Donald Trump on the Orient Express

An anonymous senior official of the Trump administration has written an op ed piece published by The New York Times that depicts the Trump White House as a looney bin for an amoral, impulsive, unpredictable and seemingly crazy 70-year old child who somehow managed to get himself elected President.  The asylum is run by a staff of adults (a/k/a the President's Cabinet), a number of whom ignore the directives of the child President whenever he issues orders that are dumb, dangerous or incoherent.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage.

By all indications, President Trump is beside himself trying to figure out who the author is.  A number of Cabinet-level officials have issued statements apparently intended to deny that they were the author.  https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/nyt-trump-op-ed-statements-denials/.  Their statements make interesting reading, as the explicitness of the denials seems to vary somewhat among them.

The anonymous author says that a number of officials in the Trump administration (referred to as the "Resistance") are working to thwart the President's craziness.  Even if only one of them wrote the op ed piece, all who are in the Resistance are authors in spirit.

In Agatha Christy's gem of a novel, Murder on the Orient Express, a man is found murdered on a train.  Belgian private detective Hercule Poirot investigates, and discovers that the victim was a criminal who had murdered a young girl but avoided punishment due to a technicality.  Poirot also learns everyone on the train is connected to the young girl who was killed and has a reason to kill the man because of his murderous past.  Poirot hypothesizes that either a stranger came on the train and killed the man, or all the other passengers on the train had a role in the man's death.  One of the passengers admits to the second theory, but at the end of the book, the police are presented with the first theory.  Justice is done, albeit extra-judicially.

If President Trump wants to know who wrote the anonymous op ed piece, he should give Murder on the Orient Express a quick read.  In the final analysis, it doesn't matter who put pen to paper.  The authors are hiding in plain sight.  And it he gets rid of them, new authors will replace them.