Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dowd gives us her take on the James Comey testimony last week in her New York Times column this morning. After describing the personalities of Comey and Donald Trump as the G-Man v. the Mob Boss, it is her opinion, that Trump is on his way to self-destruction.
Here is her recap:
“Who is bigger than Trump?
Sure, Trump got called a liar by the ousted F.B.I. chief, in what was “almost certainly the most damning j’accuse moment by a senior law enforcement official against a president in a generation,” as Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times.
Sure, the president came across in Comey’s testimony like a mob don, demanding fealty and calling on Comey to do him a service by seeing his way clear to letting the nefarious Michael Flynn go.
But on the bright side for Trump — which is a historically low bar — there were these things:
Comey admitted he was a leaker, and Trump is obsessed with catching leakers even though he’s a world-class leaker himself. They are their own Deep Throats.
Comey confirmed that he had told the president three times that he was not under investigation.
He asserted that Loretta Lynch lost her credibility on the Hillary email investigation when she let Bill Clinton on her plane and directed Comey to call it “a matter” rather than “an investigation.”
And Comey seemed like a wimpy careerist for not confronting Trump on the Flynn meddling and looking him in the eye and saying, “What you want is wrong and we will not do it and I will no longer work for you.” Unlike Trump, Comey wasn’t even willing to do the dirty work of leaking himself.
The main takeaway, however, is that with the absurdist Trump administration, we have sunk very low. There’s no way that the Republicans would not be calling for the head of a Democratic president who had done this stuff. They would be going nuts trying to impeach him.
Instead, we have the risible Paul Ryan trying to excuse the president’s sleazy behavior with Comey by painting the most powerful man in the world as Candide.
“He’s just new to this,” Ryan told reporters, explaining that Trump “wasn’t steeped in the long-running protocols” between the Department of Justice and the White House.
The real problem isn’t that Trump is a Washington naïf, though he is. It’s that he brought his own distorted reality and warped values with him.
He has yet to express a scintilla of real concern that the Russians tried to hurt our democracy and alter the will of American voters.
At the press conference Friday, he reiterated his ridiculous contention that the Russia scandal is a red herring, even now that everyone agrees that it is real.
“That was an excuse by the Democrats who lost an election that some people think they shouldn’t have lost, because it’s almost impossible for the Democrats to lose the Electoral College, as you know,” Trump said. “You have to run up the whole East Coast and you have to win everything as a Republican, and that’s just what we did.”
Trump is so self-regarding that he can only process the Russia hack as an insult to him. If the Russians helped him beat Hillary, then he gets less credit.
And with Comey & Co., Trump is so eager for the credit that he would rather bring himself down than allow someone else the honor.”
Classic Dowd but the key question is how much time the Republicans will allow Trump to bring himself down. They have Vice President Pence waiting in the wings who will do all of the bidding of the GOP leaders. It could come sooner than later if one of Trump’s cronies should flip and became a state witness.
Tony
