On September 5, 2018, The New York Times published an editorial by an anonymous Trump administration official that accuses President Donald Trump of being amoral, erratic, unstable, petty, ineffective and anti-democratic. The writer claims that, fortunately, there are many people in the White House and elsewhere in the federal government who do what they can to save the country by running the U.S. government in a proper manner.

Most of the media coverage of this editorial has focused either on how scary it is to have a president who is clearly unfit for the job or on the hunt by Trump and his allies to figure out who wrote the piece. But there is another aspect of the editorial that is disturbing. These inside “resistors” attempt to portray themselves as patriots who are trying to save America by being “adults in the room.” But the anonymous official and other insiders have an agenda that is not as patriotic as they make it out to be. Here is the key line in the article that makes clear their real agenda: “There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.”

Let’s be clear: Trump’s deregulation actions are “effective” only if you are a big business owner or, preferably, the CEO or member of the board of directors of a large corporation or financial institution. Historic tax reform? The overwhelming majority of those savings went to the rich and super-rich. A more robust military? Good news if you’re a weapons maker or another kind of military contractor. But out in the field and around the world, I have yet to notice any significant positive change. Indeed, the military under Trump is barely distinguishable from the military under Barack Obama.

The anonymous Trump administration official appears to support Donald Trump’s general agenda of helping the richest Americans and ignoring everyone else. What worries the writer is not that Trump is failing “to put country first,” but that he is so emotionally disturbed that he will somehow screw up this corporatist agenda.

-David Wallechinsky