After President Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, a novel appeared. Primary Colors was a thinly-veiled dramatic retelling of Clinton’s improbable path to victory. What made the book sell so well initially was that its author was, literally, “Anonymous.” It would be several years before the public learned that “Anonymous” was Newsweek reporter Joe Klein. The success of the novel (and the 1998 film starring John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, and Kathy Bates) was proof of the concept that anonymity sells books.
I say this because while the short-attention-span crowd in Washington, D.C. was glued to the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the New York Times published an online op-ed by an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” and it has everyone’s undivided attention.
“I am part of the resistance…”
The article echoed the pre-release nuggets from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book on the White House. It describes a West Wing in chaos, with cabinet-level officials defying the president by hiding potentially damaging memoranda so he can’t sign them, or leaving a meeting and telling subordinates not to do what the president had just directed.
“The dilemma – which [Trump] does not fully grasp,” the official wrote, “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.” He (and a Times tweet did give away that the author is indeed a “he”) said many Trump appointees are trying to “preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
The author describes a “two-track presidency” where the president says one thing while the government does another. After acknowledging the president’s “preference for autocrats and dictators,” the official notes what I’ve been preaching for months. “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.”
We saw this in action just a few hours before the article appeared online.
egregious Russian interference
The president may not be able to bring himself to admit that the Russian government, on orders from the top, engaged in a disinformation campaign designed to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. But the rest of the administration, as I have pointed out repeatedly, has no such reservation.
Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristjen Nielsen spoke at The George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. She has previously hedged in her public statements about the level of confidence she has in the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian activities. Not on Wednesday.
Perhaps she was encouraged by the revelations coming from reports of the Woodward book. But she left no doubt as to where she now stands on the issue. She told the audience “At Vladimir Putin’s direction, Moscow launched a brazen, multi-faceted influence campaign to undermine public faith in our democratic process and to distort our presidential election.
“Although NO actual ballots were altered by this campaign,” she continued, “make no mistake: this was a direct attack on our democracy” (emphasis in the original advance copy of the secretary’s remarks). Nielsen is the latest in a string of Trump administration officials to contradict the president. Something tells me there will be many more in the days to come, both anonymous and on the record.
I yield back.
