of Service to The Republic”, or something to that effect. Liberals will eat it up.

Of course, by “defending the republic” the Citizen never meant the restoration of voting rights, the end of money in politics and gerrymandering, the shoring up of our civil rights. He meant something vastly more important to him: politeness. If the Citizen has his way, we will never have quality healthcare in this country, or an end to oligarchic governance, or a foreign policy that transcends brutish imperialism. But maybe the people of America will have a president who can speak in complete sentences. Nevermind the content of the sentences themselves.

The post I Know the Identity of the anonymous Op-Ed writer appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The New York Times took the rare step, today, of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. The author, an unnamed, senior White House official, delivers an astonishingly honest account of how other senior officials are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of Trump’s agenda and his worst inclinations.” Coming just one day after we began hearing excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump administration, the op-ed offers a timely confirmation of Woodward’s accounts.

Of course, it would be more satisfying–and morally much more courageous–if  the senior official had the temerity to come out of the closet. But, given his/her contention that the only way to save the presidency [and, perhaps, America] from the autocratic demagoguery of Donald Trump is to work from within, the anonymity is understandable.

It’s a sure bet that Trump is going to go ballistic over this, and launch his own internal “witch hunt” aimed at purging whoever wrote this. Undoubtedly, too, everyone who might be suspected of authoring this op-ed will deny that he/she wrote it–just as virtually everyone quoted by Woodward has already issued a denial [possibly a scenario they pre-arranged with Woodward as a condition of speaking to him on tape.]

Obviously, there’s going to be a big media kerfuffle over the author’s identity–trying to match the style of writing, the use of language, etc., to people closely associated with Trump. Eventually, we may learn his/her identity–everybody leaks everything in D.C.– and  he/she could be deemed a “hero” [whatever that means].  But the issues raised by this White House insider are more important than media speculation as to his/her identity. Kudos to the Times for recognizing the value of publishing this op-ed, and to the author for speaking out [ish]. That’s worth something.

Here is the full text of the op-ed:

The New York Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. 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.

That is why many Trump appointees 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.

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. 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.

Don’t get me wrong. There 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.

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.

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.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.

Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.

On Russia, for instance, 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. 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.

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

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 bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.

We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.

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 writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.

Let the wild rumpus of “who said it” begin.

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