As Fox News reports, the Justice Department is demanding information on the anonymous Trump administration official allegedly behind the September 5, 2018, New York Times oped headlined, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The same official is reportedly the author of A Warning, billed as “an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency from the anonymous senior official whose first words of warning about the president rocked the nation’s capital.”
The DOJ wants to know if the author has legal obligations, non-disclosure agreements and so forth, but the DOJ attempt may be unnecessary. Fox News doubts whether the official is still in the administration but it is possible the author boasts White House experience during the previous administration.
The New York Times publisher of the oped prequel, was the employer of the Stalinist Walter Duranty, who long before Adam Schiff wrote fake stories about Ukraine. More recently, the Times was also home to faker Jayson Blair, who perpetrated “frequent acts of journalistic fraud.” This same newspaper, the Dead Sea Scrolls of fake news, proclaimed red diaper baby David Axelrod “Obama’s narrator.”
In the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the official biography by Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow, Axelrod does not appear until page 820. After more than 1,000 pages, Garrow cites an unidentified reporter who explains “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true.” That fits the way Axelrod sees himself.
“I felt more comfortable, and proficient at, telling stories than I did creating the ads that were state-of-the-art in Washington,” Axelrod revealed in his 2015 Believer. “I knew Barack was an exceptional writer,” he writes, though the future president had no record of publication. True to form, Axelrod’s style is evident in Dreams from My Father, which David Garrow proclaimed a “historical novel,” and the author a “composite character.”
What animated The Audacity of Hope, Axelrod writes, “were stories written with the narrative skill of a gifted novelist. It occurred to me, in reading the manuscript, that Obama approached every encounter as a participant and an observer.” So in more ways than one, Axelrod duly shows up in that story. “Axe,” as the president called him, kept rather quiet after David Garrow proclaimed Dreams from My Father to be fictional. At that point, the narrator shifted into damage control.
In 2018, Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes came out with The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. Rhodes reported to David Axelrod, “a brilliant strategist who weighed in on every issue.” According to Rhodes, the president’s “first memoir, Dreams from My Father, is a kind of Rosetta Stone to Obama’s life and world view.” Rhodes claims he reread it “a dozen times” but never notes that official biographer David Garrow pronounced the book a work of fiction. Rhodes effectively airbrushes Rising Star out of existence.
Also in 2018, former First Lady Michelle Obama, like her husband never known as a writer, came out with Becoming. Halfway through this account readers meet David Axelrod, who would “lead the messaging and media for Barack.” True to form, Axelrod’s fingerprints are all over this account, which charges that questions about POTUS 44’s authenticity are “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks” and posed a danger to the family. This is a version of Axelrod’s charge that anyone less that worshipful of POTUS 44 must be a racist.
As Carol Feisenthal recalled in Chicago Magazine, “In 2009, Axelrod followed Obama to the White House where he was given an office near the ‘Oval’ and unusual access to the rookie president.” The narrator handled the messaging, signed off on everything, and has insider knowledge of how the White House works. With the “narrative skill of a gifted novelist,” the proficient storyteller is the ideal candidate for an anonymous hit job on President Trump, who spoiled POTUS 44’s plan to appoint his own successor and take out Trump. As FBI coup plotters Strzok and Page revealed, the president “wants to know everything we are doing.”
As David Garrow’s Rising Star reveals, the narrative Obama and David Axelrod built back in the 1990s is “not entirely true.” Like Dreams from My Father, A Warning may recount actual events and people but is best regarded as complete fiction.
“Axe” never uses a word when a paragraph will do, so look for the elephantine style, unctuous dialogue, and characters with one name only. Look also for what Axelrod and other POTUS 44 acolytes say about the account. Whatever Axelrod’s contribution, A Warning, will be entirely predictable, totally understandable, and completely without significance, with one exception.
A Warning can also be seen as an example of the left projecting onto others the very thing they are doing. The 2018 New York Times oped claimed that anyone who works with Trump “knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.” Readers may wonder what first principles were in play when POTUS 44 told the American people they could keep their health plan, called the Fort Hood terrorist mass murder “workplace violence,” and shipped billions in cash to Iran.
A Warning is due for release on November 19. Look for the movie version in the run-up to the 2020 election.
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