As the White House hunts for the anonymous author of the New York Times op-ed by a “senior administration official,” Sen. Rand Paul has suggested lie detector tests for suspected authors. For his part, Donald Trump is blaming the deep state, suggesting that the op-ed writer “may not be a conservative. It may be a deep state person that's been there a long time.”
That take makes all the sense in the world as someone as dishonest as Trump tries to wrap his mind around the loathing coming out of his inner circle. Because if it’s the deep state, it’s not that the people closest to him, ones he chose, think he’s a dangerous idiot. But just as the quotes from all the senior Trump aides in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book are really from senior Trump aides, the New York Times isn’t going to run something as being by a “senior administration official” unless the author fairly meets that description.
A better investigation method than the notoriously unreliable lie detector test—and one that can be carried out outside the White House, too—might be analyzing the language used, in much more subtle ways than pointing out that Mike Pence likes the word “lodestar,” which could have been used intentionally to focus attention on Pence or because it was used recently during Sen. John McCain’s funeral. Instead:
One of the favorite techniques of [Duquesne University computer and language scientist Patrick] Juola and other experts is to look at what’s called “function words.” These are words people use all the time but that are hard to define because they more provide function than meaning. Some examples are “of,” ″with,” ″the,” ″a,” ″over” and “and.”
“We all use them but we don’t use them in the same way,” Juola says. “We don’t use them in the same frequency.” Same goes with apostrophes and other punctuation.
However, experts warn that the New York Times editing process may make that analysis less reliable, and that finding relevant writing samples from all of the suspected senior administration officials may be difficult, since comparison samples have to be similar forms and it may be difficult to find multiple op-eds from every possible senior administration official.
This mystery may continue driving Donald Trump to sputtering fury and mounting suspicion for a while, in other words. At least for a few days until he hears more about what’s in the Woodward book, or a new unflattering story gets reported, or he’s thwarted in any one of a million ways to focus his rage elsewhere.