On Wednesday morning, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, walked out to address the cameras stationed in front of the West Wing and offered one of the week’s most unintentionally revealing comments. The first reports were out about the contents of Bob Woodward’s damning new account of the Trump Administration, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” and she was trying, not all that successfully, to downplay and deny the book’s sorry chronicle of internal chaos, dissension, and dismay within the White House over the President’s behavior. “I haven’t read a lot of his books,” she said, of Woodward, before going on to dismiss his latest as fiction.

Trump is the eighth President of the United States to have been subjected to the Woodward treatment, and, had Sanders read his previous works, she would have known exactly what to expect: a devastating reported account of the Trump Presidency that will be consulted as a first draft of the grim history it portrays long after the best-sellers by Michael Wolff and Omarosa Manigault Newman have been forgotten. Merely dismissing it as fiction was never going to work. The book begins with what Woodward calls “an administrative coup d’etat”—Trump’s former chief economic adviser deciding to steal key papers off the President’s Oval Office desk in order to stop him from pulling out of a South Korean free-trade deal as tensions escalated with North Korea last summer. The book ends with the President’s lawyer John Dowd quitting his legal team, concluding that he could no longer represent someone he believed to be “a fucking liar.”

As Sanders spoke to reporters on Wednesday, her White House colleagues told journalists that they had only just managed to obtain a copy of the book, which does not go on sale to the public until next week. Up until then, they were left with the excerpts in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN, which mostly emphasized, as Dwight Garner put it, in the Times, that “if this book has a single point to drive home, it is that the president of the United States is a congenital liar.” Trump’s lies, of course, have been thoroughly covered territory throughout his Presidency, especially because so many of them occur in public. Amazingly, it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful.

Reading through a copy of the book obtained by The New Yorker, however, I was struck by a different theme: what Woodward has written is not just the story of a deeply flawed President but also, finally, an account of what those surrounding him have chosen to do about it. Throughout much of Trump’s first year in office, the shorthand had it that, while Trump was an inexperienced, and possibly even dangerous, newcomer to politics, he could be managed by the grownups he had invited into his government. Many of those grownups are now gone, fired by Trump or pushed out by scandal, and for months they have been telling people how bad it was, or how much they did to stop the President, or how much worse it could have been. Here, then, are some of the details of what they claim to have done to control Trump: Gary Cohn, who was the economic adviser until he resigned, early this year, swiped that order to withdraw from a free-trade agreement with South Korea, and another one to unilaterally withdraw from NAFTA. H. R. McMaster, the soon-to-be-fired national-security adviser, pondered quitting after the President ranted against U.S. allies and threatened to pull troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, but he remained in the job and convinced Trump, at least temporarily, not to go through with it. James Mattis, the generally unflappable Defense Secretary, told the President, “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III here,” during a contentious meeting that exasperated him so much, according to Woodward, that he later complained Trump behaved like a “fifth- or sixth-grader.” Another session in the Pentagon with the national-security team and Trump went so famously badly that, afterward, the Secretary of State at the time, Rex Tillerson, called Trump a “fucking moron,” a detail that Woodward confirms here for posterity.

This is hardly a flattering picture of what the internal pushback to Trump looks like. Many of Woodward’s sources come across as caricatures of Washington power brokers, scheming against one another as they jockey for Trump’s favor, shamelessly flattering the President, fuming about insults and threatening to quit but never actually doing so. I was about halfway through the book on Wednesday afternoon when the news cycle interrupted my reading: an anonymous Op-Ed by a “senior official in the Trump administration” had just been published by the Times, praising the “unsung heroes” inside the White House who have secretly been members of the same clandestine “resistance” chronicled in the Woodward book. “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era,” Anonymous wrote, “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.”

It was as if one of Woodward’s sources had chosen to publish a real-time epilogue in the pages of the Times. Reading the Op-Ed, I immediately thought of an amazing passage in the book, which quoted a summary of a national-security meeting written by a White House official (and which never even made it into the news accounts about the book). It said, “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”

Both the Op-Ed and the book convey the laments of conservatives who, in many respects, are fine with the Trump agenda but not with the man. That is, for now, what passes for the Republican wing of the resistance. So far, it is mostly underground, or perhaps still largely nonexistent; we don’t really know. The Republicans who control Capitol Hill have not joined, or even made token moves toward addressing these significant concerns raised by members of their own party. Instead, the silence from the congressional G.O.P., awaiting its fate in the November midterm elections and still wary of crossing the President who remains popular with the Republican base, has been deafening.

Meanwhile, the anonymous article and the nameless accounts in Woodward’s book have already infuriated those who have publicly struggled against Trump. For instance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former Bush Administration speechwriter, called the Op-Ed “a cowardly coup from within the administration” and said it “threatens to inflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.” Such objections to the nascent Republican resistance are understandable; this is not the principled public combat of a democratic system as envisaged by the Founders. It is secretive and uncomfortable, the stuff of office backstabbing and private betrayals. It is not enough for those who have staked out public opposition to Trump, and it likely never will be. It is about ego and vanity as much as patriotism and principle. Most of all, it is a reminder of the terrible dilemma that Trump has posed for Republicans since the moment he announced his campaign for President, and will pose as long as he is in office.

A few minutes after the Post published the first story about the Woodward book, I met with a foreign-policy expert who is well connected in the Trump national-security world. The news seemed very much consistent with what both of us had been hearing since the beginning of the Administration. His friends who have been on the inside, he told me, have invariably told him stories like those now turning up in the news: “As bad as you think it is, it’s actually worse.” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, who is one of Trump’s most open critics on Capitol Hill, made a similar point to an interviewer on Thursday. “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week,” Sasse said. “So it’s really troubling, and yet, in a way, not surprising.”