DISCLAIMER: The review that follows and the book that is its subject each include a fact-based timeline, political polemic, and inflammatory language, some or all of which may be highly offensive to certain individuals, especially those who identify with the MAGA movement or abjure critical thinking. If you or someone you care about fits that description, is highly sensitive, or is unable to handle views that contradict your political narrative, you are urged to stop reading now and put this review aside. Those who proceed further do so at their own risk, and this reviewer will hold himself blameless for any fits of rage, dangerous increases in blood pressure, or Rumpelstiltskin-like attempts to stomp the ground so hard that the reader sinks into a chasm, that may result from continuing beyond this point …
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader. It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall. The dilemma—which he does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.
That is the opening excerpt from an Op-Ed entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” published in the New York Times on September 5, 2018, along 
The Op-Ed was written on the eve of the mid-term elections, before the release of the Mueller report, the murder of Khashoggi, the shutdown of the Trump Foundation for what was described as “a shocking pattern of illegality,” the expulsion of most remaining adults-in-the-room including Mattis and Kelly and Rosenstein, the “perfect call” with Volodymyr Zelensky that led to impeachment—which was just one shocking by-product of an erratic foreign policy of appeasement to Putin, ongoing saber-rattling with the Ayatollah and kissy-face with Kim Jung-un, the granting of dispensation to Mohammed bin Salman, and the green-lighting of Erdoğan to take out our Kurdish allies in Syria, not to mention the continuing crisis at home of kids in cages, and the ousting of any civil servant who dared contradict the President with a fact-based narrative. And there was so very much more that it is truly a blur. In September 2019, Trump doctored a map with a Sharpie and flashed it on television to prove he was right all along about the path of Hurricane Dorian. In October 2019, the President of the United States actually expressed interest in constructing an electrified moat filled with alligators along the Mexican border and shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down! Who even remembers that now?
Shortly after the moat full of alligators rose to a brief crest in the 24 hour cable news cycle and then sank beneath the weight of the tide of whatever was next that no one can really recall anymore, while we collectively held our breaths for the next wave of … well, who knows what? … A Warning, by Anonymous—the same “senior Trump administration official” who was author of that NYT editorial—was published. A Warning set a record for preorders and made the bestseller list, and while the staggering revelations by a senior insider that it contains would have no doubt thrust any other administration into a tailspin so severe that it could never have recovered, this book—much like the misadventures it chronicles—is essentially as forgotten to an overwhelmed amnesiac public as the moat full of alligators. The notion that “nothing matters” has become such a cliché precisely because—as the subsequent impeachment acquittal underscored—when it comes to Trump, nothing truly does matter anymore. Or really ever has.
The thesis of A Warning—which picks up where the author’s editorial left off—is that 1) all hyperbole on left-leaning media aside, President Trump really is as he appears to the non-brainwashed observer: an unhinged, irrational, narcissistic, incompetent clown who left to his own devices would no doubt steer the clown car with all of us aboard right into the abyss; and 2) if not for the valiant efforts of the author and his or her furtive cohorts, working ceaselessly behind the scenes to curtail Trump’s most dangerous instincts, we would likely already be acquainted with said abyss. “Anonymous” claims that he/she is generally supportive of the administration’s conservative right-wing agenda, but fears what the President’s unbalanced behavior could bring. While Trump rambles on paranoiacally about the so-called imaginary “Deep State” plotting to undermine him, the author of A Warning refutes the notion of said “Deep State” while emphasizing what he/she terms the “Steady State,” an unidentified alliance at the top tier of “glorified government babysitters” who quietly strive to “keep the wheels from coming off the White House wagon.”
