Para ilustrar a resistência crítica vinda de dentro da
própria Administração o New York Times publica hoje, excepcionalmente, um
artigo de Opinião anónimo (o Times conhece a identidade do autor) de um Alto
Funcionário na Administração de Trump.
OVOODOCORVO
Opinion
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.
Sept. 5, 2018
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.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and
Twitter (@NYTopinion).
How Trump's White House is under siege from within
A Trump aide’s unprecedented New York Times op-ed came just
hours after Bob Woodward’s book laid bare the antipathies and resentments of
those who work for him
Lauren Gambino
@laurenegambino
Thu 6 Sep 2018 03.39 BST Last modified on Thu 6 Sep 2018
05.11 BST
Donald Trump is facing the fallout from an op-ed written by
an aide and a book by Bob Woodward.
An unprecedented op-ed in the New York Times and a
devastating book by the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward have
exposed Donald Trump as a modern-day emperor with no clothes.
Taken together, the essay, written by an anonymous Trump
administration official, and the book, Fear: Trump in the White House, describe
an administration in quiet revolt against its most powerful figure. A
“resistance” of officials within Trump’s inner sanctum stealthily plot to foil
the worst impulses of an “impetuous” and “amoral” president in an effort, they
say, to protect the country he was elected to lead.
“To be clear, ours is
not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left,” the “senior administration official”
wrote in the op-ed, titled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump
Administration and published by the newspaper on Wednesday. “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.”
In his book Fear, Woodward, who based the account on
hundreds of hours of interviews with officials and principals in the Trump
administration, paints a damning portrait of a White House in utter disarray
under a president who has “gone off the rails”. The White House chief of staff,
John Kelly, reportedly summarized the current state of affairs at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue as “Crazytown”.
Meanwhile, administration officials and staff are engaged in
“an administrative coup d’etat”, according to Woodward, with senior aides
conspiring to keep official documents out of Trump’s reach as a way to avert
economic or diplomatic crises. In one scene in the book, Gary Cohnplucks a letter
from Trump that would have formally withdrawn the US from an important trade
agreement with South Korea.
In the op-ed, the official characterizes Trump as
“impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” and so prone to making
impulsive and irrational decisions that members of his cabinet explored the
possibility of invoking the 25th amendment to remove him from office, though
they ultimately decided against it. The amendment is a complex constitutional
mechanism to allow for the replacement of a president who is “unable to
discharge the powers and duties of his office”.
The official also claimed the administration’s achievements
had included some “bright spots” such as “effective deregulation, historic tax
reform, a more robust military and more”. But, the official said, those
successes came “despite – not because of – the president’s leadership style”.
The depiction of Trump’s leadership described in the op-ed
and the book match what has been reported by news organizations and other
writers since he took office in January 2017.
“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,”
the official wrote.
The official added: “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 one-two punch has sent the White House into “total
meltdown”, according to Politico, as officials launch a full-scale hunt for the
culprit behind the New York Times op-ed.
Trump raged on Twitter, calling the essay “treason”. Trump
questioned whether the official was a “phony source” but demanded that if the
“GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National
Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
In an official statement, the White House also attacked the
opinion column and criticized its author.
“The individual behind this piece has chosen to deceive,
rather than support, the duly elected president of the United States,” the
White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said in a statement. “He is not
putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the
American people. This coward should do the right thing and resign.”
Trump has always preferred to construct his own reality.
“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what's happening,” he told
supporters earlier this year.
On Wednesday, as reality appeared to be closing in, Trump
instead bragged about his approval ratings during an event with sheriffs in the
East Room of the White House.
“The poll numbers are through the roof,” he told the
reporters in the room. “Our poll numbers are great – and guess what? Nobody’s
going to come even close to beating me in 2020.”
That most polls show more Americans disapprove than approve
of his performance was beside the point. The sheriffs were enjoying the show
and when the president finished, they burst into applause.
Trump demands New York Times reveal explosive op-ed author's
identity
President condemns ‘gutless’ source of piece revealing
opposition within administration and claims paper must hand writer over
Mark Oliver and agencies
Thu 6 Sep 2018 02.27 BST Last modified on Thu 6 Sep 2018
05.31 BST
Donald Trump said of
the New York Times: ‘They don’t like Donald Trump and I don’t like them.’
Donald Trump has called for the New York Times to reveal the
identity of a senior administration official who the paper says is the author
of a column revealing they are part of a “resistance” against the president’s
“worst inclinations”.
The president vented his fury at the essay, which the
newspaper said it had taken the rare step of running anonymously, saying the
writer’s “identity is known to us” and their “job would be jeopardized by its
disclosure”.
Its publication has prompted a frenzied search for the
author.
Trump called for the source to be revealed in tweets on
Wednesday evening, with one asking starkly: “TREASON?”
Then in a follow up tweet, he insisted: “If the GUTLESS
anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security
purposes, turn him/her over to government at once.” Later he tweeted:
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
I’m draining the
Swamp, and the Swamp is trying to fight back. Don’t worry, we will win!
