I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
The
Times 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.
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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.
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