Simply because there have been no gut-punch Trump corruption stories in the last 48 hours or so, it feels as if we’ve entered a respite of sorts. But anyone paying attention to our politics is still reckoning and piecing together all that has happened and been reported over the past week. Here’s a rough outline of stunning stories that we’ve pulled from a helpful CNN rundown: Donald Trump fires FBI Director James Comey; Trump reveals in an interview that he did so because of the Russia investigations; Trump threatens Comey against speaking out; stories break of Trump having shared highly classified information with top Russian diplomats at a still-otherwise-disturbing Oval Office meeting; there are reports that Trump met with Comey one-on-one to ask that he drop the investigation of General Michael Flynn (on top of various other stories about Comey's concern that Trump was trying to compromise his independence, and this on top of an earlier story that Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president); Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel for the Russia campaign interference/Trump campaign collusion investigation; news breaks that at the fateful Trump-Russian diplomat Oval Office meeting, Trump bragged of firing Comey, referred to him as a “nut job,” and talked about how the pressure over Russian had been “taken off” by Comey's dismissal; and, last but not least, reports that a current advisor to the president is under criminal investigation
And let’s not forget that we also learned this past Friday that James Comey will be giving Senate testimony, in public, at some soonish date.
It’s not just that Donald Trump himself has, both in the public eye and out of it, engaged in behavior that looks very much like obstruction of justice to cover up what seems like corrupt actions by himself and/or his advisors in relation to Russian interference in the election, though this alone would be deeply disturbing. There’s also the way other details about Trumpworld have been emerging, which make it increasingly clear this administration has a Turkey problem in addition to the more well-known Russia issues (as a big for instance, there is the fact of Flynn’s paid engagement by the Turkish government while he made crucial decisions about U.S. dealings with the Kurds). And maybe most importantly of all for helping us understand the gravity of the various threads, we are starting to understand the relation of one story to another, and to put together timelines that present an increasingly damning perspective on the behavior of Trump and his political intimates.
In the face of this seething vastness of political crisis and possibly criminal malfeasance, The Hot Screen feels the constraint of an understandable but inappropriate cognitive paralysis — what to talk about? Where, in the name of all that is holy, to start, when if ever there were a time not to be overwhelmed, this is it?
So we’re letting the gut lead us forward, and our gut is saying one thing above all else: Donald Trump is an amazingly self-incriminating, self-sabotaging monster, and no matter what bad acts he may or may not have committed during the campaign, his clumsy efforts to protect himself now are providing his opposition with cudgels that will continue to do political damage to him as long as he remains in office. This president seems to be doing everything he can to assure that the escalating resistance to his misrule will be rightly seen as a fight between defenders of our democracy, and an illiberal, intemperate, anti-democratic wrecking ball of a former reality show host.
