| Nice catch by the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, who notes that we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of that explosive op-ed written by an anonymous official in Donald Trump's administration, who told brutal stories about the president being unfit for office. It makes sense to look back at this extraordinary episode now that some time has passed. But I disagree with what Farhi identifies as the key questions that remain about the piece: "Is the author still working in the administration? What policies or initiatives did she or he actually thwart, if any? And, of course, the big one: Whodunnit?" Although I have as much curiosity about this as anyone else, those aren't really the big questions. What we should be asking is whether the author correctly described Trump and the administration – and especially if he or she added to what we otherwise know about what's happening inside the White House. Mostly, the op-ed holds up. Trump still seems isolated from the rest of his administration in important ways, and while it wasn't really news a year ago that officials ignored or contradicted the president, it was useful to get some (sort of) on-the-record confirmation that reporting about it was true. That said, while the op-ed assured us that there were "adults in the room," that seems less true now than it did then. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is gone; so is Chief of Staff John Kelly. It's true that White House and executive-branch officials can still constrain the president, but it seems more and more likely that those who matter are carving out fiefdoms to advance their own objectives, rather than protecting consensus policies from the president's whims. (Not that consensus policies are necessarily good! Just that Trump's alternatives tend to follow from, well, random outbursts. And one of the consequences of Trump's failure to master policy and his general weakness is that his administration never really challenges the status quo; it sometimes reacts to those outbursts, but without the kind of work that normally produces viable public policy.) All of which means that the ethical implications of that anonymous op-ed are even more difficult to assess now than they were then. A year ago, it was still plausible to reassure people that insiders were preventing even worse chaos; after the past two months, and the government shutdown and on and on and on, it seems more pressing to reveal what's happening behind the scenes and take a visible stand against it, and less worthwhile to preserve the ability to resist the worst of Trump from inside the administration. Because the latter seems more and more futile. 1. Julia Azari at Mischiefs of Faction on the Democratic National Committee and the request for a climate-change debate. While I agree with her conclusion, I see this dispute a bit differently. To me, it shows that there's a division of labor within the party. It's not that the party is neutral with regard to the importance of climate change (compared to other policy areas). It's that the formal party organizations, especially at the national level, have the job of staying neutral on unsettled questions while other portions of the party fight things out. As a whole, the party will eventually choose positions and priorities as well as a nominee, and then the DNC can join in. That the formal organization follows the informal network has all sorts of implications, but it doesn't necessarily mean the party is any weaker – that it has any less capacity for taking "bold action" – than if the DNC made decisions. 2. Nadia E. Brown at the Monkey Cage on #MeTooPoliSci. 3. Also at the Monkey Cage: Jonathan N. Markowitz and Benjamin A.T. Graham on dreams of Greenland. 4. Matthew Shugart on what's unusual about the upcoming election in Israel. 5. I like Mark Schmitt's item on Trump and corruption – especially the material on strengthening Congress – but please let's not pretend that "drain the swamp" ever meant anything more than attacking Trump's enemies. 6. Benjamin Wittes on the inspector general report on James Comey. 7. Jack Shafer tears apart Bernie Sanders's plan for journalism. 8. And here at Bloomberg Opinion, Anne Stevenson-Yang has some suggestions if the U.S. really wants to win a trade war with China. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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