"WHO IS THE TALL DARK STRANGER THERE?":

Did I mention that he and John McCain were buddies, and that, unlike his boss, he issued a statement praising McCain after he died?

What we know about the provenance of the op-ed comes from James Dao, the Times op-ed editor, in an interview on The Daily, the Times podcast, Thursday.

"It began with an intermediary, who I trust, and know well," said Dao. "And they told me that there was this individual in the Trump Administration who was very interested in writing an op-ed."

My surmise is that the intermediary was Michael Gerson, the former top speechwriter for President George W. Bush who is now a columnist for the Washington Post. Previously, Gerson had served as a speechwriter for Coats. Both are graduates of Wheaton College, the Illinois college that likes to style itself the "evangelical Harvard."

Gerson has made himself into Trump's most prominent evangelical critic. Column after column has assailed the President's moral character and the concomitant moral culpability of the those who support him, not least his fellow evangelicals.

It hardly strains credulity to think that Gerson has stayed in close touch with Coats. Indeed, just as he once worked with Coats on his speeches, so he would likely have helped him with the op-ed.

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