Here's What To Read About That Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed
On Wednesday, the New York Times published an anonymous op-ed from someone claiming to be a "senior official in the Trump administration." In the op-ed this unnamed senior official details the "resistance inside the Trump administration," where multiple staffers are "working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."
Coincidentally, the op-ed was published just after the Washington Post published excerpts from Bob Woodward's upcoming book on the Trump administration that essentially confirms the claims the op-ed writer made about trying to foil Trump from within.
In it, Woodward names top Trump administration officials — White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former economic advisory Gary Cohn among them — actively ignoring and even subverting mandates from the president. The most plain of which involved Cohn literally taking policy papers off Trump's desk and hoping he would forget about them.
Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump's strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn "stole a letter off Trump's desk" that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.
The president, naturally, wasn't too happy about the revelations put forward by Woodward's book and the Times op-ed, labeling it as "treason" and "gutless."
Are We In A Political Crisis Now?
Though the op-ed writer uses terms like "resistance" and frames themselves as a voice of reason from within, they aren't exactly the counter-weight you might expect, writes the Atlantic's Adam Serwer. This isn't so much as a coup as it is the Republican party having to go around a temperamental and unpredictable head of state to pass the legislation they were always planning on passing: corporate tax cuts, deregulation of the oil and banking industries and expanding the military budget.
The biggest open secret in Washington is that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. His staff knows it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows it. House Speaker Paul Ryan knows it. Everyone who works for the president, including his attorneys, knows it. But they all want something, whether it's upper-income tax cuts, starving the social safety net, or solidifying a right-wing federal judiciary. The Constitution provides for the removal of a president who is dangerously unfit, but those who have the power to remove him will not do so not out of respect for democracy, but because Trump is a means to get what they want. The officials who enable the Trump administration to maintain some veneer of normalcy, rather than resigning and loudly proclaiming that the president is unfit, are not "resisters." They are enablers.
By Serwer's reckoning, the op-ed is merely a way for the Republican establishment to wash their hands clean of Trump when he eventually leaves office. They'll point to this op-ed and Woodward's book and claim that you see, they tried their best to stop him.
Other questions of motive come from former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, whose main criticism is that if there is a resistance within the Trump administration, they're going about it the wrong way. If they're really interested in undermining Trump's authority, then they should use the systems in place to oust him, namely the 25th Amendment.
If the president's closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no "riskiness" exemptions in the text of that oath.
Vox's Zack Beauchamp counters that, well, it's not that easy.
Invoking the 25th Amendment, a possible constitutional solution to ousting Trump, is far harder than it sounds. It would require the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to decide that the president was incapacitated. In response, Trump could simply refuse to accept the outcome — in which case, the issue gets kicked to the GOP-controlled Congress, which would require a two-thirds vote to remove Trump from office. It's not a simple process.
[Vox]
Beauchamp goes on to argue that while it's not ideal that policy decisions are now being made by a secretive group of appointed bureaucrats and not the person accountable to an electorate, it's good that some people are at least doing something to stop Trump from wantonly tearing down trade agreements with long-time allies and playing nuclear chicken with North Korea.
Should The Times Have Published It In The First Place?
Apart from the question of "Is this a thing people in the Trump administration should be doing?" is the inevitable one of "Should the New York Times granted this person anonymity and a platform?"
Margaret Sullivan, once the public editor for the Times and now media critic over at the Washington Post, is the perfect person to answer this question. In her read of the situation, she thinks it was far too newsworthy to pass up, although it puts the Times' own political reporters — who are separate from the opinion desk — in a bit of a jam.
For me, it comes down to newsworthiness — and that the piece has, in spades. Its revelations may not break entirely new ground, but certainly add to our understanding of an administration in dangerous turmoil.
As for the knotty journalistic dilemma in reporting on the author, I can only hope — for the sake of the New York Times, of course — that The Washington Post breaks the story.
That this anonymous op-ed is grabbing headlines, demanding criticism and analysis (hello!) and ruffling everyone's feathers is the entire point of the Times op-ed section, writes Jack Schafer.
As the Times op-ed page took shape, its editors assembled a list of prospective authors and subjects they could address. One list, preserved in the Harrison Salisbury Papers at Columbia University, proposes soliciting pieces from Communist Party USA head Gus Hall, John Bircher Society leader Robert Welch, oil man and right-winger H.L. Hunt, labor radical Harry Bridges and revolutionary Angela Davis. The page's concept was to express ideas and opinions the reader couldn't find on the editorial page or elsewhere in the newspaper. The range and ambition of the page were such that one of the early editors on the page, John Van Doorn, tried (and failed) to hire Tupac Shakur's mother, Afeni Shakur, as an editor in 1971, as Socolow writes elsewhere.
[Politico]
As political reporters hammer away at trying to find out who the op-ed writer is, and as Trump staffers spend the next days and weeks proving that they weren't the one to write it, there's one thing you can't deny: it's definitely stirred the pot.
