I don’t know who wrote the anonymous op ed in the New York Times, but boy howdy, it sure pushed Trump over the edge.
TREASON?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018
Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official†really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2018
Of course it’s not treason. It’s arguably not all that partiotic, either, but not because it’s disrespectul of The Creature. There’s nothing “patriotic” about continuing to cover The Creature’s ass. Charles Pierce:
Enough of this stuff. Stand up in the light of day and tell your stories. All of them, right from the beginning. Admit that what you’re confronting now is the end result of 40 years of conservative politics and all the government-is-the-problem malfeasance you’ve been imbibing since you were wingnuts in swaddling. The fire’s licking at your ankles at last. Come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls. None of you are heroes.
There’s a lot of guessing about who anonymous is. Lots of votes for Mike Pence, even though he doesn’t quite fit the Times’s description of a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. Pence can’t be fired, and his job can’t very well be jeaopardized.
On the other hand, Pence being an ambitious, unscrupulous weasel, he would be the one person most interested in planting the notion of getting rid of Trump via the 25th Amendment. He must realize by now that the only way he’s going to be president is if Trump is deposed first.
Otherwise, there’s nothing in the op ed that’s shockingly new. It’s all been pretty obvious, including the part about how the Administration is running on two tracks. It’s not at all unusual for the White House/Washington bureaucracy to fail to follow through on Trump’s policy announcements.
Anonymous wrote,
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.
Charles Pierce:
Jesus H. Christ on an auto-glass ad, everybody who watched him for 11 seconds on the campaign trail figured this out. You’d have to have had the brain of a marmoset not to be convinced of this back in 19-goddamn-79. More than 60 million people voted for him anyway. You took a job with him. When the scales fall from your eyes, make sure they don’t hit you in the feet.
Anonymous:
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
This is self-serving crap. There is no Constitutional crisis involved in removing Trump from office via the 25th Amendment if not impeachment. Anonymous just wants to be a good party apparatchik.
The 25th Amendment requires the VP and half the cabinet declare Trump unfit. Pence would love to be president, but the 90% of Republican voters who support Trump will want Pence's head on a pike. Pence would not survive 2020 and he couldn't run for dog catcher as a Republican after serving 2 years as a lame duck despised by both sides.
Pence knows it. He's waiting for Mueller to do the dirty work and hoping it will precipitate a crash-and-burn for Trump which Pence can declare he wasn't at fault for.
Elaine Chao comes to mind as a candidate for the op-ed. If McConnell has decided to discredit Trump and EC from the inside sees the crash as inevitable, are they taking active measures to push Trump into self-destructing?
If Kavanaugh gets confirmed, Trump's usefulness to the GOP will have completed it's life cycle.. I think he can expect a taste of the old sonderkommando treatment from his GOP buddies once that event comes to fruition.
What did you think of Stephen Miller's op-ed in the New York Times? Pretty clever of him to make it appear like Pense was the stoolie. Actually the op-ed kinda makes sense seeing how financial regulators have successfully used stress testing to gauge the financial health of banking institutions, why not use a little stress testing in the form of an op-ed to gauge the mental health of the president?
Uh, Jeez, yeah. Thanks, guy, for the info – that we already knew.
Oh, and if you really want to make the maximum impact, resign your job on "Morning Joe" tomorrow.
But no… You want to remain "Anonymous."
That bug eyed revelation of things hidden in plain view drives me mad.
From cab drivers and doormen, to debutants, drag queens, and CEOs, everyone in NYC had sized up Donald Trump, the laughingstock, by 1978, like Pierce says. In a city where every kind of success is celebrated, he, with his cheap ass celebrity, was a puny failure. More than the White House Correspondents Dinner, I think Trump's trajectory to DC was revenge for being given the cold shoulder in NYC society. Who would want to sit next to him at a dinner party?
Some of us also knew for sure that the war with Iraq was evil too.
25th Amendment requires the VP and half the cabinet declare Trump unfit.. and then if Trump objects in writing they need a two-thirds vote of both Houses to keep him from returning.
Not an easy hurdle to overcome
I figure we will know the identity of Anonymous by Friday at the latest. Could well be some bureaucrat most of us have never heard of unless we are Washington insiders. Like with Deep Throat–I never heard of Mark Felt until his identity was revealed.
Controlling an unfit president by coup d'etat sounds like a Constitutional crisis to me. But could it be that Trump was about to do something truly desperate and this official was trying to head that off?
The op-ed really sounds like junior wingnut drivel. The shocking realization that Trump is amoral and not moored to any "first principles". Just the style of writing. It's certainly not Mike Pence.
Sad! These "Oh poor me" descendants of Dick Nixon's Orthogonians are breaking my heart. Sure, they're doing the best they can.
But of course – the show must go on.
