The White House is shrugging off publication of a book by an anonymous author claiming to be a senior administration official, reacting with a mix of weary indifference and lukewarm contempt.
The book, A Warning, goes on sale Tuesday after two weeks of lackluster reviews.
Although other books have prompted the White House to prepare for battle, this one arrives with officials focused on impeachment hearings and keen to present an air of normality.
Stephanie Grisham, the president’s press secretary, said: “Others can fret about ridiculous, cowardly accusations; President Trump remains focused on delivering results to the American people.”
She added that the White House now had a clearer idea of the identity of the author.
“Yes — a coward,” she said when asked.
The anonymous author first surfaced with an op-ed piece published last year by the New York Times. The writer suggested a cabal of officials had launched a resistance effort inside the White House to thwart “Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
But with publication of the book looming, officials said the approach of remaining anonymous undermined any effort at authority. And the absence of explosive new details — aside from well-known accounts of the president’s bad temper and short attention span — makes it easier to dismiss.
In contrast, Cliff Sims’s insider tale of working for Trump, Team of Vipers, created an air of excitement and dread inside the White House at the start of the year, according to a former staffer.
“Everyone was dying to have a look at it and see if their names were in it. This one doesn’t feel the same,” he said.
Ask aides this week about the anonymous book, and the response is largely indifference.
“Is that this week?” one said.
Such responses might be dismissed as an act of affected nonchalance were it not for a string of scathing reviews in publications that might usually be expected to talk up any warts-and-all biographies of the Trump administration.
A withering New York Times review highlighted how the unnamed author has flipped and flopped on how best to resist Trump’s wilder impulses and ridicules an insider whose insight appears little greater than an outsider’s.
“A Warning, Anonymous says, is intended for a ‘broad audience,’ though to judge by the parade of bland, methodical arguments (Anonymous loves to qualify criticisms with a lawyerly ‘in fairness’), the ideal reader would seem to be an undecided voter who has lived in a cave for the past three years, and is irresistibly moved by quotations from Teddy Roosevelt and solemn invocations of Cicero,” the Times wrote.
The Washington Post concludes the book adds little to the debate other than to repeat descriptions of a president uninterested in detail and who regards criticism as treason.
“However accurate and sobering such characterizations may be, they all belong in a folder labeled Stuff We Already Know. Unfortunately, much of A Warning reads like a longer version of the op-ed, purposely vague and avoiding big revelations in order to preserve the author’s anonymity.”
