By David Harsanyi
Thursday, May 11, 2017
“Trump has an authoritarian impulse,” Ian Bremmer tweeted
after the president fired FBI Director James Comey, “But incompetence is a
better explanation of his administration’s challenges to date.”
It’s difficult to believe that Donald Trump is both a
clueless idiot, unable to spell or read or earn a single cent on his own merit,
and a nefarious mastermind, capable
of bamboozling the entire nation so he can hand over the White House to Russia.
The truth is that the plausible explanation for the timing of the Comey firing
— and for the many other political missteps of this administration — is
remarkably undramatic: Trump isn’t very good at being president.
The Comey firing was reflexively framed as the next
Watergate because there is a predetermined conclusion regarding Russian
collusion. We’re still re-litigating Trump’s victory. All coverage flows from
this inevitable finale. It clouds all perspective and creates a hysterical environment
that leaves no space for anything but rigid positions.
“I remain a Trump skeptic in more ways than not,” Commentary’s Noah Rothman tweeted, “but
I’m more concerned we now regard withheld judgment not as prudence but as
collaboration.” C’mon, Noah, make a snap judgement or you are embracing Putin.
David Frum called Comey’s firing a “coup.” Jeffery
Toobin, a reliable defender of executive abuse over the past eight years, went
on CNN and claimed it was a “grotesque abuse of power by the president of the
United States,” the “kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” The rule
of law, the very fabric of American life, was under attack, says almost
everyone on the Left. Now more than ever,
we have to save our institutions.
Never mind that the FBI director serves at the pleasure
of the president. The firing of Comey is not a constitutional crisis until
there is evidence that it is. Democrats have spent months impugning Comey’s
integrity, after all, and most Republicans weren’t exactly fans either. When Politico asked a number of experts
whether the Comey firing rose to the level of crisis, refreshingly enough, all
but one was reluctant to say yes. They were inclined to wait and see what
happens.
I’ve defended Comey’s integrity on numerous occasions,
although I don’t believe he was particularly good at his job. Firing him was a
mistake. The optics are appalling. Trump’s stated reasons for firing him are
completely absurd. Still, it’s difficult to believe that Comey was dismissed
because he was on the cusp of some great Kremlingate discovery. In fact, if
Comey were about to break the case wide open, he has more freedom to divulge
that information now.
Moreover, the Russian investigation doesn’t end with
Comey. With Comey gone, it will likely end with someone far more competent. The
melodramatists wishcasting the next Watergate on cable news know this well. (If
Trump names a lackey, and the Senate lets him, then we have a crisis.) It is
far more likely, as this Wall Street Journal article points
out, that the president was looking for a pretext to fire the FBI director for
wholly Trumpian reasons. They are not good. They are not “Nixonian.”
But I’m open to believing the worst-case scenario. So if
the Senate wants to pressure the president or launch an independent
investigation, I’m all for it. Separation of powers is a vital component of
healthy governance. The problem, though, is that Democrats only embrace these
checks and balances when they’re convenient.
I know, I know, whataboutism! But actually, it’s
something more serious than a gotcha. It’s a cycle of partisanship that has
truly corroded our institutions.
Fact is, we’ve had (at least) two norm-busting presidents
with authoritarian impulses in a row. Both believe in ruling with a pen and a
personality, disregarding process whenever it suits their political purposes.
One was a thoughtful-sounding, charismatic force, and a talented fibber; a
virtuoso at erecting strawmen and offering false choices. He pushed his party
farther to the Left than it has ever been. The other is a clumsy and
transparent fibber, an incompetent novice, pushing his party into whatever
ideologically untethered position is catching his fancy at the moment. Only one
of these men, however, was given a free pass by most people in the
institutional media because his progressive ideological outlook pleases their
sensibilities.
You don’t trust Donald Trump to name an FBI director,
even though it’s within his purview to do so? Well, I don’t trust Barack Obama
to enter into faux treaties with a bunch of nations without Senate approval or
to unilaterally legalize millions of people without Congress. I understand that
you find those unilateral decisions morally comforting, but if process and
norms matter they should always matter. (An example of the opposite would be an
ACLU lawyer who argues that Trump’s immigration order might
have been constitutional had Hillary signed it. This undermines trust.)
While there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around,
Democrats’ newfound adoration of checks and balances simply isn’t credible. And
once that trust has been eroded, it’s difficult to regain it. Most Americans
aren’t impressed by procedure. So why would they surrender power when they’re
certain you will abuse it again four years from now?
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