(***Spoiler alert: if you haven't yet read the book or seen the film versions of Agatha Christie's Murder On the Orient Express, stop right here.)
I wouldn't be surprised if the internal White House coup to effectively neutralize the presidency of Donald Trump also extends to the editorial being a group effort. Mirroring the plot of the above-mentioned mystery classic, maybe they all wrote it. Each of them conspired to destroy a malevolent old man by contributing a few lines to the essay, thus thwarting the software technology designed to expose anonymous authors.
So the self-serving kleptocratic Trump administration, anxious to keep their boss physically in office the better to neutralize the rest of us into a state of penury and submission, now purports to be protecting us from the designated villain in this thriller of a set piece. Unlike the revenge killers in Agatha Christie's story, though, they themselves are not the victims of the bad guy, but his co-conspirators. And unlike the killers on the Orient Express, they're all stabbing Trump from the right instead of from both the right and the left. They are, in fact, co-opting the Democratic #Resistance, which is also attacking Trump from the right via charges of Russian collusion and its defense of the police/surveillance state.
The internal coup and its anonymous manifesto are another variation on the unaccountability theme so beloved of predatory capitalists everywhere. If all of them are guilty, then none of them can be blamed. Like the cowards they are, they hide themselves within their fortified institutions as they do their dirty work.
My guess is that the real brains behind both the coup and the op-ed, with its self-righteous, rather jingoistic tone, is Trump's chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly. The gratuitous simpering nod to the newly canonized John McCain is one clue firing off the synapses of billions of little gray cells in this real life version of the game of Clue. Another possibility is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who graduated from West Point and is also a couple or four heartbeats away from the presidency. Since the Times says it offered the author anonymity to protect his job, that should also eliminate Mike Pence from the list of suspects. Since Pence is an official elected directly by the American people, Trump does not have the power to fire him - although, theoretically Pence could be impeached in Congress and convicted in the Senate under a Trump-beholden majority.
Trump's own express of a train wreck is now being described by the entertainment-intensive corporate media as a veritable puddle of twisted molten metal. Since he is still physically alive and still inhabits the Oval Office, he is desperate to find out Whodunit, gathering all the suspects in his closed room to intimidate and persecute, but never to solve. He not only is sadly lacking in the Hercule Poirot little gray cells department, he even lacks a Hercule Poirot investigator or any more "fixers" to help him out.
As Poirot replied to Ratchett, the beady-eyed and universally loathed tycoon of a murder victim in the Christie story who offered him "big money" to expose the enemies who were plotting behind his back: "If you will forgive me for being personal, I do not like your face, M. Ratchett."
So running out of friends, perhaps the paranoid Trump could do the obverse of the Orient Express solution. If his administration lackeys won't rat each other out, maybe he'll fire everybody.
But that's a thriller for another day. Maybe then we can crib a different Agatha Christie classic and call it "And Then There Were None."
If only.
Trump knows he is unqualified for his job and that is why he gutlessly keeps his alleged enemies close as he merely tweets his displeasure into cyberspace.
So for now, anyway, these are the versions of America we're stuck in:
