Here’s how we know Donald Trump isn’t secretly behind the 25th Amendment op-ed

| 10:15 pm EDT September 5, 2018
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The trouble with an anonymous op-ed like the one published tonight in the New York Times is that it requires examining every possible scenario when it comes to the author’s identity. We’ve already gone through an exhaustive list of names, and suffice it to say that some people in the Donald Trump administration are far more likely possibilities than others. We’re also seeing another premise widely floated: Trump was secretly behind this, as a way of firing up his base and having an excuse to start firing everyone.

This notion, that Donald Trump and his remaining loyal people wrote this op-ed as a false flag, is being floated by a number of political pundits whom I respect. But the theory has a fatal flaw they’re overlooking. The New York Times knows who the author is. This op-ed isn’t something that showed up, unsigned, in the mailbox. This is the most important and influential op-ed of the century, and there’s no way the Times would run it without having thoroughly vetted it first.

That means not only obtaining the op-ed first hand from the author, but also poking around to make sure the author really meant what was written, and that this wasn’t a plot by Trump and an underling to put a phony op-ed out there. The NY Times isn’t perfect, and I’ve previously pointed out certain behind-the-scenes editorial practices they’ve invoked that I don’t consider legitimate, but this isn’t the kind of thing they’d take a flyer on.

For the New York Times higher-ups to get snookered on this by Donald Trump, they’d have to be complete idiots, and they’re not idiots. But if you don’t want to simply trust them, consider this: just yesterday we learned from Bob Woodward’s book that Trump is every bit as much the confused and flustered, if certainly derangedly devious, simpleton that we always suspected he was. Now he’s pulling off some genius plot to trick the NY Times into tricking us into believing that he has a turncoat in his ranks? Come on.