The big picture: He should be paranoid. In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous Op-Ed from "a senior official in the Trump administration" trashing the president ("I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration"), two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths.
- "I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating — that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside," one senior official said. "A lot of us [were] wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows — maybe he does? — that there are dozens and dozens of us."
Why it matters: Several senior White House officials have described their roles to us as saving America and the world from this president.
- A good number of current White House officials have privately admitted to us they consider Trump unstable, and at times dangerously slow.
- But the really deep concern and contempt, from our experience, has been at the agencies — and particularly in the foreign policy arena.
For some time last year, Trump even carried with him a handwritten list of people suspected to be leakers undermining his agenda.