Rafia Zakaria is the author of "The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan" (Beacon 2015) and "Veil" (Bloomsbury 2017). She is a columnist for Dawn newspaper in Pakistan and The Baffler. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) "'Why do people stay?' a close friend asked me at the time. 'You all should quit. He's a mess.' 'That's why,' I responded. 'Because he's a mess.'"

Rafia Zakaria

This exchange between a friend and "Anonymous," the author of the notorious New York Times op-ed and now the latest edition in the burgeoning genre of Trump-lit, does not happen until nearly half the book is done. That's a pity, because it is the question that is likely to dominate the reader's attention throughout most of the book. Perhaps the timing of the exchange doesn't matter, because the author's response, of course, would still have been exactly the same.

That's the biggest problem with the "A Warning," written by Anonymous, an unnamed senior Trump administration official. There are no issues with new revelations (for the most part, there aren't any) or that the ministrations required to maintain anonymity render the volume sterile and lifeless (they do). The issue is instead that while the book takes us on a greatest hits tour of near or actual catastrophes in the Trump White House, the egregiousness of these events seems to have no impact on the author's evaluation of his or her complicity in them. The "Steady Staters," as the lot who have stuck around to support this growing debacle refer to themselves, do not sway but continue to stay.

"A Warning," then, is only superficially a book about President Donald Trump. The author assiduously enumerates the boss's faults, from the crude way he refers to women to his penchant for calling officials then putting them on speakerphone for the entertainment of other officials gathered around him, to the basic infographics that mesmerize but add little to what is already known about the President. They do, however, tell us a lot about the book's author and the group of officials that have decided that staying the course is in fact the noblest cause.

Readers might disagree with this premise and ask a deeper question about the ethics of propping up a man whom one knows to be corrupt. "He isn't a man of great character, or good character. He is a man of none," writes Anonymous at the end of chapter two. And yet when the members of the Steady Staters consider a mass exit, it is "deemed too risky "because it would "shake public confidence" and "destabilize an already teetering government."

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