The Atlantic

The Saddest Part of the Anonymous <em>New York Times</em> Op-Ed

The writer justifies continued service in the Trump administration by citing relatively trivial policy wins. Daniel Ellsberg, this is not.
Source: Evan Vucci / AP

Okay—let’s make sure we have this straight: The anonymous senior administration official who devastated Donald Trump in the op-ed pages of The New York Times this week believes that the president is amoral; “is not moored to any discernible first principles”; acts “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic”; is unstable and prone to “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions”; and has conspired with a bamboozled citizenry to allow “our discourse to be stripped of civility.”

So how does this would-be paladin justify his or her continued service in Trump’s government? Nominally, because as everyone

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