CNN cut into coverage of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh to analyze the Op-Ed article. Rachel Maddow called into MSNBC, hours before her prime-time slot, to say, “This feels like the end of something, and I don’t know what happens next.”
The Fox News website declared “Trump Wants a Name.” Media pundits questioned whether The Times had been right to grant anonymity. “This one is a P.R. stunt,” wrote Erik Wemple of The Washington Post.
And reporters and online commenters alike began dissecting the article’s language for clues about the identity of its author. Dan Bloom, a producer for the podcast company Panoply, noted on Twitter that the word “lodestar,” which appears toward the end, had popped up in speeches by Vice President Mike Pence. Hundreds of Twitter users retweeted his theory.
Other reporters recalled the 1990s-era efforts to unmask the author of “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. The author was eventually revealed to be the journalist Joe Klein, after The Washington Post commissioned a handwriting analysis of notes in the margins of a manuscript.
Not every critic of Mr. Trump welcomed the piece’s publication.
David Jolly, a former Republican representative from Florida, said on MSNBC that if the author “wants to do something in service to the nation, you have to come forward and sign your name for this.” David Frum, the conservative writer whose latest book is “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic,” mocked the writer’s motivations: “See, we only look complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.”
The Times said it had published only a handful of anonymously written Op-Ed pieces, several of them by authors whose safety could be endangered if they were publicly identified.
One anonymous piece, published in June, was written by an undocumented immigrant facing deportation and gang-related threats. An Op-Ed article in 2009 was written by a student in Iran who, for reasons of safety, asked to be identified only by his first name.
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