When Joe Klein was identified as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, a bestselling 1996 satire of campaign life with the Clintons, he arrived at a press conference wearing a Groucho Marx disguise.
Though he did not counsel quite so lighthearted an unveiling, Klein said on Sunday he thought the author of A Warning, the book by a mystery senior Trump official which will go on sale next month, should not stay unnamed for long.
Last year, the official authored an earth-shaking New York Times column, entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration and detailing what he or she characterised as efforts to protect the country from its ungovernable governor.
Such efforts have been widely reported since.
Watergate reporter Bob Woodward’s book Fear, for example, begins with a scene of the chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, removing a document about a trade deal from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
“I stole it off his desk,” Cohn is quoted as saying. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.”
The military news site Task & Purpose, meanwhile, reported that in a book to be published on Tuesday, a former aide to James Mattis says Trump ordered his first defense secretary to “screw Amazon”, owned by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, out of a $10bn Pentagon contract.
“Relaying the story to us,” the site quoted the Hold the Line author Guy Snodgrass as writing, “Mattis said, ‘We’re not going to do that. This will be done by the book, both legally and ethically.”
Trump is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry centred on his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. His supporters would dearly love to know who is behind the Times column and the forthcoming book, which Axios revealed promises to contain “a great deal from Donald Trump directly”.
Introducing Klein on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, host Brian Stelter said a “publishing world source” had told him the instances of misconduct by Trump described in the book are “specific and shocking”.
Klein, 73, is a former editor and columnist for Rolling Stone, New York and Newsweek. He said his own book had not had such stratospheric expectations, but when it was published its air of mystery helped it “explode like a bomb”.
The anonymous nature of A Warning was helping ratchet up anticipation, he said, adding that “you also have the track record of the column a year ago, which I thought was a courageous act” by one of the people who formed “guardrails” against Trump’s wild behaviour.
“I think that the guardrails are off,” Klein said, “and now is the time for people of good faith to stand up, identify themselves and tell the story.”
Referring to testimony to House committees which continues behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, he said: “You’ve got … a parade of foreign service officers going in, identifying themselves, risking their careers and now that Trump is clearly way off the rails, it’s time for everybody to put their cards on the table.”
“There may be six smoking guns in there,” he said, adding: “Whoever this is has successfully remained anonymous for a year now, which is something I couldn’t do.”
Klein pointed to a Washington Post report which detailed attempts by Republicans to uncover the identity of the whistleblower whose complaint about Trump’s conduct regarding Ukraine lies at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
Unlike the author of A Warning, he said, “the whistleblower under law has the right to privacy … unless the anonymous author was the whistleblower, which would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s mindblowing,” Stelter said.
Klein also pointed out that the whistleblower’s life could be in danger. That might also apply to the anonymous Trump official.
Two decades ago, Klein was rumbled by Don Foster, an expert in literary forensics. Most observers expect the Trump official to be unmasked relatively quickly too, whether by forensic analytical software, by the kind of simple human error which revealed Harry Potter author JK Rowling to be the pseudonymous mystery writer Robert Galbraith, or in a coordinated public reveal.
The Washington punditocracy is awash with theories over who it might be. Prominent bets include Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor and ambassador to Russia; Cohn, a New York Democrat who did not issue an outright denial about Woodward’s reporting; or even Nikki Haley, formerly ambassador to the United Nations and widely seen as a future Republican leader.
A Warning is not out until 19 November, but in a development which will surely displease Trump, it is already the No1 bestseller on Amazon.