5:22 AM - Sep 6, 2018
Earlier a defiant Trump, appearing at an unrelated event at
the White House, said of the New York Times: “They don't like Donald Trump and
I don't like them.”
The essay immediately triggered a guessing game as to the
author's identity on social media, in newsrooms and inside the White House,
where officials were blindsided by its publication. The article’s language was
being scrutinized for clues.
The writer, claiming to be part of the “resistance” to Trump
– but not from the left – said: “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 column went on: “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.”
Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent at CNN, reported
that the author of the piece had used an intermediary several days ago to make
contact with the New York Times op-ed editor Jim Dao.
Stelter said Dao had told him that there were only a
"very small number of people within the Times who know this person's
identity” and that a number of special precautions had been made to keep it
protected. Dao would not elaborate.
The op-ed pages of the newspaper are managed separately from
its news department.
Dao, Stelter reported, declined to comment on how senior the
official was or reveal further nuances of the person’s role. It was unclear if
the author worked in the White House or had direct contact with Trump.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, accused the
author of choosing to “deceive” the president by remaining in the
administration.
“He is not putting country first, but putting himself and
his ego ahead of the will of the American people,” she said. “The coward should
do the right thing and resign.”
Sanders also called on the New York Times to "issue an
apology" for publishing the piece, calling it a "pathetic, reckless,
and selfish op-ed".
White House officials did not immediately respond to a
request to elaborate on Trump's call for the writer to be turned over to the
government or the unsupported national security ground of his demand.
The furore over the op-ed comes after Trump had also hit out
at a highly critical book on his presidency by the respected investigative
journalist Bob Woodward. Trump called the book a “con of the public”.
Woodward, one of the journalists who helped uncover the
Watergate scandal, portrays the Trump White House as chaotic and dysfunctional
in his new book, Fear.
In one section, Woodward says that Trump ordered the defence
secretary, James Mattis, to kill the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad after a
chemical attack on civilians, but Mattis dismissed the order.
Speaking on Wednesday to Anderson Cooper on CNN, the former
secretary of state, John Kerry, asked about the Woodward book and the New York
Times op-ed, said there was a "genuine constitutional crisis" around
the presidency.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Trump doubles down on 'treason' accusation after New York
Times op-ed
At Montana rally, president hails Republican who assaulted
Guardian reporter as fighter ‘in more ways than one’
Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Elliott Woods in
Billings, Montana
@SabrinaSiddiqui
Fri 7 Sep 2018 03.53 BST Last modified on Fri 7 Sep 2018
08.20 BST
Trump said Greg Gianforte had ‘fought in more ways than one’
for Montana.
Donald Trump on Thursday accused the New York Times of
committing “treason” after the paper published an opinion piece by an anonymous
senior administration official who detailed a “quiet resistance” working to
rein in the president.
During a campaign appearance in Billings, Montana, Trump
also praised Greg Gianforte, the Republican congressman who physically attacked
the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs last year, as “a fighter and a winner”.
“He’s fought in more ways than one for your state,” the
president said of Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a charge of misdemeanor
assault after body-slamming Jacobs on the day before he was elected to the US
Congress.
Trump had arrived in the state to campaign on behalf of
Republican candidates amid an intensifying battle for control of Congress ahead
of the November midterm elections.
But as the president took the stage, the fallout lingered
from the anonymous account published Wednesday in the New York Times. In the
editorial, the unnamed administration official wrote of a coalition focused on
thwarting Trump’s “worst inclinations”.
Trump told a raucous crowd of supporters: “Nobody knows who
the hell he is, or she, but for the sake of our national security, the New York
Times should publish his name at once.
“Unelected, deep state operatives who defy the voters to
push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself.”
Earlier in the day, the White House aggressively pushed back
against the column as speculation mounted over the author’s identity. Sarah
Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted the phone number of the New
York Times opinion desk in a bid to amplify pressure on the paper to identify
the “anonymous coward”.
During an interview with Fox and Friends, conducted onstage
prior to Trump’s rally and set to air on Friday, the president called the
paper’s decision to publish the column “very unfair”.
“When somebody writes
and you can’t discredit because you have no idea who they are,” Trump said. “It
may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state
person that’s been there a long time.
“It’s a very unfair thing, but it’s very unfair to our
country and to the millions of people that voted really for us.”
Since the editorial was published, the highest-ranking
officials in Trump’s administration have come forth to publicly deny any
involvement. Those distancing themselves from the column have included the
vice-president, Mike Pence, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, along with
much of Trump’s cabinet. The first lady, Melania Trump, also condemned the
author and called on the individual to come forward.
“You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it
with your cowardly actions,” she wrote.
The editorial was published as the White House was
contending with yet another firestorm.
A book authored by the famed journalist Bob Woodward, poised
for release next week, chronicles the chaos and dysfunction within the Trump
administration. Excerpts released on Tuesday provided an unflattering portrait
of the president, who was described by aides in disparaging terms that included
being likened to a schoolchild.
The madness is pouring out of the White House now, for all
to see
Richard Wolffe
An anonymous New York Times op-ed by a senior Trump
administration official and an explosive new book reveal just how bad things are
around the US president
@richardwolffedc
Thu 6 Sep 2018 05.03 BST Last modified on Thu 6 Sep 2018
16.15 BST
‘There is a consistency to the awfulness of this week’s
gut-spilling revelations from the Trump White House.’
