Sarah Sanders calls for harassment of NY Times over ‘anonymous’ op-ed

The White House’s meltdown over a Trump administration official who wrote a scathing takedown of his boss for the New York Times’ op-ed page escalated on Thursday.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took the extraordinary step of publicly pushing the Times’ switchboard phone number on Twitter, urging Trump fans to bombard the paper with, undoubtedly, angry phone calls:

For those of you asking for the identity of the anonymous coward: pic.twitter.com/RpWYPHa6To

— Kayleigh McEnany 45 Archived (@PressSec45) September 6, 2018

The move came after Sanders denounced her unknown colleague on Wednesday as “a coward” who should “resign” after writing the Times piece.

Trump himself seemed to suggest the anonymous writer had committed “TREASON” by cataloging Trump’s endless and dangerous shortcomings for the newspaper.

In the piece, the Trump official wrote that there were “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” a constitutional process to remove the president from office.

The White House’s move on Thursday to incite anger at the Times, and to specifically urge rabid loyalist to contact the paper, comes three months after five staffers at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, were murdered when a gunman opened fire on the newsroom.

The shooting marked the deadliest day for U.S. journalism since 9/11. The “targeted attack” came after Trump has spent most of his presidency viciously attacking the free press and more recently labeling journalists as the “enemy of the people.”

Meanwhile, in the wake of the embarrassing Times op-ed revelation, several top Trump aides have sprinted forward in order to deny being the source of the Times op-ed.

“The essay prompted a hunt in the White House, with the President intent on knowing who wrote the words he suggested could be treasonous,” CNN reports.

For some Republicans, the content of the Times’ tell-all essay actually rings true. “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) conceded on Thursday.

The startling Times piece arrives the same week that Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump Inside the White House.”

In it, Woodward delivers an insider’s view and also concludes the West Wing is utterly dysfunctional. In the book, Trump advisers describe Trump as “unhinged,” a “moron,” an “idiot,” and a “fucking liar” with the intellectual capacity of a “fifth or sixth grader.”

Inside the White House, it’s hard to find Trump allies these days.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.