If the “senior official” who published an anonymous op-ed bashing President Donald Trump in the New York Times on Wednesday was hoping for accolades from the opposition, he or she must have been sorely disappointed, as the media’s leftists and Never Trumpers accused the author of cowardice for failing to take the extra step of removing Trump altogether.
The author claimed to be part of the “resistance” inside the White House. But the real “resistance” wasn’t having it.
Jessica Roy, an anti-Trump writer at the Los Angeles Times, attacked the author in an op-ed titled, “No, anonymous Trump official, you’re not ‘part of the resistance.’ You’re a coward.” She accused the author of “enabling” the president:
Nobody who’s part of the real resistance should be celebrating this. If you work in this administration and carry out any part of Trump’s agenda, you are enabling him, not undermining him. If we have a president so incompetent that his most trusted advisors have to play peekaboo to preserve national security, then those people should be working to get him out of office, not just spare us from his cruelest impulses.
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If they really believe there’s a need to subvert the president to protect the country, they should be getting this person out of the White House. But they’re too cowardly and afraid of the possible implications. They hand-wave the notion thusly:
“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.”
How is it that utilizing the 25th Amendment of the Constitution would cause a crisis, but admitting to subverting a democratically elected leader wouldn’t?
David Frum, a Never Trump former George W. Bush aide, agreed in the Atlantic, calling the op-ed a “cowardly coup”:
If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.
[W]hat the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
Comments on the Times op-ed tended to agree that the author lacked the courage to act on his or her convictions.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.