The five most explosive revelations about Donald Trump from an anonymous senior official's New York Times opinion piece
Video Report by ITV News Washington Correspondent Robert Moore
A senior White House official has written an explosive attack on Donald Trump, calling the US president "impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective".
Writing anonymously in the New York Times, the senior administration official describes the president as reckless and ill-informed, with little regard for the values of the country he governs.
The Trump insider also hints at a "quiet resistance" movement within the White House made up of people "choosing to put country first".
Trump hit back at the anonymous source saying he was "probably failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons."
Looking directly at the Fox News camera,the president seized the opportunity to have a dig at the "dishonest media".
He said: "The New York Times is failing. If I wasn't here, the New York Times wouldn't even exist."
Here are the five most astonishing revelations about Trump that are bound to ruffle a few presidential feathers.
He is erratic and goes off the rails in meetings
"Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“'There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,'” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
"The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful."
He prefers dictators to America's allies
"In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations."
He did not want to punish Russia for the Salisbury novichok poisoning
"Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
"On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable."
He is "undemocratic"
"Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.
"In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic."
He is without principles
"The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making."
In his first response, Mr Trump said the opinion piece writer was "some anonymous source within the administration, probably who's failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons".
White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders issued a statement saying "this coward should do the right thing and resign".