No, I'M the Real Resistance

By Anonymous

We are taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous op-ed essay. We do so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known only to columnist Donald Morrison and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously can deliver an important perspective to our readers.

President Trump is facing a test of his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader. It is not just the Russia investigation. Or his party's impending loss of the House in November's mid-term elections. Or even Bob Woodward's new book, Fear, whose title pretty much sums up the mood in the West Wing these days.

The dilemma — which the president does not fully grasp, possibly because he doesn't know a dilemma from a delusion — is that senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to undermine his agenda. And they don't even know they're doing it.

People like me are the real "resistance." Not those wimps on the left, or that anonymous colleague of mine whose own essay ran the other day in the New York Times. Unlike him, I don't want the administration to succeed. i want it to fail, quickly and spectacularly. I also want to keep my job for a while and hop nimbly to a lobbying firm before Special Counsel Robert Mueller figures out where I work.

That is why many of us Trump appointees have vowed to advance the president's agenda while encouraging his excesses until he is safely out of office. Which, at this rate, could be Thanksgiving.

I do not have to tell you about the president's shortcomings. For me, however, they are outweighed by his charms. I have especially enjoyed his inability to notice when I deliver presentations with the charts deliberately turned upside down. Or his Oval Office assurance to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that he never paid hush money to Starry Decisis. Or his touching conviction that real wages are rising, that tax cuts pay for themselves, that North Korea is no longer developing nuclear weapons and that Vladimir Putin really, really likes him.

What keeps me and my colleagues toiling at our looms is the knowledge that we are making America ...worse. We are storming ahead with the administration's goals: relieving Americans of their health care, freeing them from the tyranny of Social Security and Medicare, eliminating those pesky regulations that prevent citizens from free access to respiratory disease and climate catastrophe, saving women from the stigma of abortion and equal pay, separating parents from their children, launching a global trade war, alienating our European allies (also those treacherous Canadians), and returning America to the golden age of coal.

Indeed, it is these policies that are making our president deeply disliked by the majority of Americans. (The hardest part of my job is keeping a straight face in the Cabinet Room when the latest polls come out.) The president's sinking popularity is why, despite my misgivings about Trump the man, I'm sticking with Trump the walking disaster. If my colleagues and I labor diligently enough to attain his ends, we can undermine him, his administration and his party more effectively than his declared opponents ever could.

Sen. John McCain put it best: "Every day, people serve their neighbors and our nation in different ways." I am not sure when or why he said that, but the New York Times essayist quoted him. Besides, I found the this gem on the Internet and it helps make my point. Which is: Some of us in the Trump White House, like the anonymous Times guy, try to save the president from himself. Others, like me, prefer to indulge his self-obsessed whims and advance his self-defeating policies.

Only by letting Trump be Trump will America ever be rid of him — and spared from any future hyper-partisan authoritarian who might be tempted to adopt his ways. Only then can we re-unite through our shared values and our determination never to make this mistake again.