On September 5, a high-level Trump administration official published an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times. They claim to be a part of a “secret resistance” inside the Trump White House made up of officials who have “vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The writer describes Trump as “amoral,” “anti-democratic,” and a danger to the country. They call out partisanship that borders on tribalism and call for unity among Americans. However, they also expressly condone parts of the administration’s policies, including “historic tax reform,” which many criticized as having adversarial effects on the middle and working class.
Many people have speculated as to who the writer is. However, that is not the most important part of this story. The important part is that non-elected officials have decided that they are somehow qualified to decide what is just in terms of policy and behavior. The official writes that there are “adults in the room,” and that they and others are actively pushing back against the president’s worst policies—and yet they allowed hundreds of children to separated from their families at the border, and given Trump’s general demeanor and quagmire of offensive and inflammatory daily statements, the idea that people are somehow “reining him in” seems ludicrous.
What is most troublesome is that people who were not elected by the American people, who do not serve any constituents and do not have a strict constitutional obligation to the governed, have decided that they are fit to maintain justice. This is not to say that the basic idea behind their work and the publishing of this op-ed is not brave—their jobs are certainly in jeopardy—but to suggest that they are actively seeking to uphold justice is disingenuous. Whoever these officials are, they were appointed by Trump or his close affiliates, and they are complicit in so much of his policy and behavior that they are part of a machine, even if they claim to be better. To truly denounce his policies would be to step down and come forward as the “members of the secret resistance.” Hiding behind an anonymous byline and doing the bare minimum in terms of resisting a President who consistently attacks the press and the people, and is under investigation for alleged crimes regarding ties to adversarial foreign powers (not to mention numerous credible accusations of sexual assault), is not bravery. It is not “comforting” to the American people who are consistently harmed by Trump’s policies.
Condoning 90 percent of this administration’s policy and claiming to resist the worst is not proof of a moral compass. If the writer and their colleagues found family separation, referring to Nazi sympathizers as “very fine people,” pulling out of the Iran deal and Paris Climate Accords, and fraternizing with dictators such as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim JongUn of North Korea to be permissible, then the question remains: what was so bad that even Trump’s allies acted against him? What plans were so terrible that even those closest to him had to ensure they never saw the light of day? This “resistance” is not, as the author claims, the “work of a steady state” trying to avoid precipitating “a constitutional crisis.” Instead, it is a broken system upheld by complicit members of an administration that consistently undermines our democratic norms, traditions, and institutions