Bettors are playing the odds as to the identity of the anonymous official who wrote a New York Times op-ed, claiming to be part of an internal “resistance” to U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
The op-ed said many senior officials within the Trump administration are “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
WATCH: An anonymous White House insider has written to the New York Times to sound the alarm on U.S. President Donald Trump’s “erratic” and “amoral” behaviour.
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There were various guesses as to who could have authored the piece on Wednesday.
One Twitter thread honed in on the use of the word “lodestar” — and noted that the term has often been used by Vice President Mike Pence.
The Washington Post speculated that the op-ed could have been a “last act of defiance” by deceased senator John McCain, who was also known to use the term “lodestar.”
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Meanwhile, ex-Trump administration employee and reality TV star Omarosa Manigault Newman tweeted that she provided clues to the identity of the author in her book Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.
She also tweeted a poll suggesting four possible names:
The guessing game has reached bookies in various quarters.
Coverage of Donald Trump on Globalnews.ca:
They largely list Pence as the odds-on favourite to have been the op-ed’s author.
Here are the odds as listed by OddsShark:
Pence was also at the top of the list posted by betting site MyBookie.
Other names on the list had much longer odds, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (+200), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (+400) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (+400).
Least likely to be the author, according to MyBookie, were senior advisor Stephen Miller (+1,500), Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (+1,200) and the president’s daughter Ivanka (+1,200).
Trump himself tweeted his response to the op-ed, as broadcast on Fox News.
He followed up that tweet with a single word.
“If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”
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