Trump blasts Times op-ed as ‘gutless’
Top White House official describes people actively impeding president
WASHINGTON— In a striking anonymous broadside, a senior Trump administration official wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times on Wednesday claiming to be part of a group of people “working diligently from within” to impede U.S. President Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” and illconceived parts of his agenda.
Trump said it was a “gutless editorial” and “really a disgrace,” and his press secretary called on the official to resign.
Trump later tweeted, “TREASON?” and in an extraordinary move demanded that if “the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
The writer, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump but not from the left, said, “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 newspaper described the author of the column only as a senior official in the Trump administration.
“It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room,” the author continued. “We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”
A defiant Trump, appearing at an unrelated event at the White House, lashed out at the Times for publishing the op-ed. “They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them,” he said of the newspaper. The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from its news department.
The essay immediately triggered a wild guessing game as to the author’s identity on social media, in newsrooms and inside the West Wing, where officials were blindsided by its publication.
And in a blistering statement, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders accused the author of choosing to “deceive” the president by remaining in the administration.
“He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people,” she said. “The coward should do the right thing and resign.”
Sanders also called on the Times to “issue an apology” for publishing the piece, calling it a “pathetic, reckless, and selfish op-ed.”
White House officials did not immediately respond to a request to elaborate on Trump’s call for the writer to be turned over to the government or the unsupported national security ground of his demand.
To White House officials, the ultimatum appeared to play into the very concerns about the president’s impulses raised by the essay’s author. Trump has demanded that aides identify the leaker, according to two people familiar with the matter, though it was not yet clear how they might go about doing so. The two were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
A House of Cards- style plot twist in an already over-the-top administration, Trump allies and political insiders scrambled to unmask the writer.
Hotly debated on Twitter was the author’s use of the word “lodestar,” frequently used in speeches by Vice-President Mike Pence.
Trump and his aides sought to push back Tuesday on a new book by veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward that depicted the West Wing as “Crazytown.”
In the first of two tweets, Trump cited denials by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and other aides in claiming that “their quotes were made up frauds, a con on the public.” He suggested that Woodward is a Democratic operative who timed the book to this year’s congressional elections.
Trump also tweeted out written statements by aides on the Woodward book, including one from his chief of staff.
“The idea I ever called the President an idiot is not true,” Kelly said, adding that the claim “is another pathetic attempt to smear people close to President Trump and distract from the administration’s many successes.”
Kelly repeated a statement he made in May, saying that he and Trump “have an incredibly candid and strong relationship.”