In May it’ll be eight years exactly since some anonymous scumbag in convicted felon President Trump’s first failed administration fairly famously told Axios that “to cover my tracks, I usually pay attention to other staffers’ idioms and use that in my background quotes. That throws the scent off me,” while the Orange God Emperor was raging over this or that leak to the press.

The brazen meta-impunity was and still is pretty funny – and also worth the callback to contrast with this Tuesday night New York Times account headlined “How Trump and His Advisers Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War” that, despite billing itself as “based on interviews with a dozen US officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations,” contains zero direct quotes from those witnessing and experiencing the tempest inside the demented old tyrant’s castle.

Really the only explanations are fear that even the most neutral language could be traced back to an individual and/or that the language was too neutral/boring for the Times to bother print. Still weird that they spoke to “a dozen US officials” who obviously weren’t so afraid to talk at all and couldn’t get anything. Whatever the filter was, the only color conveyed to readers comes in the Times’s own composition on the internal discomfit and even that’s kind of isolated within the piece.

First there’s “Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of a clear strategy to finish the war. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success” and then further down a “Since the start of the war, Trump has not offered a consistent message. In private, his aides have said they feel frustration over his lack of discipline in communicating the objectives of the military campaign to the public.” Way to tease us out here in the ignorant masses, NYT.