It's extremely difficult for The Hot Screen to believe that President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey and the subsequent parade of contradictory explanations — including some proferred by his staff and later contradicted by Trump himself — have not opened up a world of permanent hurt for the president. As noted in our last post, Donald Trump himself said in an interview with NBC News that the investigation of Russian interference in the election, and possible collusion between that country and his own campaign, was on his mind when he fired Comey.
Whether or not this admission meets the legal definition of obstruction of justice, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump has put his personal agenda ahead of the nation’s interest in determining the extent of interference by a foreign power in the 2016 presidential election. From other remarks made in the interview, Trump doesn’t seem able to separate the idea of an investigation into Russian interference from the inquiry into possible collusion between his campaign and the Russians. The two are obviously linked; but he seems to see both as a threat to him, when in fact only one of those lines of inquiry really is; even if it were somehow determined that it was only through Russian interference that he was elected president, it’s all but impossible to see how this could lead to the results of the election somehow being set aside — there’s just no mechanism for that. Of course, it would weaken the country’s sense of his legitimacy, and this may be Trump's larger fear — but when weighed against the integrity of our electoral process and our democracy itself, this personal cost must be counted as mere peanuts, and his inability to see this as disqualifying for a chief executive.
But the actual firing of Comey has now expanded to invoke a far larger constellation of related words and events, as reporting on this decision and the relationship between Trump and Comey continues to turn up new information. There is the dinner the two had, at which Trump reportedly asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to Trump, and at which Trump claims Comey asked Trump to keep him on the job. There are Trump’s repeated statements that Comey assured him that the president himself is not under investigation — if false, this is another pernicious lie by Trump, and if true, it raises the damaging issue of inappropriate inquiries by Trump.
And of course, as a sort of piece de resistance, cherry-on-top-of-the-whole-shit-sandwich, there is Trump’s amazing tweet that “James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” We all know at this point that the Trump administration is, among other things, a grotesquely dirty snowball of accumulating outrages and violations of our political norms — but a more or less overt threat against a former FBI director really takes the cake! Part of the wonder is how Trump’s threat so badly backfires on himself, in simultaneously invoking shades of Richard Nixon and all but calling Comey’s bluff by suggesting Comey has more to lose than he does — considering that Trump has already done his worst against Comey, firing him in humiliating fashion, the threat seems particularly reckless and somewhat power-mad.
One major deciding factor in how things play out in the coming days and weeks, and how quickly, will be whether substantial numbers of Republican representatives and senators begin to speak out against the president. The evidence so far is not encouraging. And with the Comey firing, continued Republican support of the president means that the party as a whole is further committing itself to a lawless, anti-democratic presidency in a way that is without precedent in our history. Some are pointing to how Republicans who turned on Nixon during the Watergate crisis were crucial to forcing him out of office, but there are major differences between the dynamics then and now. The Republicans were in the minority in both houses at the time; the Democrats were in fact in the midst of a decades-long dominance of the House of Representatives. The pendulum has swung the other way in our time, and the Republicans now hold the Senate and House.
Whereas jettisoning Nixon could be seen as a way to ensure the Republicans were not permanently tainted by his corruption, the Republicans now find themselves at a precarious pinnacle of power, one they are loathe to abandon now that they’ve achieved it. Republican politicians are aware that though they hold the reins, they are, and are increasingly likely to remain, a minority party in terms of raw voter numbers. Hilary Clinton, after all, won the election by millions more votes than Donald Trump, and in recent elections Democratic senators and representatives have received more votes than the Republicans, even if this has not always resulted in control of the legislature. In short, as this guy and others have argued, the Republicans have major incentives, based on issues of democratic legitimacy that echo Trump’s own, to continue to defend Trump. And the longer they do, and the more deeply implicated they become, the more of a perverse incentive they’ll have to keep supporting him, as a way to keep at bay a backlash and the inevitable weakening of Republican power should Trump be forced out of office.
Everything we have seen about Trump points to one thing: his outrages will only get worse. This hellish elevator of a presidency has only one direction - down - and one speed - faster and faster. And so we end with this quote from Laurence Tribe, who is interviewed this week at Slate about Trump's offenses against our country and constitution: “[D]eceiving the American public on matters directly pertinent to the institutions and processes of government, taking advantage of one’s high federal office to give one’s lies both cover and credibility, is certainly a grave abuse of executive power — and is indeed the essence of the unenumerated offenses the Framers clearly contemplated by the open-ended phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors." Even if lying to and/or misleading the public — as opposed to deceiving official bodies under oath — is not and could not be made a civil offense, that by no means implies that such a pattern of deliberate deceit is irrelevant to the ultimate inquiry of whether one has forfeited the public trust that alone entitles one to retain a position of power in the United States government.”
Discuss.