In a Sept. 5 , 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, “Anonymous,” a high-level White House staffer in the Trump Administration, reassured the American people that even if the President appeared to be hinged, cooler heads prevailed. They regularly ignored or countermanded Trump’s orders in favor of their own good judgment, he insisted, keeping the Administration from going off the rails into illegality, revenge, or downright disaster. Fast-forward a year, and the result is a mea culpa in the form of ‘A Warning.’ (Apparently Sept 2018 - Jan. 2019 was the turning point.) Turns out, your average “Steady Stater” can only endure chaos, insults, tantrums, and lies for so long before they throw up their hands or quit or both; the result is a government of apologists and sycophants. Anonymous admits s/he was wrong about the ability of dedicated professionals to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses and now what the author fears most is a second, unleashed term. Not much is actually new here—perhaps the author feared outing his/her identity with concrete details—but the sheer cataloguing of Trump’s assaults on democracy, foreign policy, norms, and ethics is shocking and depressing. Anonymous outlines in each chapter how Trump has corrupted and distorted the Framers’ well-designed Constitution and repeatedly suggests how much worse it could get if Trump is re-elected. He ends with a thought experiment that imagines this President coping with a foreign and domestic policy disaster like 9/11. “Imagine that, as smoke arose from the Twin Towers, he questioned whether al-Qaeda really orchestrated the attacks; he dismissed the intelligence community’s conclusions as ‘ridiculous’... and he urged Americans that it would be a mistake to go after al-Qaeda because the United States had the potential for a ‘great relationship’ with them” (251). And finally Anonymous challenges all of us to hold ourselves to a higher standard that would make his re-election odious, to stop blaming the swamp in DC, and recognize that we make the government with our votes and our voices. We can only hope this works and that Trump’s horrors become a distant nightmare and a cautionary tale.