Donald Trump says he is firing James Comey because of the way Comey mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Donald Trump is also, rather obviously, lying.
Trump expressed no qualms about Comey at the time of the alleged misconduct, or during the transition. Nor did he take the opportunity of his first 100 days in office to make any gestures of bipartisan outreach on this — or any other — topic. Indeed, back in January, Trump went out of his way to specifically ask Comey to stay on for six more years, and Comey agreed.
The bad faith involved in this move is both palpable and obvious. Anyone maintaining focus on the “irony” that the very Democrats who were critical of Comey’s handling of the emails are now defending him is trying to pull the wool over your eyes and evade the main issue. Trump is lying. Again.
Trump lies all the time
Beyond the specific implausibility of Trump’s official story, there is the more general fact that Trump is a notorious liar. For years, he called New York tabloids using a fake name. He claimed that climate change was a Chinese hoax, and then, during a debate, he claimed that he’d never claimed that. He lied about his wealth, and he obtained that wealth in part by lying to students at his fake university. He promised to get behind a health care bill that covered everyone, lowered deductibles, and avoided cuts to Medicaid — he was lying on all three points.
He said Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. During the second presidential debate, he interrupted Clinton to deny telling America to "check out [the] sex tape" of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. During the third debate, the interruption was to deny that he'd mocked a reporter with a disability.
Yet he had. The first two were on Twitter; the third had been circulated widely as a video clip. It was stupidly easy to track down the proof. He lies. All the time.
This is known and widely reported, and yet the knowledge that it’s true rarely seems to suffuse the reporting. I have friends who are notorious for being late all the time. When I make plans with them, I simply assume they will be late.
America has a president who lies all the time. If we had a different kind of president, it would make sense to give him the benefit of the doubt on something like this. But we have President Donald Trump. If he says something that seems implausible, that’s probably because he’s lying.
Trump is covering something up
The easy presumption is that the real reason for firing Comey has something to do with the ongoing Russia investigation. We don’t, however, really know that.
Over the years, Trump seems to have been mixed up with the Mafia, and his casinos have paid civil fines for evading money laundering rules. He’s been involved in empty-box tax scams, and his shenanigans with the Trump Foundation may have constituted criminal tax evasion.
Still, as Edward Ericson Jr. details, he’s never faced a serious criminal investigation despite repeatedly bumping up against one.
An FBI inquiry that started with a hard look at Trump associates’ possible ties to the Russian government could easily have turned up some totally unrelated criminal misconduct. By the same token, it’s entirely possible that whatever it is Trump might be covering up by refusing to release his tax returns has nothing to do with Russian bribes or blackmail.
But what we know from the tax return saga is that Trump appears to be covering something up. Something big and important. And anyone with half a brain can see that sacking Comey appears to be, likewise, part of covering something up. Maybe something to do with Russia and maybe something else. But it sure looks like something.
The Republican Party is playing a dangerous game
Democrats are out with statements calling for special prosecutors or for Comey to testify before Congress. Everyone is demanding that the next FBI director be someone who’s impartial and independent. That’s all well and good, and it’s all important, but it’s also all irrelevant beside the basic attitude of the Republican Party.
When Marine Le Pen entered the second round of the French presidential election as a Russia-backed far-right, xenophobic candidate, she met a wall of opposition from establishment center-right political figures who all endorsed her center-left opponent. Republicans, by contrast, spent the 2016 campaign being supportive of Trump and have spent the post-election era being sycophantic toward him.
It would be child’s play for a Republican Party that cared about the integrity of American government institutions to force Trump to comply with some basic ethics guidelines and undertake meaningful financial disclosures. Instead, Ivanka Trump is hawking a book from inside the West Wing and nobody has any idea what kind of sweetheart deals corporations or foreign governments with business before the US government are striking with the Trump Organization.
In exchange for turning a blind eye to Trump’s corruption, Republicans are getting a slate of conservative judges, a solid roster of business-friendly regulators, and, if they’re lucky, a giant tax cut for the rich and millions of people cut off from Medicaid benefits. The price, however, is obvious. The deeper you get in bed with Trump, the more tightly your fate is entwined with his. Some Republicans will decide they are overcommitted to Trump at this point, and they’ll fight on the lie that Comey was fired over emails.
For others, one hopes, this will be a wake-up call that Trump is a profoundly dishonest person but also a rather clever one. The comeback from the financial wreckage of his Atlantic City casino empire was incredibly slimy but involved a bravura display of low cunning. The fake rationale for firing Comey is, similarly, somewhat inspired. But sane Republicans should see the real meaning of this. Trump isn’t a policy savant, but he’s also not a dummy whom they are going to manipulate. He’s a snake whom they’ve taken into their home, and the sooner they do something about it, the better off we’ll all be.
