Charlie has a good post below making the case that the op-ed represents a threat to the constitutional order. Obviously, this isn’t now how our system is supposed to work, and I think the op-ed is dishonorable, as I noted below. But is shambolic government really a threat to the constitutional order? None of the members of the so-called internal resistance are, as far as we know, actively defying presidential orders or actively attempting to depose the president (trying to invoke the 25th Amendment would be such an attempt, but it is a conditional mechanism). What the resisters are doing is operating within the seams of the president’s inattention, changing moods, bar-stool musing, and shaky grasp of policy to keep him from making what they consider mistakes.
But if, to take an example we already knew about months ago, if Trump really wanted Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, he could have fired him for not doing it and then found someone to do the deed. McGahn probably thought Trump wasn’t very serious about it, or not serious enough to go through the exertions of making it happen, and he was right. Or, to take an example from Woodward’s book, if Trump really wanted to kill Assad, he could have directly ordered his military to do it and, if Mattis refused, fired him and readily found someone to carry out the order. Trump apparently wasn’t serious enough about this to make it happen, either. Did McGahn or Mattis subvert the president by not acting on what they surely believed to be ill-considered whims, or serve him faithfully by waiting him out and not taking a fraught course with potentially disastrous downsides? I say the latter, but this is a dynamic that is tricky, chaotic — and endemic to this presidency.