Tom Nichols

Opinion columnist

I don’t know who wrote the anonymous column to The New York Times, and neither do you. Neither do the people now lionizing the writer as a hero. Nor does President Donald Trump, whose rage, according to reports, has reached “volcanic” proportions. The only thing certain is that we have transitioned into a protracted political crisis that could last until 2020, and perhaps longer.

Yes, we’ve heard some of this before, from the tales of the White House refugees, Michael Wolff’s too-good-to-be-true book and Omarosa Manigault Newman’s recordings. But coming at the same time as a classic Bob Woodward exposé, in which names are named and the journalistic receipts will be produced, the anonymous column is the final piece of evidence that should tell even the most unshakable loyalist we are now in an unsustainable and dangerous situation — the very definition of a crisis.

We are in a crisis not least because of the stunning charge that Cabinet officials have actually considered invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for removal of the president due to some sort of incapacity. This, according to the anonymous writer, was dismissed as an option, and rightly so: If the president resists removal, two-thirds of Congress would have to agree, an impossibility in the current House and Senate.

Those closest to the president think he is unfit

If true, this means that some of the most senior men and women around Donald Trump think the president — the man in control of 2,000 nuclear weapons — should be disqualified from office on the grounds of mental instability.

The writer also drops a bombshell that isn’t a bombshell but rather a confirmation of something many observers already suspected: The president isn’t actually running the country. Instead, his appointees are making decisions — or preventing Trump from making decisions — and implementing policies while Trump goes to rallies or stares at his Twitter feed in the wee small hours. This is a state of affairs, particularly in national security and military affairs, so dangerous that it should take the breath away of any citizen who thinks about it even for a moment.

It is possible, however, that The Times has made a mistake. The writer could turn out to be someone too junior to claim to know what he or she knows, or just a younger person hoping to maintain some viability when the Trump administration is eventually run out of town. If that is the case, The Times has made a colossal error in judgment and Trump allies will gleefully hold to the line they’ve already started to use about how the piece is merely the griping of a disgruntled nobody.

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Even so, the author was right to stay out of the limelight at the outset. As conservative writer Charlie Sykes and Clinton campaign veteranJen Palmieri have noted, the writer is likely to be someone you’ve never heard of. And unless it really is a Cabinet-level official, we are all likely to be disappointed after this much anticipation.

The message about the dysfunctional, unconstitutional and perhaps even illegal actions people are taking to cope with Trump is a message we need to hear from people inside the administration, no matter who delivered it. And anonymity helped to make that case. If the author had appended his or her name to the piece, we’d now be in a full cycle of human-interest nonsense about where he went to high school, how she got interested in politics, and how his parents feel about it all. The rest would have been lost.

At this point, however, the message has been delivered, and it’s now time to come forward. There is nothing to be gained from waiting, and there is nothing heroic about continuing to enable a dysfunctional president.

Trump is being subverted by his own people

No matter who wrote the piece, our politics are different as of today, for two important reasons. First, we now know that Trump is not being subverted by the “Deep State” but by his own state, the very people he brought with him to the White House. He’s not the victim of conspiracies hatched by long-serving denizens of Washington but by people right next to him, who will snatch papers off his desk in the name of saving the country from ruin. None of this can go on much longer.

More important, perhaps, is that the column sent Trump into such a frenzy that the mask over his authoritarian impulses, which we’ve seen in short bursts for two years, has finally not only slipped but fallen away. We don’t know who wrote the piece, but we can be sure it was the president of the United States who demanded, as if we are little more than a crumbling Soviet republic or an insecure South American junta, that The Times must “turn him/her over to government at once!” in the holy and inviolable name of “National Security.”

How all this will end is unknowable. That is the nature of a crisis. But we can no longer even pretend any of this is normal.

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, is the author of "The Death of Expertise." The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.