The first excerpts from the upcoming book, A Warning, purportedly written by a senior administration official, say that multiple senior administration officials at one point considered resigning en masse in a “midnight self-massacre” to show public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, according to The Washington Post.
The author, who caused an uproar last year with an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times claiming several officials in the Trump White House were concerned about the president’s fitness for office, describes Trump as cruel and inept, according to excerpts obtained by The Post.
The president is described as “a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.”
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The author describes Trump as making misogynistic and racist comments in the book, at one point allegedly suggesting that migrant women who enter the U.S. without their husbands are “useless.”
“They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something,” the book quotes Trump saying.
The book also describes Trump’s behind-the-scenes response to the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, where the author wrote that Trump remarked that the cost of oil would rise significantly if the U.S. were to “pick this fight” with Saudi Arabia.
“Do you know how stupid it would be to pick this fight?” Trump said. “Oil would go up to one hundred fifty dollars a barrel. Jesus. How [expletive] stupid would I be?”
The author also claims that Vice President Mike Pence would have supported invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office due to mental incapacity. The author said that White House officials did a tally of which Cabinet members would be willing to sign a letter to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Pence has denied this claim, and called it “appalling.”
“I never heard anything in my time as vice president about the 25th Amendment,” Pence told reporters. “And why would I?”
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham called the anonymous author a “coward” and the book “a work of fiction’ in an email to the Post.
“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” Grisham wrote in an email. “Real authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact checked—but this person is in hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer impossible. Reporters who choose to write about this farce should have the journalistic integrity to cover the book as what it is—a work of fiction.”
The 259-page book, which is set to be published on Nov. 19 by Twelve, does not describe many specific events in detail, which the author writes was intentional to protect his or her identity.
“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the author writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”
