With President Donald Trump reportedly “volcanic” over the authorship of an anonymous op-ed by a “high-ranking” White House official in the New York Times, the game being played far and wide after the publication of the explosive and deeply troubling column is, of course: which of the many jerks hired, elected, (or born) into the president’s inner-circle wrote it?
It’s the “million-dollar question,” according to NPR’s MarketWatch:
Click Here: camiseta seleccion argentina
As Taylor Telford reports for the Washington Post on Thursday morning, “the explosion the piece created wasn’t really about the what; it was mostly about the who.”
Over at New York Magazine, Margaret Hartmann has a long rundown of the currently competing theories.
The effort to reveal the author became, Telford continues,
The widespread speculation followed a demand by the president that the newspaper immediately reveal the identity of the author—who he called both “gutless” and a “coward.”
Strikingly, according to the Huffington Post‘s David Moye, a lot of amateur investigators scouring the op-ed for clues have determined a theory—based on the usage of one word in particular—that Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, is the author. Moye reports:
Not convinced? In a statement, Pence’s office flatly denied that the vice president wrote the op-ed.
Or who cares? As progressive critics have pointed out, the author of the op-ed is no hero and should not been seen as brave or taking a bold stance.
In a piece headlined, “Just Shut Up and Quit,” Esquire‘s political columnist Charles P. Pierce excoriating the author of the op-ed, and those it claimed to represent, writing, “Nobody elected the Anonymous Heroes executing a de facto coup against” the president.
“Don’t stand on one leg waiting for your statue on the mall, Ace,” Peirce continued, as he quoted derisively from the op-ed. “It’s not ‘cold comfort.’ It’s utter bullshit. Nobody elected you, whoever the hell you are. Nobody elected these other anonymous heroes, either. This isn’t the way the presidency is supposed to work.”
And Pierce was hardly alone.
In her takedown of the still unidentified author, the Los Angeles Times‘ Jessica Roy wrote, “If you’re reading this senior White House official, know this: You are not resisting Donald Trump. You are enabling him for your own benefit. That doesn’t make you an unsung hero. It makes you a coward.”
Strangely, those were Trump’s words exactly.
But while the president demands to know who “the snakes” are and the public waits for the identity to leak—which irony and history pretty much guarantee it eventually will—Hartmann writing at New York Magazine urged in her column for the American people to enjoy the guessing game while it lasts.
“An anonymous administration official claiming he’s part of a resistance movement working to thwart our unhinged president,” she writes, “is about as fun a story as we’re going to get in these troubled times.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.