The resistance inside Trump administration

I work for the US president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations

United States President Donald 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 Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party may well lose the House to an opposition hell-bent 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 America and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of the American republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting 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.

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 nearceaseless 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 commanderin-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. The erratic behaviour 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.

The bigger concern is not what Trump has done to the presidency, but rather what America as a nation has allowed him to do to it. 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 from the tribalism trap.

■ 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 jeopardised by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.