Donald Trump doesn’t know!
The real story about tonight’s New York Times op-ed isn’t who wrote it, but the fact that it was written at all, and the fact that the things revealed in the article have been going on behind the scenes. The questions about the author’s identity are threatening to overshadow the most important revelations in the op-ed. But as the night goes on, the mystery could end up becoming more important – because Donald Trump doesn’t know who wrote it.
There have been so many plausible explanations as to the identity of the op-ed author, it’s become difficult to keep track. Large chunks of the internet think it was Mike Pence. There’s reason to believe it could be Jeff Sessions. Kellyanne Conway has been dragged into it. Lawrence O’Donnell just made a compelling argument on television that it could be Dan Coats. Some have floated the very believable notion that this was a group effort penned as one voice.
If you’re Donald Trump right now, where do you even start? Every pundit has a different theory about which of Trump’s top advisers just publicly confessed to having spent the past year and a half committing mutiny against him. Which of these pundits is he supposed to believe? Which of his own people is he supposed to trust right now? He has to be realizing that he can’t trust his gut either, because his gut wrongly told him to trust all of these people to begin with.
Donald Trump is about to rip his own White House apart, or perhaps simply rip apart what’s left of his own fractured inner psyche, trying to operate in an environment in which he knows he can trust no one. Trump would be better off if he did know. When you don’t know which of your people are leading a mutiny against you, there’s really no way to even approach it. The longer it takes Trump to figure it out, the more he’ll destroy himself in the process.
