Anonymous tell-all book likens Trump to '12year-old in air traffic control tower' – report
The anonymous author of a widely anticipated book on the Trump White House has described the US president as spiraling from crisis to crisis “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower”, according to scathing extracts published by the Washington Post on Thursday.
The unnamed author, identified only as “a senior official in the Trump administration”, also says that colleagues considered resigning en masse in order to raise alarm about the president’s conduct, but ultimately decided against it, according to the Post.
The extracts obtained by the Post are due to appear in A Warning, a book written by the unnamed person who last year wrote a New York Times column critical of the president. They paint Trump as volatile and incompetent, while also describing how he made racist and misogynistic statements in private.
In the book, the author describes Trump’s approach to the presidency as “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport”.
The author also describes how
Trump’s impulsive Twitter antics often left senior officials “waking up in the morning ‘in a full-blown panic’”.
“It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him,” the author writes, according to the Post. “You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”
The White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham criticized the book and the author’s decision to remain anonymous.
“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” she said on Thursday.
She said reporters should “cover the book as what it is: a work of fiction”.
The Post said the author decided to publish the work anonymously so as not to distract from the president and the larger issues.
“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the official writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice’. My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”
The book includes passages describing Trump allegedly making misogynistic and racist comments behind the scenes, commenting on people’s weight or appearance, and at one point describes the president as trying to affect a Hispanic accent during an Oval Office meeting to complain about migrants crossing the USMexico border.
In one alleged incident, Trump said: “We get these women coming in with like seven children. They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”
The unnamed author’s original oped in the New York Times, headlined I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, alleged that some senior White House officials collaborated to protect the country and public from some of Trump’s most dangerous and irresponsible impulses.
Agencies contributed reporting