I work for the president but like-minded colleagues
and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his
worst inclinations.
President Trump at an event in August at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Photo Credit - Tom Brenner for The New York Times
The 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 jeopardized by
its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay
anonymously is the only way to deliver an
important perspective to our readers. We invite
you to submit a question about the essay or our
vetting process here.
President 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 Mr.
Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might
well lose the House to an opposition hellbent 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 this country,
and the president continues to act in a manner that
is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why 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 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. At best, he has invoked these
ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has
attacked them outright.
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
near-ceaseless 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
commander in 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 he’d made
only a week earlier.
The erratic behavior 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.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but
Americans should know that there are adults in the
room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we
are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump
won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private,
President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and
dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of
Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and
displays little genuine appreciation for the ties
that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest
of the administration is operating on another track,
one where countries like Russia are called out for
meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies
around the world are engaged as peers rather than
ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was
reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies
as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian
spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior
staff members letting him get boxed into further
confrontation with Russia, and he expressed
frustration that the United States continued to
impose sanctions on the country for its malign
behavior. But his national security team knew better
— such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow
accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state.
It’s the work of the steady state.
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.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done
to the presidency but rather what we as a nation
have allowed him to do to us. 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 of the tribalism trap,
with the high aim of uniting through our shared values
and love of this great nation.
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will
always have his example — a lodestar for restoring honor
to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump may
fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration
of people choosing to put country first. But the real
difference will be made by everyday citizens rising
above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving
to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump
administration.
