Book Review: In ‘A Warning,’ Anonymous Author Makes Case Against Re-election
The same official who wrote an Opinion essay in 2018 argues in a new book that the president’s contract shouldn’t be renewed.
By Jennifer Szalai
Nov. 7, 2019
Anonymous.jpg
Credit...Twelve Books
Now here's one whistleblower whose identity I'd like to see revealed.
In various reporting, there's some question whether the author is still a senior Trump administration official, but sufficient information to follow up on some of his more incendiary charges.
Book by ‘Anonymous’ describes Trump as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation
By Philip Rucker
November 7, 2019 at 8:31 p.m. EST
Double-checking this claim will naturally lead to surveying all current and recently-departed senior Trump administration officials.
The same official who wrote an Opinion essay in 2018 argues in a new book that the president’s contract shouldn’t be renewed.
By Jennifer Szalai
Nov. 7, 2019
“Trust me”: It’s a tired cliché, a throwaway line, but when you first encounter it in “A Warning,” the new book by “Anonymous,” who is identified here only as “a senior Trump administration official,” it lands with a startling thud. Any revealing details have been explicitly and deliberately withheld to protect this person’s identity. Who is this “me” that we’re supposed to trust?
It’s a question that the anonymous author — who wrote an Op-Ed for The Times last year about resisting the president’s “more misguided impulses” — might have anticipated, given how much of the book is devoted to the necessity of “character” and to quoting dead presidents by name.
Not to mention this individual’s own conspicuous failures of judgment thus far. You don’t even have to take it from me; you can take it from Anonymous. “Many reasonable people voted for Trump because they love their country, wanted to shake up the establishment, and felt that the alternative was worse,” Anonymous writes. “I know you because I’ve felt the same way.” A mildly chastened Anonymous now seems to recognize, somewhat belatedly, that President Trump’s peddling of birtherism conspiracy theories and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals might have constituted their own kind of warning — plausible evidence that Mr. Trump might not magically transform into the dignified statesman Anonymous so desperately wanted him to be.
It’s a question that the anonymous author — who wrote an Op-Ed for The Times last year about resisting the president’s “more misguided impulses” — might have anticipated, given how much of the book is devoted to the necessity of “character” and to quoting dead presidents by name.
Not to mention this individual’s own conspicuous failures of judgment thus far. You don’t even have to take it from me; you can take it from Anonymous. “Many reasonable people voted for Trump because they love their country, wanted to shake up the establishment, and felt that the alternative was worse,” Anonymous writes. “I know you because I’ve felt the same way.” A mildly chastened Anonymous now seems to recognize, somewhat belatedly, that President Trump’s peddling of birtherism conspiracy theories and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals might have constituted their own kind of warning — plausible evidence that Mr. Trump might not magically transform into the dignified statesman Anonymous so desperately wanted him to be.
Anonymous.jpg
Credit...Twelve Books
Now here's one whistleblower whose identity I'd like to see revealed.
In various reporting, there's some question whether the author is still a senior Trump administration official, but sufficient information to follow up on some of his more incendiary charges.
Book by ‘Anonymous’ describes Trump as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation
By Philip Rucker
November 7, 2019 at 8:31 p.m. EST
Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.
Double-checking this claim will naturally lead to surveying all current and recently-departed senior Trump administration officials.
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