But apparently the axle nuts are getting looser every day, and those wheels are about to let go, as underscored in the very first chapter, aptly entitled “Collapse of the Steady State,” where the author admits that:
I was wrong about the “quiet resistance” inside the Trump Administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump in the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is. Americans should not take comfort in knowing whether there are so-called adults in the room. We are not bulwarks against the president and shouldn’t be counted upon to keep him in check. That is not our job. That is the job of the voters …
If the original editorial was an attempt to reassure us that while the President was often indeed as mindlessly dangerous as a runaway bull amok in the national china shop, there was yet a significant presence of others sane and rational to rein him in before too much of value was irreparably wrecked, A Warning goes much further, urging a broad coalition to defeat him in 2020, especially targeting those in the right lane who otherwise cheer the lower taxes, frantic deregulation, and the ascent of ultraconservative Supreme Court justices that have been a byproduct of Trumpism. But does such a cohort actually exist?
For Trump and a polarized America in 2020, there are essentially four audiences to play to: 1) Donald Trump represents an existential threat to our values of freedom and democracy in our sacred Republic; 2) Donald Trump is a savior for America sent by the almighty God to restore our sacrosanct traditional values and lock up anyone who would even think about having an abortion; 3) Donald Trump is an absolutely offensive buffoon—of course—but the economy has been supercharged so why don’t they just let him do his job?; and, 4) Donald Trump is the same as Joe Biden, and if Bernie Sanders was President we’d all have free college and healthcare and everything else and if you don’t agree you should just die. A Warning makes a compelling argument, but I don’t see it changing anyone’s mind. Either the Emperor is wearing those new clothes or he isn’t.
Each chapter of A Warning is headed by a quotation from a former president—Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Kennedy, Reagan, etc.—that speaks to an aspect of government or the character of its leadership. What then follows are accounts of Trump’s resistance to expertise, paranoid ramblings, irrational behavior, and “malignant management style” that clearly stand as counterpoints to these ideals. At one point, the author reveals that: “Behind closed doors his own top officials deride him as an “idiot” and a “moron” with the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.” [p63] This excerpt that describes briefings with the President is a bit longish but perhaps most illustrative:
Early on, briefers were told not to send lengthy documents. Trump wouldn’t read them. Nor should they bring summaries to the Oval Office. If they must bring paper, then PowerPoint was preferred because he is a visual learner. Okay, that’s fine, many thought to themselves, leaders like to absorb information in different ways. Then officials were told that PowerPoint decks needed to be slimmed down. The president couldn’t digest too many slides. He needed more images to keep his interest—and fewer words. Then they were told to cut back the overall message (on complicated issues such as military readiness or the federal budget) to just three main points. Eh, that was still too much … Forget the three points. Come in with one main point and repeat it—over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents—until he gets it. Just keep steering the subject back to it. One point. Just that one point. Because you cannot focus the commander-in-chief’s attention on more than one goddamned thing over the course of the meeting, okay? [p29-30]
This is just one of many persuasive arguments that the President is unfit for office, but again: whom is it likely to persuade?
A couple of things struck me about this book that have little to do with its message. First of all, it is not well-written. Not at all. It may be that it was deliberately dumbed-down to target a less educated audience, but I don’t think so. More likely, the author simply isn’t a very talented writer. A Warning has a conversational style, and my guess is that it was dictated and transcribed by someone who is not generally comfortable with a pen.
Second, the author attempts to use history to make his/her point—beyond quotes from presidents, there are also numerous references in the narrative that reach back to ancient Greece and Rome. But the effort is clumsy, at best, and at worst just completely off the mark. At one point, when tracing the origins of the GOP, the author identifies it with “states’ rights,” which while a core value of the modern Republican Party was a hundred fifty years ago closely associated with rival Democrats. [p95] (In fact, one could argue that today’s “Party of Lincoln” has little in common with Lincoln at all.) Elsewhere, there is an awkward tussle with fact-based history as the author struggles to mine democracy in ancient Greece for workable analogies with today’s politics. Athenian demagogue Cleon is cast as a cloak-wearing precursor to Trump “… who will sound familiar to readers … [as he] … inherited money from his father and leveraged it to launch a career in politics.” The famous episode from Thucydides that has Cleon calling for the slaughter of the Mytilenean rebels is posited as an alleged signpost to the decline and fall of Athenian democracy. The later massacre of the Melians is also referenced, as is the execution of Socrates, along with a wild claim that “the latter was an exclamation point on the death of Athenian democracy …” [p183-86] All this is not only completely out of context but downright silly, and—as any historian of ancient Greece would point out—the radical democracy of Athens actually thrived for decades after the death of Socrates in 399 BCE, and even persisted well beyond the subjugation of the polis by Phillip II in 338 BCE.
