Playbook: “The Washington parlour game of guessing who wrote the op-ed is at an all-time high. Everyone around town is buzzing about who it might be. The question dominated cable news. The author will be revealed. Remember Primary Colors? And all the NYT can hope is that its ‘senior administration official’ is actually someone that the news pages would consider a ‘senior administration official.'”

“This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one… I understand this is the case and that’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the President to stay. I thank General Mattis whenever I see him.”

— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), quoted by CBS News, on the anonymous New York Times op-ed published yesterday.

“President Trump is not just seething about Bob Woodward. He’s deeply suspicious of much of the government he oversees — from the hordes of folks inside agencies, right up to some of the senior-most political appointees and even some handpicked aides inside his own White House,” officials tell Axios.

The big picture: He should be paranoid. In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous op-ed from ‘a senior official in the Trump administration’ trashing the president, two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths.”

Said one senior official: “I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating — that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside. A lot of us were wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect … I hope he knows — maybe he does? — that there are dozens and dozens of us.”

Playbook: “How is it sustainable for the president to operate in an environment in which he trusts nobody? We’re about to find out. And we’re about to find out during a critical period of legislating, with the backdrop of an election his party is somewhat likely to lose.”

“President Trump and his aides reacted with indignation Wednesday to an unsigned opinion column from a senior official blasting the president’s ‘amorality’ and launched a frantic hunt for the author, who claims to be part of a secret ‘resistance’ inside the government protecting the nation from its commander in chief,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump reacted to the column with ‘volcanic’ anger and was ‘absolutely livid’ over what he considered a treasonous act of disloyalty, and told confidants he suspects the official works on national security issues or in the Justice Department.”

“The column sent tremors through the West Wing and launched a frantic guessing game. Startled aides canceled meetings and huddled behind closed doors to strategize a response. Aides were analyzing language patterns to try to discern author’s identity, or at a minimum the part of the administration where the author works.”

David Graham: “It’s not just that many sources were willing to tell Woodward damaging stories about Trump: The most stunning examples are those where top aides reportedly thwarted his will. Even more stunning is an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times Wednesday afternoon written by a purported ‘senior official in the Trump administration.'”

“The op-ed is so bizarre that it is tempting to dismiss it as fantasy—akin to the obviously bogus Twitter accounts that flourished early in the administration claiming to be by saboteurs inside the White House… Yet what the anonymous official says lines up closely with the accounts in Woodward’s book, in which officials steal documents, act on their own, and simply disregard orders from the president.”

“If you believe that Trump does not have the judgment and temperament for office—not a difficult conclusion to draw—this is a win of a sort. Yet the actions described in the book and in the op-ed are extremely worrying, and amount to a soft coup against the president.”

President Trump denounced what he called a “gutless editorial” posted by the New York Times, “an essay written by an unnamed administration official claiming that advisers to the president were deliberately trying to thwart his ‘misguided impulses’ from the inside,” the New York Times reports.

Said Trump: “We have somebody in what I call the failing New York Times talking about he’s part of the resistance within the Trump administration. This is what we have to deal with.”

Washington Post: “The anonymous nature of the column is likely to intensify a persistent suspicion among Trump supporters — that a ‘deep state’ within the federal government is actively working against him and his agenda.”

For members: Who Wrote the Anonymous Op-Ed?

David Frum: “Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The 25th Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.”

“If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no ‘riskiness’ exemptions in the text of that oath.”

“Two people with direct knowledge of Trump’s comments tell the Daily Beast that they have heard the president mock Sessions—a frequent target of his cyber-bullying and degradation—as mentally deficient, personally annoying, and ‘retarded’ and a ‘retard.'”

“This corroborates a minor, though eyebrow-raising, detail featured in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, the release of which is currently causing intense heartburn in Trump’s West Wing.”

The New York Times runs an anonymous op-ed from a senior Trump official:

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.