"A Warning" by Anonymous (azw3 epub mobi)


Book Review by The New York Times:
In ‘A Warning,’ Anonymous Author Makes Case Against Re-election

The same official who wrote an Opinion essay in 2018 argues in a new book that the president’s
contract shouldn’t be renewed.

By Jennifer Szalai

   Published Nov. 7, 2019, Updated Nov. 11, 2019

“Trust me”: It’s a tired cliché, a throwaway line, but when you first encounter it in “A Warning,”
the new book by “Anonymous,” who is identified here only as “a senior Trump administration
official,” it lands with a startling thud. Any revealing details have been explicitly and deliberately
withheld to protect this person’s identity. Who is this “me” that we’re supposed to trust?

It’s a question that the anonymous author — who wrote an Op-Ed for The Times last year about
resisting the president’s “more misguided impulses” — might have anticipated, given how much
of the book is devoted to the necessity of “character” and to quoting dead presidents by name.

Not to mention this individual’s own conspicuous failures of judgment thus far. You don’t even have
to take it from me; you can take it from Anonymous. “Many reasonable people voted for Trump
because they love their country, wanted to shake up the establishment, and felt that the alternative
was worse,” Anonymous writes. “I know you because I’ve felt the same way.” A mildly chastened
Anonymous now seems to recognize, somewhat belatedly, that President Trump’s peddling of
birtherism conspiracy theories and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals might have constituted
their own kind of warning — plausible evidence that Mr. Trump might not magically transform into the
dignified statesman Anonymous so desperately wanted him to be.

Anonymous even admits that the thesis of the Op-Ed in The Times — the essay that led directly to
the existence of this book, and was published just over a year ago — was “dead wrong” too.

Attempts by the “adults in the room” to impose some discipline on a frenzied (or nonexistent)
decision-making process in the White House were “just a wet Band-Aid that wouldn’t hold together
a gaping wound,” Anonymous writes. The members of the “Steady State” (the term “Deep State”
clearly stings) have done everything they can, to no avail. Anonymous is passing the baton to “voters
and their elected representatives” — only now the baton is a flaming stick of dynamite.

“A Warning,” then, is just that: a warning, for those who need it, that electing Mr. Trump to a second
term would be courting disaster. “The president has failed to rise to the occasion in fulfilling his duties,”
Anonymous intones. The book’s publisher and agents apparently referred to the manuscript as the
“December Project,” though the publication date was moved up to this month when the House
announced an impeachment inquiry.

“I realize that writing this while the president is still in office is an extraordinary step,” Anonymous says.
In light of three years’ worth of resignations, tell-all books, reports about emoluments and sworn
testimony about quid pro quos, this is a decidedly minimalist definition of “extraordinary.” How can a
book that has been denuded of anything too specific do anything more than pale against a formal
whistle-blower complaint?

It’s hard to look like a heroic truth teller by comparison, but Anonymous tries very hard, presenting
anonymity as not just convenient but an ultimately selfless act, designed to force everyone to pay
more attention to what this book says by deflecting attention away from the person who’s saying it.
“Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an opportunity to create a distraction,”
Anonymous writes, referring to Mr. Trump’s compulsion for attacking his critics.
“What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?”

Anonymous has seen disturbing things. Anonymous has heard disturbing things. You, the reader, will
already recognize most of what Anonymous has seen and heard as revealed in this book if you have
been paying any attention to the news. Did you know that the president isn’t much of a reader?
That he’s inordinately fond of autocrats? That “he stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated,
and has trouble synthesizing information”?

“A Warning,” Anonymous says, is intended for a “broad audience,” though to judge by the parade of
bland, methodical arguments (Anonymous loves to qualify criticisms with a lawyerly “in fairness”),
the ideal reader would seem to be an undecided voter who has lived in a cave for the past three years,
and is irresistibly moved by quotations from Teddy Roosevelt and solemn invocations of Cicero.

Plenty of people have preemptively criticized this book as an opportunistic grift, though Anonymous
has announced a plan to donate a portion of the royalties to “nonprofit organizations that focus on
government accountability,” including the White House Correspondents’ Association. Besides,
everything in the text of “A Warning” suggests a dyed-in-the-wool establishment Republican.
There’s the typical talk about American exceptionalism and national security. There’s the eternal
complaint that President Barack Obama was “out of touch with mainstream America.” There’s a wistful
elegy for “our budget-balancing daydreams.” Yes, Anonymous is happy about the conservative judicial
appointments, the deregulation, the tax cuts; what rankles is the “unbecoming” behavior, the “unseemly
antics.”

A big tell comes early on, when Anonymous reveals what “the last straw” was. It wasn’t Mr. Trump’s
response to the right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when a white supremacist killed a woman
and the president talked about “the violence on many sides.” It wasn’t even the administration’s separation
of migrant families at the border. These examples might have left Anonymous appalled, but the truly
unforgivable act was when Senator John McCain died last year and Mr. Trump tried to hoist the flag on
the White House above half-staff: “President Trump, in unprecedented fashion, was determined to use
his office to limit the nation’s recognition of John McCain’s legacy.”

Anonymous says that the president “deserves to be fired,” but that’s just the author indulging in a little
rhetorical flourish; what Anonymous really means is that the president’s contract shouldn’t be renewed.
Actively seeking to remove Mr. Trump from office, whether by invoking the 25th Amendment or pursuing
impeachment proceedings, would be “bad” because “we can scarcely afford further disunion.” Mr. Trump,
Anonymous says, should simply not be elected to a second term; only then can the country “undertake the
arduous task of moral repair” and “restore the soul of its political system.”

Anonymous declares that this “American spirit” was best exemplified by the bravery shown by the
passengers on United Flight 93, who rushed the cockpit on 9/11. We’ve seen Flight 93 used as a conservative
analogy before — by another anonymous author no less, writing under the pen name Publius Decius Mus,
who argued before the 2016 presidential election that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with
a semi-auto” and consequently that voting for Mr. Trump offered the only chance for the republic’s survival.

That the same violent tragedy has been deployed to argue one point and then, three years later, to argue
its utter opposite is, to put it charitably, bizarre. But then Anonymous, a self-described “student of history,”
doesn’t seem to register the discrepancy. Nor does Anonymous square the analogy with an episode
mentioned in the opening pages of “A Warning” — of senior officials contemplating a replay of the Nixon
administration’s so-called Saturday Night Massacre by resigning en masse. The idea of doing anything so
bold was floated within the first two years of the Trump administration, and then abandoned.

Toward the end of the book, an earlier quote from Mr. Trump kept coming back to me, unbidden:
“These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.”

   © 2019 The New York Times Company

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