How soon will the NYT’s Trump Resistance writer be outed?

The New York Times did the right thing in publishing Anonymous because the “first duty of the press “is to obtain the correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation.” But having posited the ongoing conspiracy against the president, he can’t expect the press—maybe not even reporters on the news side of the New York Times—to protect his identity. He’s not an anonymous source for a journalist; he’s an anonymous author publishing his work.

This puts him in a separate, more vulnerable category. He’s less like Deep Throat and more like journalist Joe Klein, the anonymous author of the best-selling novel Primary Colors, or Michael Scheuer, the CIA officer turned anonymous author of 2003’s Through Our Enemies’ Eyes and 2004’s Imperial Hubris. Journalists suffered no compunctions about revealing the identities of both authors, and they will work as hard as Trump to uncover him. Don’t feel bad for Anonymous: In Washington, such acts of subterfuge are automatically rewarded with big book contracts.