Since loyalty to one’s president is also a prerequisite for the job, it stands to reason that those who consider it an honor and a privilege to serve in the presidential headquarters in any capacity would refrain from publishing mendacious reports about the holder of the highest office in the land.
All of which makes it even more astonishing that on Wednesday, January 25th, a Twitter account was briefly active from inside the White House before being shut down.
The tweeter, who called himself @WhiteHouseLeak, said he was a mid-level staffer in the West Wing of the White House and used the account to communicate less than flattering descriptions of Trump’s first few days in office before the tweets disappeared and the account was disabled.
The anonymous tweeter, who also identified himself as a loyal Republican, described in 37 tweets of no more than 140 characters the chaotic atmosphere of the White House, a demoralized staff, and an unfocused and irrational President incapable of processing information.
In reality, the information being divulged by the anonymous tweeter about the freshly anointed POTUS had already been shared by someone intimately aware of Trump’s character during his presidential campaign and should have come as no surprise to anyone.
In July of 2016, Jane Mayer’s interview with Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump’s ghostwriter for his 1987 memoir, The Art of the Deal, was published in The New Yorker sparking the very reaction from Trump that Schwartz was trying to warn American voters to avoid.
Knowing Trump’s propensity to have knee jerk reactions to criticism that could very well come back to bite him, Schwartz nevertheless felt a moral obligation to tell the American public about his concerns that Trump was not fit to serve in a presidential capacity.
A subsequent article by Mayer said that Schwartz’s main worry was that “Trump, who is famously litigious, would threaten to take legal action against him” and that is exactly what Trump tried to do.
“I fully expected him to attack me, because that is what he does, so I can’t say I am surprised,” Schwartz told Mayer at the time. “But I’m much more worried about his becoming president than I am about anything he might try to do to me.”
No more than a few hours after Schwartz appeared on “Good Morning America” to voice his concerns about Trump’s “impulsive and self-centered” character, Jason D. Greenblatt, general counsel and vice-president of the Trump Organization, sent a threatening cease-and-desist letter to Schwartz who in turn refused to comply.
In spite of numerous warnings about the volatility of Trump’s character, American voters who had grown tired of career politicians and “politics as usual,” went to the polls in November and elected Trump to be the 45th President of the United States of America.
And now, less than a week after the volatile billionaire businessman placed his hand on two bibles and took the presidential oath to “faithfully execute the office of President of the United States” to the best of his ability, a staff member was tweeting that the White House was in chaos, the staff was disillusioned and the President was irrational, unable to focus and incapable of processing information.
In sharing with Allan Holmes of Fox News last July what he had learned about Trump’s character during many hours spent gathering information for The Art of the Deal, Schwartz had also compared him to “a 9-year old with ADHD” saying that “Trump does not have a deep wealth of knowledge, mostly due to his incredibly short attention span.”
Fast forward to six months later and it should come as no surprise that an anonymous staffer is now thoroughly disillusioned by what has been going on inside of a White House presided over by Donald Trump.
During his brief presence on Twitter, the mystery leaker quickly acquired a following of thousands and was tweeting to real reporters from Fox News and the New York Daily News as well as other agencies.
All 37 of his tweets were captured in screenshots by a couple of foresighted followers before the @WhiteHouseLeak account vanished and it is merely a matter for speculation as to who the leaker may have been, and whether he shuttered the account himself or was outed.
An album of the captured tweets can be viewed here: https://imgur.com/a/TSrPJ
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