Top Trump Aides Disavow Resistance Op-Ed

Top aides to Donald Trump scrambled on Thursday to deny authorship of an anonymous New York Times opinion column that slammed the U.S. president’s leadership style and described “a quiet resistance” to him within his own administration.

NYTimes Website Screen Shot

By early afternoon, eight senior officials had disavowed the piece, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis, while hammering the author for writing it and the Times for publishing it.

Trump seethed about the piece and presented it as one more jab from the ranks of disgruntled critics in denial about his presidential successes, even as Washington was consumed with speculation about who wrote it.

First Lady Melania Trump said in a statement on Twitter, “To the writer of the oped - you are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions.”

On Wednesday, visibly angry at a White House event, Trump called the Times article a “gutless editorial,” and in a later tweet he suggested it was treasonous.

The Times opinion section said the piece was written by a senior official in the administration and that it was taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous article because disclosing the author’s identity would jeopardize the person’s job.

As of  4pm ET Thursday, 24 hours after the op-ed was posted, the page was just over the 10 million page view mark, according to a Times spokeswoman. That makes the op-ed "one of the most read pieces of 2018" on the New York Times website.