The letter writer is going for heroism, but is really a coward, and a not too bright one at that. And the people the letter describes are self-serving cowards. Invoking the 25th amendment would be no more of a "constitutional crises" than someone invoking their first amendment rights. It is in the Constitution and provides a facility and process for removal. That's an excuse for them to continue to leverage Trump's insanity to essentially destroy the nation with all the "good things" they're doing, i.e. the tax cuts which almost exclusively helps the wealthy, the deregulation that's taking health care away from people and allowing corporations to speed up destruction of the environment, the stacking of the courts with partisan "judges" who'll ignore the law and the majority to cement all that in place. And all that money spent on the military that is certainly not needed that could go to maybe rebuilding some of our infrastructure, like that bridge in NY/NJ I heard about that was built in 1910 where they have to use hammers to lower it.
Trump is a republican, and he's the logical conclusion (hopefully its at the end, but I doubt it) of what they've been doing the last 40 years. The only difference between Trump and say a "normal" republican like Pence is Pence's insanity as a republican is controlled, whereas Trump is out of control. There's no daylight between 'em on policy.
"Come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls"
Wow Charlie Pierce gets in an obscure post punk reference! I don't see whats so shocking about this op-ed. Didn't we already know Trump wasn't moored to any sense of decency, morals, purpose, other than his own self aggrandizement? The man went bonkers on day one based on the media's reporting about his small "inaugural crowd" size! I would find it hard to believe his entire staff could be a vapid as Sour Sarah, Stephen Miller and Kelleyanne, surely their are more "senior staff" that think like the anonymous author does, at least I hope so!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c
"Trump's usefulness to the GOP will have completed it's life cycle"
Swami, you don't really think the the GOP'ers are finished swindling the American Public after Kavanaugh gets confirmed do you? What about all of that clean air and clean water, those public schools, all of that public land, come on the GOP has only just begun!
uncledad , I'm not saying the GOP is done swindling the American people. What I'm saying is that it is very likely that the GOP will change their tack and turn their liability of Trump into an asset with a come to Jesus moment. Was blind but now we see?..
I don't doubt for one minute that Trump's base and repuglican voters wouldn't welcome a voice from the GOP leadership that would lead them out of their quandary of defending Trump by offering him up as a propitiation for the ills of the GOP. The repuglican voters will get behind that voice like it was the Pied Piper.
What better way of reuniting a fractured GOP than to lay all the blame on their faithfulness in honoring the will of the American voters who chose Trump. We tried to be faithful to the American voters, but Trump deceived you.
Swami — You could be right. If the Right, including media, unites against Trump, and turn Trump into the public villain, they could put on a great “finest hour” act.
Maha – "if".
I'm not ruling the possibility out, but it would require honor among thieves.
The quicker the op-ed writer comes forth and goes public, the quicker they can sign the book deal.
There's nothing like a heaping helping of paranoia served up at the White House. Now the moron is fixated on finding out who the culprit is with the idea of using a polygraph to ferret them out.. That kinda reinforces the message and intent of the anonymous source. It reminds me of when the Bush administration was insisting on requiring all top level members of his administration submit to drug testing —as was required of all federal workers at the time — in an effort to show that his team was drug free. It was George Schultz (Secretary of State) who told Bush that he wouldn't submit to such a humiliating exercise to prove that his words and actions weren't sufficient to hold his trust. Schultz told him if you have any doubts about me, just get rid of me..But don't demean my credibility for being truthful in what I say.
Now Trump is considering subjecting his lineup of misfits and sycophants to a similar ordeal by destroying the trust in all for the sake of one. It should be interesting to see who and how many surrender their dignity to appease Trump's paranoid insecurities.
What's the difference between making a statement through a pseudonym or persona, like say John Barron or John Miller, and making a statement behind a veil of anonymity?
Confession: My name really isn't Swami. I think my father wanted to name me that,but my mother insisted against it. I'm so ashamed! I'm just as deceitful as that Publius guy who wrote some stuff for the federalist papers.
Anyway, I don't think the writer of the op-ed was cowardly at all. I think it was a well placed blow in an effort to rid us of the destructive creature that inhabits the White House. " Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"?
Charles Pierce voiced the theory, put forth by his wife, that it’s KellyAnne Conway
KellyAnne doesn’t need to find a book deal, and the op-ed would only help turn the public toward whatever book she might write, and so there’s not a lot of personal urgency for her to come forward, right now. It seems like a brilliant maneuver on her part.
moonbat …The thing that makes me think it wasn't KellyAnne is the idea that the New York Times is risking getting some serious egg on their face if they allow themselves to be taken in by a stunt to change the narrative away from other issues. I'm sure the Times took a hard look at the source of the op-ed and questioned the sincerity of that source before they granted anonymity. KellyAnne is vicious and worthy of the same amount of trust and altruism that a sane person would give to a cornered rattlesnake. I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her. There is no truth in her.
If it was a feminine tone that Pierce's wife picked up on maybe Kirstjen Nielsen would be a better guess. After all, she came into the administration on John Kelly's coat tails so she not a staunch MAGA hat wearing Trumpite and she might have a desire to protect Kelly's image as well as her own in doing so for when the wheels come off the bus.
Swami — I agree with you. It ain’t KellyAnne.