What if more then one person was involved?
I think it was Kellyanne Conway, whose job description has amounted to Rump Whisperer since the campaign hired her. She was supposed to be the one who knew how to talk to Donald, to calm him down and keep him from going off the rails.
She seems to be the latest front runner.
Trying to find a “Monimiss” source could be interesting, I think it’s a small town in Jersey ?
KAC is Charlie Pierce’s guess as well, probably with help from her husband (plausible deniability, perhaps). I still think that Raj had a hand in it as well, perhaps helping to make it less readily identifiable as KAC.
UGH!
there is a very high & very distracting nonsense factor in this .
… reminiscent of people playing Beatles records backwards searching for hidden “Paul is Dead” clues.
but if it keeps Trump distracted - like occupying a cat with a laser pointer - so much the better.
The focus in the letter on foreign affairs argues against KAC. One of the arguments in support of her authorship is that she needs to reinvent herself if she is ever to work in Washington DC again. I dunno about that. I think there will still be jobs for right wing shills, maybe just not in the administration.
Notice that Dan Coats’ denial was not much of a denial. He gets my vote for the author. He is 75 and doesn’t need to work in a Republican administration again.
The fact that it was written in comprehensible English, and followed a central theme, strongly suggests a ghost writer from far outside the Oval Trailer confines…
Here’s a clue:
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.
Where does the phrase “free minds, free markets and free people” come from? It’s the title of an essay published in 2017 by Professor Bradley J. Birzer of Hillsdale College.
As Politico reported on Hillsdale College:
Its alumni fill prominent roles in the administration, from speechwriters to the chief of staff for Betsy DeVos.
Chaos
Whoever it was, it wasn’t me. That’s the tenor of all denials, but no one has denied that the contents of the op-ed are wrong. No one, not even Trump, has said the op-ed is an incorrect description of the state-of-affairs in the WH.
If it weren’t so scary, it’d be funny.
I think there will still be jobs for right wing shills, maybe just not in the administration.
I’m not sure about that since it assumes whoever wrote it (and I think it is KAC) thinks the political world will not be all that transformed by the “Trump Years”. Any yet, it’s precisely such a fear that motivates the op-ed author.
My guess is Coates due to focus on national security and praising of the Republican "accomplishments ".
Part of me likes to entertain the unlikely possibility that Pence indeed wrote it and the NY Times left in “lodestar” so that observant people could still figure out the author. 
I was pretty sure it was Kellyanne from the start, but it’s my understanding that the NYT revealed that the person is male.
Steve Bannon?
Very good friends with dearly departed John …
I think it finally got to him —
Fingerpointing and accusations among the senior staff will escalate to revenge leaks about colleagues and on to on-air cable-news display of dirty laundry as the staffers lose track of what started the bickering and unleash their pent-up grievances.
After the West Wing is left a smoldering ruin, one person will walk out untouched. He had long been considered so harmless that even that mob of perm-victims would have been too embarrassed to claim that this person had been able to inflict some harm or insult upon them.
So, out he will stroll: ashes falling around him, but never landing on him; suit and hair in pristine condition; and shoes looking freshly buffed. The innocent. The one you would never suspect of doing anything, much less of doing something as clever and powerful as engineering the destruction of the West Wing with a single anonymous letter.
Out he will stroll, our Keyser Söze, singing a little song he made up:
Linguistic analysis is not infallible. Unless it is a major author, who has written extensively, so enough data points exist for computer to churn through, it is mostly a subjective art. For example, linguistic analysts were not able to confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note associated with JonBenet’s supposed kidnapping. That letter was handwritten.