Anonymous Author of A Warning Takes to Reddit: ‘Trump Will Hear from Me, In My Own Name’ Before 2020 Election

An individual claiming to be the “Anonymous” author of Trump White House tell-all A Warning participated in the ‘AMA’ subreddit on Tuesday night.

In a clear attempt to get more media attention for a book that has failed to make a big splash since early details were leaked, the individual took questions in the “Ask Me Anything” format. While Mediaite has not confirmed the identity of the individual, the publisher of the book assured Reddit the participant was Anonymous.

For the uninitiated, the AMA format is simple: Reddit users submit questions on a message board format, to which the AMA subject answers. The individual involved in this one notably claimed that he was “not afraid to use my own name” to express concern about President Donald Trump. But, he or she also compared his or her secret identity to the “Founding Fathers” who “also disguised their names under pseudonyms.”

The author also notably proclaimed that “Trump will hear from me, in my own name, before the 2020 election.”

He or she opened with the following statement:

Good evening. Thank you for taking the time to join tonight. Not everyone will agree with my rationale, but anonymity has a long tradition in American politics, as far back as the birth of our Republic. When debating whether or not to ratify the new Constitution, for instance, the Founding Fathers wrote public essays about the controversial subject and disguised their names under pseudonyms. They hid their identities, not because they were scared to debate the issue openly, but because they wanted the public to focus on the message and not the messenger. They didn’t want their personal involvement to be a distraction. I’m not Alexander Hamilton or James Madison by any stretch, but I don’t believe they were cowards for using anonymity as a tool to refocus the debate. Trump thrives on distractions, and anonymity is a way to deprive him of his favorite weapon of mass distraction–personal attacks–and force the discussion to center on the substance, his character.

We’ve seen this on full display in the past few weeks, as the President has mercilessly attacked honorable public servants, from an anonymous whistleblower to aides on his own National Security Council. He can’t win on ideas, just on mud slinging and personal attacks. So he’s trying to use the long arm of government to unmask and undermine his critics.

What follows is a collection of questions and answers from the AMA:

“What did he or she leave out of the book?”

For starters, my original argument has been thoroughly debunked. In the New York Times op-ed, I suggested that the “Steady State” of top officials in the Administration could ameliorate Donald Trump’s lapses in judgment. I was dead wrong. No one can thwart his attraction to wrongdoing. Americans cannot and should not rely on a group of unelected bureaucrats to maintain stability. Their confidence in the Executive Branch should be measured primarily by their faith in the President himself, not be the people around him, even if those people are able to dissuade him sometimes from making poor decisions.

That said, anyone should be able to see the chaos has worsened as the guardrails have come off. The President has little handle on the day-to-day operations of the federal government and is trying to run our Administration with a skeleton crew. He is hurtling between different controversies and ignoring important matters of state, abusing his power with some regularity, undercutting vital democratic institutions daily, and debasing the national dialogue tweet-by-tweet. We can expect this and much, much more if he is reelected. The last guardrails are coming off, and if reelected he will feel emboldened to follow those dangerous impulses to unknowable and alarming ends.

There is a great deal that was left out of the book, out of necessity. But there is more to come, in due course.

“Hello! This question is by no means an attempt to pressure you to do so, but do you think that you’ll ever unveil your identity in the future?”

As far as anonymity is concerned, I will not keep my identity shrouded in secrecy forever. I am not afraid to use my own name to express concern about the current occupant of the Oval Office. Donald Trump has not heard the last of me. There is more to come. Other people who are currently serving, and who have left, are also considering adding their voices before votes are cast in 2020. We talk about this with some regularity. In the meantime, Trump must answer to the American people for his own conduct instead of redirecting their attention.

“Will you consider making your identity public and do everything you can before the election to prevent another victory for Trump?”

The only credible way to stop Trump is at the ballot box–and by a convincing margin. He has to be defeated badly enough that Republicans will recognize they cannot support Trump’s claim of voter suppression, or tampering, or fraud. He will never willingly acknowledge defeat and will fuel conspiracy theories for years to come. That will be dangerous for the country, so we’ve got to deprive him of those arguments with decisive electoral action.

“Do you believe Trump will be successfully impeached? Will this lead to civil war?”

There is no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump demanded a quid pro quo from Ukraine in order to disrupt the 2020 election. Everyone in the White House knows this, including the President himself. Now the question is whether it rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” I personally think that it now does. To be clear, I I am not cheering on the President’s impeachment, and at the outset of this process I believed firmly in reserving judgment until the facts were on the table. Impeachment is a sobering, last-resort process for holding the commander in chief accountable, not something to be undertaken because we think the President’s tweets are vile and his rhetoric is ugly. We politicize this at our own peril. If Congress goes about it the wrong way, impeachment will further divide our nation.

“Why do you have so little integrity to come out publicly and speak?”

Trump will hear from me, in my own name, before the 2020 election.

Read the entire AMA here.