The Atlantic

Whose ‘Resistance’ Is It Anyway?

The term has popped up repeatedly of late, including in a recent <em>New York Times</em> op-ed written by an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration. But what does the word itself really mean?
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Wednesday morning, The New York Times published an op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” written by an anonymous senior government official. “There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put country first,” he writes toward the end of the column, which describes a calculated campaign in which multiple concerned staffers in the president’s orbit have committed to “thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”

Earlier, though, the author takes great pains to note that “ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” Should the president simply stay—or be kept—out of the way, it seems, the

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