The commentariat largely seems to agree with
David Frum that publishing that op-ed will mainly serve to confirm Trump's fears of a "deep state" conspiracy against him and compromise efforts to rein him in. If your strategy for preventing him from signing bad orders is to engage in distraction tactics like stealing them off his desk until he forgets about the issue and moves on,
telling him about that strategy seems like an astoundingly bad idea.
[W]hat the author has just done is throw the government of the United States into even more dangerous turmoil. He or she has enflamed the paranoia of the president and empowered the president’s willfulness.
What happens the next time a staffer seeks to dissuade the president from, say, purging the Justice Department to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation? The author of the Times op-ed has explicitly told the president that those who offer such advice do not have the president’s best interests at heart and are, in fact, actively subverting his best interests as he understands them on behalf of ideas of their own.
He’ll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous.
And those who do not quit or are not fired in the next few days will have to work even more assiduously to prove themselves loyal, obedient, and on the team. Things will be worse after this article. They will be worse because of this article.
However, there's some debate over the ethics of the internal "resistance" itself. Frum argues that it's not the role of unelected officials to engage in a "soft coup" by intentionally defying the president's policy agenda. In his view, if administration officials believe the president is unfit then it's their responsibility to use constitutional measures (e.g. invoking the 25th Amendment or resigning and testifying to Congress) to try to remove him, not to use extraconstitutional measures to prevent him from exercising the legitimate powers of the office in the service of unwanted policy goals.
That seems to be the popular position, but some
dissenters like Rich Lowry note that Trump himself obviously reconsidered the wisdom of these actions at some point given that he didn't persist for long in attempting them, so they contend that what these officials are really doing is not so much active defiance as waiting out his bad moods in order to better pursue his "true" goals, like a friend hiding your phone when you try to drunk-dial your ex so you won't make a mistake you'll regret in the morning.
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?
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn