So says Charles M. Blow in his column today for the New York Times, which is titled Trump Is Insulting Our Intelligence, and as you might guess is about the firing of James Comey.
We get a sense of the power of what Blow is saying from his opening paragraph:
I feel as if we are being conditioned to chaos by a “president” who abhors the stillness of stability. Every day we awake to a new outrage. We now exist in a rolling trauma — exhausting and unrelenting.
Many have commented in the past that we never had the chance to fully absorb the impact of one scandal before we are distracted by something else. In this case, the scandal we did not get to fully absorb was the testimony of Yates and Clapper on Monday. What Blow is noting is that now the distractions are further outrages.
His next paragraph focuses our attention in so that we are not in fact distracted:
Yet even in that context, some things spike higher than others. Donald Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, is one of those things. This should shock the whole of America out of its numbness.
It should, and there has been a fair amount of shock expressed, from some Republicans and many editorial pages as well as those on our side of the political chasm.
Blow does not assume that we know the entire background. He reminds us that this may seem to have a parallel in Nixon’x 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre”
But Cox was just a special prosecutor; Comey was head of the F.B.I.
HE then provides a recap of the past 36 hours for those who had not been paying attention. After he gets to the participation in the firing by Jeff Sessions, he breaks his narrative to offer the following:
How exactly does a person who is a proven liar about his own dealings with the Russians — and who has recused himself from matters dealing with the Trump campaign — make a recommendation to a president whose associates are being investigated for their ties to Russia? And the recommendation is to fire the man leading those investigations?
The sheer brazenness of it all is stunning.
Indeed.
Blow then recaps the latter by the Deputy AG, Rod Rosenstein, before again offering his own observations. He actually agrees with the DGA’s assessment of Comey’s behavior with respect to the investigation of the Clinton emails, but notes that in real time Trump had a very different assessment of those actions, which is why any pretense of Trump now being outraged by them is not to be believed. Blow offers a framing of this attempted explanation of the firing of Comey in a way that is attention grabbing, at the end of one paragraph and the entirety of the next:
This says to America: I’m going to tell you a lie that is so outrageous that you will want to believe that some part of it is true, to preserve your faith in truth, democracy and mankind.
They are using our own human nature against us. We want to believe that people’s natural default is toward truth and good, because the alternative is untenable: Moral anarchy? Well, the alternative is upon us.
Here I have to step back for a moment. Perhaps SOME people still want to believe in a natural default toward truth, or to give the benefit of the doubt to the office of the President and to the current occupant, regardless of the actual person, but for an increasing number of Americans, and not just Democrats, Donald J. Trump lost that presumption long ago, if not during the campaign, with the many untruths since he took office on January 20. In my case he never had it, because I have been aware of him for 47 years, since he and I were both 23 and living in NYC. For those who were not then aware, but who long ago decided not to believe him,consider that the list of non-Democrats includes the likes of Bill Kristol, Ana Navarro, Tom “@radoFreeTom” Nichols, Max Boot, and Jennifer Rubin, just for starters.
Still, it is powerful to make the observation Blow offers: that moral anarchy is upon us, which is true if this is allowed to stand without being fulling challenged.
Blow offers more narrative, including yesterdays’ meeting with the high Russian officials in the Oval Office (although he does not offer the further criticism some have offered of his allowing Russian electronic devices into the White House).
Blow then asserts his strong belief in the need for an independent investigator, because he neither trusts anything coming out of the White House and he does not believe we can depend upon a Congress which he calls “feckless.”
Then come his final two paragraphs, the last of which I will repeat, although you read it in my title.
This is not about partisanship, but patriotism. We must protect this country from moral corrosion, at best, and actual destruction, at worst.
If this doesn’t stink to you, your nose is broken.
I think we need to absolutely focus on that penultimate paragraph. So let’s parse it
This is not about partisanship, but patriotism. That is the point that was made during the campaign by many Republicans.
We must protect this country from moral corrosion, at best, and actual destruction, at worst.
We can argue whether this is worse or not as bad as the Saturday Night Massacre, but there should be little doubt that we face the possibility of a real constitutional crisis — if this President, whose campaign and associates are under investigation for possible collusion with the Russian interference in our elections, can shut down this investigation, then where are their checks and balances? If Republicans on the Hill will continue to give him license with approving his appointments many of whom are dedicated to dismantling protections for ordinary Americans on behalf of corporate interests, how is that different than the nature of Fascism? If there is no way of forcing this President to disclose his ongoing personal and familial financial interests and se we can see how he is in violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, then where is there any protection for the integrity of our liberal democracy.
Which is why I found Blow’s final sentence so compelling:
If this doesn’t stink to you, your nose is broken.