But that the author is both a bad writer and a lousy historian to my mind just adds to his/her authenticity, as a “senior Trump administration official.” After all, we know that the cabinet is comprised of second and third-rate individuals, and the quality—especially as we have made the shift to “acting” secretaries that don’t require Senate approval—has seen a pronounced downward slope. Of course, the author’s lack of talent hardly diminishes the tale that is told.
The reason A Warning lacks shock-value to some degree is because we have heard much or all of this before, from multiple sources, some more respected than others. While it might be easy to dismiss such schlocky work as Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, the much-celebrated expose of the administration that was frequently as long on bombshells as it was short on substantiation, it is far more difficult to ignore the chilling accounts from award-winning journalist Bob Woodward, whose 2018 book Fear: Trump in the White House identifies then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis as the source of the “fifth or sixth grader” quote. Woodward also reports then-Chief of Staff John Kelly describing the President as “unhinged”—exclaiming: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.” Far more worrisome than such anecdotes is Woodward’s revelation that then-Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn—alarmed that Trump was about to sign a document ending a key trade agreement with South Korea that also dove-tailed with a security arrangement that would alert us to North Korean nuclear adventurism—simply stole the document off the President’s desk! And the President never missed it …
Much of this material has been substantiated by insiders, and there is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest Trump is utterly incapable of serving as Chief Executive. But would anything convince his loyal acolytes of this? Apparently not, which is why A Warning both preached to the chorus and otherwise fell on deaf ears. In February 2020, fifty-two Republican Senators voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial—and you can bet that most or all of these “august” legislators know exactly what Donald Trump is really like behind closed doors.
As this review goes to press, we are in the midst of global pandemic that has hit the United States far harder than it should have, largely due to the ongoing incompetence of the President, who is not unsurprisingly the very worst person to be in charge during what is surely the greatest threat to the nation since Pearl Harbor, perhaps since Fort Sumter. We need a Lincoln or a FDR or a JFK at the helm, and what we have is Basil Fawlty … although even that is unfair: Basil would have recognized that he was in over his head and sought Polly’s help, who would have enlisted Manual’s assistance, and we would at least have a chance. Trump, being Trump, believes he has all the answers; and thousands more succumb to the virus as the days go by …
So, who is the author of A Warning? Who exactly is “Anonymous?” There has been some speculation, but if I had to assign authorship, I would put my money on Kellyanne Conway. One clue that narrows it down a bit is that the tone in the narrative hints at a female voice rather than a male one, although I could be mishearing that. More persuasive is the style, which sounds an awful lot like Kellyanne in conversation, albeit spouting utterances diametrically opposed to those outrageous defenses of the President she concocts for the media. Perhaps most compelling is the fact that Kellyanne has uncharacteristically outlasted most members of the administration, especially striking in light of the fact that her husband, attorney George Conway, is a loud and prominent critic of the President that has long called for his removal from office. That Kellyanne has managed to somehow keep her job despite this suggests that she has something on Trump that guarantees her tenure, and makes me think she more than anyone inside that circus tent wants us to hear this warning of why the ringmaster must be denied four more years …
UPDATE 10-28-20 I was wrong … it wasn’t Kellyanne Conway https://milestaylor.medium.com/a-statement-a13bc5173ee9
Link to: NYT Op-Ed: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”
Link to: Review of: Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward
I believe someone once said, “It’s the economy, Stupid.” The wealthy more secure than ever in their wealth are happy with DTrump. They don’t need to follow the news. They follow their financial statements. Thus Republicans in the Senate are hellbent on rescuing the rich, hell with the other 80% of the population. By including something for the top 20%, albeit most for the top 1%, Trump has role models of success in every community.