By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 05, 2019
On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous editorial by a supposed
“senior official” in the Trump administration. In astounding fashion, the
unnamed writer claimed that he/she was part of a legion of administration appointees
and government officials who were actively working to undermine the Trump
presidency by overriding his orders, keeping information from an unknowing
Trump, or acting independently of his directives. Or as Anonymous
unapologetically put it:
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.
The Times
author then continues by confessing to a sort of slow-motion coup to undermine
the Trump presidency:
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.
The writer then lists the supposed Trump sins and offers
the following rationale for such extraordinary subversion on the part of
self-elected conspirators:
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.
Most telling, however, given the supposed plethora of
Trump sins, the author never cites a
particular presidential act that by any coherent definition could be called
illegal, dangerous, or unethical, much less unprecedented in presidential
history. Indeed, Anonymous concedes that Trump has often been successful in his
tenure: “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.”
Yet Anonymous then boasts that such landmark success came
because of others and in spite of Trump: “But these successes have come despite
— not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous,
adversarial, petty and ineffective.”
Trump’s purported sins then arise largely in matters of
executive “style” and supposedly unpresidential character: “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.” Anonymous did not square the circle of
how such an incompetent and dangerous leader had accomplished such admittedly
good things, often well beyond the ability of prior and supposedly better
qualified and more sober Republican presidents.
The author concludes his opinion editorial by promising
the country that like-minded unelected officials and bureaucrats have formed a
“resistance” that will do its best to nullify the directives of the elected
president and instead implement policies that they believe will take the
country in the “right direction” — and are the product of their apparently
superior professionalism and a proper presidential tone that they associate
with their own:
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.
What neither the opinion writer nor the New York Times disclosed about their
joint efforts of producing an anonymous op-ed on September 5 were some obvious
considerations of sourcing, timing, and objectives.
First, the editorial appeared on the eve of a much
publicized tell-all about the Trump White House by Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward, whose latest
book, Fear — his nineteenth such
exposé mostly based on undisclosed and unnamed sources and without citations —
was scheduled to come out just six days later. Advance excerpts largely
dovetailed with Anonymous’s argument of a president whose inexperience and
temperament “scare” those in government and force them to find ways to
circumvent or obstruct his wishes.
The opinion piece also coincidentally was published just
four days after the late Senator John McCain’s funeral. McCain is lionized in
the anonymous op-ed as the proper antithesis to Trump (“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”).
At the funeral, eulogist after eulogist used the solemn
occasion not just to praise John McCain, but also to blast Donald Trump. Oddly,
McCain’s final deification by his erstwhile critics and enemies was mostly a
result of his own bitter and ongoing feud with Donald Trump that in his
eleventh hour sanctified him to past presidents George W. Bush and Barack
Obama. Both their earlier presidential campaigns had once smeared McCain as a
libertine and reckless (the Bush effort in 2000, especially during the South
Carolina primary), and vilified him in 2008 as a near-demented racist (the
Obama 2008 campaign). Due to his feud with Trump, in death McCain was
transmogrified into angelic status by the very architects who in life were
sometimes responsible for his demonization.
Finally, the McCain funeral and anonymous op-ed marked
the return of former president Barack Obama to the campaign trail, as he began
to give a series of angry and often bitter speeches on the eve of the 2018
midterms — ironically both blasting Trump as dangerous and incompetent while
taking credit for the apparently quite competent Trump handling of the economy.
The common thread in all these coincidental events was not just collective
hatred of Trump on the part of the establishment, but also the extraordinary
means by which a proverbial deep state sought to subvert a supposedly
extraordinarily dangerous outsider.
Usually ex-presidents do not blast their successors at
funerals. A prior president customarily does not hit the campaign trail to
level charges against a sitting president. State funerals are not regularly
transmogrified into pep rallies. And anonymous members of an administration
usually do not have the connections to publish lead New York Times editorials that channel Bob Woodward’s sensational
but unsourced allegations.
A cynic might have believed there had been some sort of
collusive effort ahead of the 2018 midterm election to create a simultaneous
and force-multiplying demonization of Trump — almost as if there was a common
effort coordinated by the major media, journalists, establishment politicians,
and supposedly dozens of officials within government. But that idea would not
completely be a conspiratorial conclusion, because Anonymous boasted of the
presence of such an organized “resistance” inside the government.
A final, even more disturbing note: the deep state is
neither transparent nor confident in its criticisms, at least enough to name
names in its near-subversionary efforts. Both past presidents and Megan McCain,
daughter of John McCain, in their funeral eulogies trashed Trump — to the glee
of editorials in the major papers.
But none of them completed their politicization of the
service by mentioning Donald Trump by name. Nor did Anonymous ever disclose his
name or come forward publicly to present particular examples of documented
wrongdoing. Nor did Bob Woodward cite most of his sources, name his informants,
or produce footnoted data to assure the readers of the veracity of his
sensational charges. Instead, the premise was that the establishment has such power,
prestige, and authority that it has no need to reveal its methodologies and
sources — once it claimed the higher moral ground and felt that it had not just
the right, but indeed the duty, to overturn the verdict of the 2016 election.
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