SHERLOCK HOLMES AND SAM SPADE GOT NOTHIN', CHILD, ON ME

“Come, Watson, come!  The game is afoot.”  Donald Trump could use someone like Sherlock Holmes to help him solve The Mystery of the Anonymous Op-Ed.  I like to think that Holmes would have chosen to work with Robert Mueller, but Sam Spade or Boston Blackie would have probably agreed to help Trump identify the mystery author – if the money was right.  Sadly, none of the fictional detectives in the 1957 Coasters hit, “Searchin’” are available at the moment, but hundreds of contemporary sleuths, professional and amateur alike, are on the case. 

I don’t know who Anonymous is, but I thought it would be fun to do some speculating of my own.  Look for motive and opportunity, I told myself.  Who had the motive and the opportunity to write the “resistance from within” article? 

Alas, just about every White House staffer had the opportunity, so that doesn’t narrow the list of suspects significantly.  Adding motive to the search filter doesn’t help much either, since I can think of several possible motives for writing the article.  Maybe the motive was patriotism, as Mr. Anonymous wants us to believe.  Or maybe Anonymous intends to leverage this article into a lucrative book deal and speaking tour.  Perhaps it’s someone who is getting revenge for being passed over for a promotion, or being humiliated in a staff meeting.  Maybe it’s the opening move in a longer game.  I have no insights into any of those angles, so I dropped that line of inquiry.

Washington insiders, though, were quick to develop lists of likely suspects.  As best I can tell, all of those named have issued vigorous denials. Of course they would, wouldn’t they?  One theory is that the author of the angriest denial probably wrote the article.  The angriest denunciation I’ve seen came from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but angry denunciations are her stock in trade, so that probably doesn’t mean anything.   

When he’s not demanding that the Times release the name of the author, Donald Trump has claimed that the article is a fake.  He says that about everything, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  Nevertheless, for the sake of the argument, I’ll assume that the New York Times is being honest with its readers, and that the article in question really was written by a senior White House staffer.  If so, then a close reading of the text might provide clues about the identity of its author.

Take the word “lodestar,” for instance.  It’s an uncommon term, but it occasionally pops up in Mike Pence speeches.  The BBC, among others, have concluded on the basis of “lodestar” that Pence was Anonymous. 

But the rest of the article seems to suggest otherwise.  Anonymous seems most interested in foreign affairs, including trade policy.  The article lists “effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military” as specific examples of Trump’s successes.  Those examples are interesting for what they DON’T include.  The dogs that didn’t bark may be as important as the ones that did.  You have to wonder why the article didn’t mention border security or Neil Gorsuch. 

The failure to mention Gorsuch, in particular, seems significant, since Trump’s judicial appointments constitute the main Republican excuse for their failure to hold the madman in the White House accountable.  Surely Pence would have included Gorsuch on a list of Trump’s successes.  Similarly, when it comes to foreign relations, the only thing Pence seems passionate about is Trump’s unwavering support for Netanyahu’s Israel.  Probably something to do with End Times and the Rapture.  But there was nothing in the article about moving the embassy to Jerusalem.  Apart from “lodestar,” I don’t see much of Mike Pence in the Times article.

I lean towards the likelihood that Anonymous inserted “lodestar” into the article to cast suspicion on Pence, or just to mess with him.  That’s the kind of thing a good writer would do – isolate the verbal tics of other potential suspects and insert them into your article to throw investigators off the scent.

Donald Trump himself has opined that Anonymous – or as he said in Billings last week, “Anommus” and “Anomanus” – was probably a woman, and someone with a foreign policy portfolio.  That begins to sound like Nikki Haley, currently Ambassador to the United Nations, and coincidentally someone #NeverTrumpers tout as a potential challenger for Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.  Haley, of course, has denied being Anonymous in no uncertain terms.

No matter who Anonymous is, and no matter why they wrote the Times article, they’re headed down a dangerous road – the one that’s paved with good intentions.

Jeet Heer (staff writer for The New Republic), in a series of tweets on Saturday, wrote about two well-intentioned Germans who tried the “resistance from within” approach with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.  Spoiler alert:  it didn’t end well. 

This is a lightly edited transcript of Heer’s tweets.

“The novelist Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) & the political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) were near contemporaries & corresponded from 1930 until Schmitt's death. Both their lives were, of course, inseparable from the nightmare of German history.  Jünger was a great German military hero in the First World War, awarded the highest Prussian medal, a position that was solidified by his bestselling 1920 novel In the Storm of Steel, which answered pacifism by celebrating the cold sheen of mechanized war.  For Jünger, there was nothing more beautiful than Freikorps solidarity, which naturally attracted him in the Weimar period to far-right paramilitary challengers of liberal democracy, including, briefly, the Nazi Party.”

“Schmitt, a Machiavellian figure in several senses, had a different profile in the 1920s: He was not a Nazi but a conservative trying to figure out how to protect Weimar from extremism. You could say he was ‘Never Hitler.’  But like the German conservatives he counselled (notably von Papen), Schmitt's desire to preserve order led him to quickly shift from anti-Nazism to trying to trying to make Nazism work. He became the chief legal theorist of the Third Reich.”

“Once Hitler was in power, the two friends had reversed their politics of the 1920s: Junger, although not a critic of the regime, kept his distance, while Schmitt (lavished with power & position) defended the Night of the Long Knives.  Junger, smartly, told Schmitt to quit & leave Germany. Schmitt didn't and in any case quickly lost political power but not before forever tarnishing his own name. By the late 1930s, both were in a kind of limbo, an internal exile.

“The two men continued to correspond in the 1930s & 1940s, but (for obvious reasons) couldn't discuss their politics directly. So instead they relied on allegory (which Junger also did for his 1939 covertly anti-Nazi novel On the Marble Cliffs).  So instead of talking about Hitler directly, Junger & Schmitt wrote to each other about Hieronymus Bosch, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville & Malraux….”

“Schmitt kept returning to Melville's novella ‘Benito Cereno’ -- about a slave rebellion. The title character is a Spanish captain who seems to be the head of his ship but in fact is a prisoner of mutinous slaves who really direct the action.  I'll leave aside the grossness of equating revolting slaves to Nazis for another day, but it is very tied to how order-loving German conservatives saw the 1930s: Nazis were an insurgency from below which elites failed to quell.”

“The subtext of Schmitt's letters is clear: I am Benito Cereno -- when it looks like I was collaborating with the regime I was actually a prisoner with no agency.  When I read the anonymous Times op-ed, it called to mind many of the dilemmas faced by Junger & Schmitt, about conservative elites trying to tame racist demagogues, about the need for secret communication, about how quickly the adult in the room can become a prisoner.”