Any sitting president worthy of the name would have taken the occasion of President’s Day 2019 to say something stirring about the office, the republic, democracy, or all of the above. Not this clown. He decided to take the opportunity to attack the Department of Justice.
Trump throws the words “illegal” and “treasonous” around, not knowing what they mean. There is nothing illegal about the 25th Amendment, or talking about it. As to treason? From a guy who takes Vladimir Putin’s word about election interference over the word of his own intelligence officials? Puh-leeze.
Now here’s where it gets funny: this is what Trump tweeted yesterday.
What’s amusing about this, is that although the Wall Street journal piece is biased — and that’s fair, it’s clearly labeled “opinion” — Trump fails to realize that it is he himself, who started the ball rolling with respect to all his issues with both the DOJ and the FBI. But for him listening to the sole voice of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is arguably the only person in government today who actually knows less about government than the sitting *resident, telling him to fire James Comey, Trump wouldn’t be in the mess he’s in. He is the architect of his own adversity and cannot come to grips with that fact. He always devolves to the nearest conspiracy theory.
This op-ed piece says, “a small cabal of unelected senior law-enforcement officers held meetings in May 2017 to plot Mr. Trump’s removal from office,” which doubtlessly caught Trump’s eye, or Stephen Miller’s, more accurately, since Trump doesn’t read. In McCabe’s recent book, an excerpt from which was printed in the Atlantic last week, he tells a very different story about the alleged “plot” — that he was concerned about the Russian investigation being tampered with, in the event he himself was fired. McCabe wasn’t plotting against anybody, he was doing the job he’s paid to do, and protecting the investigation. The Atlantic:
After Comey’s firing, the core of my concern had to do with what might happen to the Russia case if I were to be removed. I convened a series of meetings about that investigation—including the one interrupted by the call from the president—in which I directed an overall review of every aspect. Was the work on solid ground? Were there individuals on whom we should consider opening new cases? I wanted to protect the Russia investigation in such a way that whoever came after me could not just make it go away.
The WSJ op-ed goes on about “rebuilding trust” in federal law enforcement, but McCabe states the issue quite differently in another paragraph in his book. Tfhe FBI is not the institution of government that has wildly diverged from the norm, the presidency is.
People do not appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on criminal prosecutions but to comment on ones that potentially affect him. He does both of these things almost daily. He is not just sounding a dog whistle. He is lobbying for a result. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. Every day brings a new low, with the president exposing himself as a deliberate liar who will say whatever he pleases to get whatever he wants. If he were “on the box” at Quantico, he would break the machine.
Indeed he would break the lie detector machine. The Washington Post has logged in over 8,000 since Trump took office, and still counting.