Anonymous tell-all book likens Trump to '12-year-old in air traffic control tower'

The anonymous author of a widely anticipated book on the Trump White House has described the US president as spiraling from crisis to crisis “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower”, The Guardian reports, citing scathing extracts published by the Washington Post on Thursday.

The unnamed author, identified only as “a senior official in the Trump administration”, also says that colleagues considered resigning en masse in order to raise alarm about the president’s conduct, but ultimately decided against it, according to the Post.

The extracts obtained by the Post are due to appear in A Warning, a book written by the unnamed person who last year wrote a New York Times column critical of the president. They paint Trump as volatile and incompetent, while also describing how he made racist and misogynistic statements in private.

In the book, the author describes Trump’s approach to the presidency as “like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport”.

The author also describes how Trump’s impulsive Twitter antics often left senior officials “waking up in the morning ‘in a full-blown panic’”.

“It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him,” the author writes, according to the Post. “You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”

The White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham criticized the book and the author’s decision to remain anonymous.

“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” she said on Thursday.

She said reporters should “cover the book as what it is: a work of fiction”.

The Post said the author decided to publish the work anonymously so as not to distract from the president and the larger issues.