Wednesday morning, The New York Times published an op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” written by an anonymous senior government official. “There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first,” he writes toward the end of the column, which describes a calculated campaign in which multiple concerned staffers in the president’s orbit have committed to “thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
Earlier, though, the author takes great pains to note that “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.” Should the president simply stay—or be kept—out of the way, it seems, the “adults in the room” will “do what’s right.”
“This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state,” the official writes. “It’s the work of the steady state.” The op-ed notes that the in-house “resistance” has thus far shied away from invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to recommend a president’s removal if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The writer cites fear of a constitutional crisis as a prohibiting factor, as though failing to formally address the president’s erratic behavior does not represent a profound disregard for that very document. The decisions described in the Times op-ed—and in the longtime Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear—appear to amount to a nefarious sort of compliance: As my colleague Adam Serwer wrote, those who “maintain some veneer of normalcy, rather than resigning and loudly proclaiming that the president is unfit, are not ‘resisters.’ They are enablers.”