Donald Trump Wrote Anonymous ‘New York Times’ Op-Ed Himself, Michael Moore Says: ‘He’s King Of The Misdirect’
On September 5, the New York Times published a bombshell op-ed piece penned by an anonymous “senior official in the (Donald) Trump administration,” in which the author portrayed Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.” The writer claimed that he or she was part of a “resistance” within the White House, opposing Trump’s worst “anti-democratic” impulses.
Since the article was published 10 days ago, Trump has reportedly been obsessed with figuring out who wrote the op-ed, even demanding that Attorney General Jeff Sessions open an investigation to root out the unnamed writer, as Inquisitr reported. Trump claimed that identifying the author was a matter of “national security.”
Numerous candidates have been proposed by a variety of media outlets as the op-ed author, including Vice President Mike Pence, who not only denied writing the piece but slammed it in a CBS News interview as “an assault on our democracy.”
Other candidates include Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whom right-wing pundit Ann Coulter fingered as the anonymous author according to USA Today; United States Ambassador to Russia John Hunstsman, whose “style” matches that of the anonymous author, according to Slate columnist William Saletan; and even, as Inquisitr reported, Trump’s own wife Melania, who “has more reason than anyone else to make public the president’s sleazy and loathsome behavior,” according to a Long Island Express columnist.
But according to filmmaker and media personality Michael Moore, whose new anti-Trump documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, will be released nationwide on September 21, Trump may have penned the op-ed himself. His public obsession with finding and even arresting the anonymous author is all a ruse, Moore suggested this week.
“If you want me to make a wild guess, Trump wrote it or one of his minions wrote it,” Moore said at the New York premiere of his new film on Thursday, according to Newsweek. “He’s the King of the Misdirect. If we’ve ever known anything by now, it’s that he does things to get people to turn away and the line that is most identifiable in terms of what he wants the public to believe, the line that says, ‘don’t worry, adults are in the room.’ The idea is to get him to get us to calm down and look away from what he’s really doing.”
If indeed Moore’s “wild guess” is correct and Trump did author the op-ed piece himself, it would not be the first time that Trump has assumed a false identity to promote his agenda in the press. According to a Washington Post investigation in 2016, when Trump was a frequent figure in New York’s tabloid papers during the 1980s, he would often call reporters identifying himself as his own “spokesman,” with the name “John Barron,” or sometimes “John Miller.”