That scratching sound you can hear are the rats snatching
their bags – and what’s left of their reputation – before scampering off their
pirate president’s ship. It’s only slightly surprising the panic has set in
before they even reached the halfway point on their voyage towards his promised
treasure.
Perhaps it was the sight of the captain’s personal lawyer
admitting to several five-year felonies that got them worried. Or perhaps it
was the thought of a Democratic House firing subpoenas at them from the Cannon
office building.
Either way, the sad excuses on public display this week are
more self-incriminating than self-glorifying.
Let’s start with the bombshell anonymous op-ed in the New
York Times, where a senior administration official claims to be part of a
secret cabal trying to protect the nation – if not the world – from the worst
impulses of the sociopathic man-child purporting to be the commander-in-chief.
Tell us something we don’t know. Actually, first tell us how
long you’ve been experiencing these messiah delusions.
“We want the administration
to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer
and more prosperous,” Mr or Ms Anonymous wrote. “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.
No doubt there were functionaries around Mussolini who
believed the Italian trains had never been so punctual. But Il Duce was also –
how best to put it? – detrimental to the health of the republic.
If you really believe your boss is a threat to the
constitution which you’ve taken an oath to protect, perhaps you should consider
quitting or going public. As in: going on Capitol Hill to hold a press
conference to urge impeachment.
In this regard, and only in this regard, our anonymous
whistleblower has handed the crazy boss a degree of righteous indignation.
“If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist,” tweeted
the madman in the attic, “the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn
him/her over to government at once!”
Donald, we feel your pain, albeit briefly. Your internal
enemies are indeed gutless, and if you feel better putting that in ALL CAPS,
that’s fine. Let it out.
But that bit about turning people over to you for national
security reasons is kind of the point here. If you’ll allow us to summarize the
GUTLESS person’s arguments: you are fundamentally a threat to democracy and
national security yourself. You are indeed, as your lawyers have pointed out
repeatedly, your own worst witness.
This much we know from this week’s other bombshell in the
shape of Bob Woodward’s latest book. Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump
rats into screeching about all the ways they prevented World War Three, or a
massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers off his
desk.
Frankly this telenovela is too far-fetched for primetime.
Surely our very stable genius is faintly aware that his own officials have not
yet declared war on our allies or assassinated the Syrian dictator. Then again,
he does watch Fox News all day – or sometimes the Masters – so perhaps he isn’t
up to speed on current affairs.
All of this might be funny if it weren’t so serious. Gary
Cohn, the president’s first chief economic adviser, was one of those
paper-stealers trying to save the republic. Right up to the point where his
boss said all those nice things about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and Cohn
threatened to quit. He was reportedly shaken that his own daughter found a
swastika on the door of her college dorm room.
You know what’s as scary as a swastika on your daughter’s
door? Being forcibly separated from your infant children as you legally seek
asylum. This happened thousands of times, Mr Cohn, creating hundreds of orphans
because your co-workers can’t even trace the deported parents. You know how
that happens? Because your neo-Nazi sympathizing boss has hired actual white
supremacists to work on immigration policy.
There is a consistency to the awfulness of this week’s
gut-spilling revelations from the the Trump White House.
First, Donald Trump is a crazy loon who is endangering the
entire world. Don’t take my word for it. This is according to the Republican
political appointees who know him best and work with him every day: in other
words, not “the deep state” or any other of Sean Hannity’s imaginary freaks.
Mr or Ms GUTLESS describes Trump’s decisions as “half-baked,
ill-informed and occasionally reckless”, while chief of staff John Kelly says
Trump is “an idiot” living in a place called “Crazytown”. This revelation led
to the priceless statement from Kelly where he had to deny calling the
president an idiot.
Somewhere in Texas, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson
is swirling a glass of bourbon muttering that he lost his job for calling Trump
a moron.
Second, Trump’s staffers are enabling the very horrors they
claim to hate, while grandiosely pretending to be doing the opposite.
Mr or Ms GUTLESS says there were “early whispers within the
cabinet of invoking the 25th amendment” in what he imagines is a clear sign
they can distinguish reality from reality TV.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Trump cabinet: please know that
you will not be accepted into the next edition of Profiles in Courage for your
early whispers. If you truly believe the president is incapacitated, you should
perhaps consider raising your voice to at least conversational level, if you’re
not inclined to bellow from the mountaintops. Library rules are inoperative at
this point.
Given the weight of evidence, even the most diehard Trump
defenders are now conceding the obvious, by signing up to the GUTLESS gang’s
self-promotion. Brit Hume, a Fox News veteran, let the cat out of the bag when
he tweeted that it was a “good thing” they were restraining Trump “from his
most reckless impulses”.
This is how the pirate ship Trump eventually sinks to the
ocean’s floor. You can fool some of Fox News’s viewers all of the time, and you
can fool all of them some of the time.
But no fool wants to drown with the captain we all know is
plain crazy.
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
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