Susan Collins, of All People, Engages in Double Speak: A Manifestation of Fear?
Maine Senator Susan Collins’s defense of the firing of James Comey was a very peculiar move—Collins being someone who is known for her willingness to buck the party line, in particular supporting the funding of Planned Parenthood (successfully), and voted (successfully! joined by McCain and Graham) against repeal of Obama administration regulations restricting methane emissions. (Whether Pruitt will enforce the regulation is, unfortunately another matter.)
So. . . what calls for explanation:
What’s most troubling is that an independent-minded Republican would resort to specious public statements in defense of Trump.
Collins made a point of saying Trump had “fired only James Comey, not the entire FBI.” Said in a tone of mockery, as if ridicule those who had made a “constitutional crisis” mountain out of a molehill, the molehill being ill-advised but perfectly legal action. Which was either the height of disingenuousness or sheer stupidity on her part, take your pick—either one would be objectionable, and just. . . weird.
Does the senator from Maine either believe, or want us to believe, that the Comey firing was not a clear signal that anyone who incurs Donald Trump’s disfavor risks losing not only his job but his dignity and reputation? Such was the punishment meted out to Comey, not even given the courtesy of a forewarning, much less an opportunity to resign gracefully. Comey, who got the news from a TV news program running in the background as he addressed a group of FBI employees, was initially so incredulous that he thought the report was a prank. Incredulity soon gave way to humiliation.
Just the way Trump likes it. The “You’re fired” motif of Celebrity Apprentice was more than a crowd-pleasing punch line; it expressed the thuggish mentality of the show’s producer, a delight in exercising power along with inflicting emotional pain.
Any executive appointee is now on notice that his or her head could roll for triggering Trump’s pique, and the axe could fall without notice. Who’s next? It’s a low threshold given the susceptibility to insult of a man with the emotional maturity of a playground bully.
It’s surprising to me that Collins went along with the damage-control campaign orchestrated by Mitch McConnell. It might be a measure of just how much fear Trump’s leanings toward gangster rule has fostered among legislators. Echoes of The Godfather. Ms. Collins does not want to wake one morning to find the severed head of her favorite pet bleeding into the sheets.*
More of the “What’s the Big Problem?” Theme
Filling in for the absent press secretary Sean Spicer, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose demeanor suggests she is constantly fighting off a toothache, asked members of the press why they were so focused on “process.” Wasn’t it enough that, in the President’s words, James Comey was “doing a bad job?”
Here’s Sarah Sanders being just as disingenuous as Senator Collins. “Process” was at least eighty percent of what was at stake in the firing of Comey, and Sanders knows it. That became all the clearer once the president had kicked the legs out from under her cover story about the DOJ memo, when he asserted he would have fired Comey regardless of whatever the Justice Department had to say. Eventually, we found out the Rod Rosenstein wrote the scathing memo about Comey knowing full well that Trump was going to fire Comey anyway.
(You have to wonder how both Sarah Sanders and Sean Spicer manage to soldier on with their defense of the outrageous, and then face themselves in the mirror. You also have to wonder how zealously Rod Rosenstein will defend the president, after the latter needlessly put him in the hot seat. . . pretending, for a couple of days, that Rosenstein’s memo, not the Russian investigation, was the trigger for Comey’s ouster. In both cases, Trump seems happy to exploit his underlings to shield him at a sacrifice to their own integrity. I don’t think we’ll have to wait another three years for him to cross a line into gross abuse of office. Question is, if he does cross the line, how will a supine Republican Party deal with it? Finally, Mike Pence, who, after defending the president’s “strong decisive action”supposedly based on a DOJ memo, found himself once again the butt of jokes, when the “strong decisive action” was revealed to be a Trump hissy fit.)
I’m going to stick my neck out here and hypothesize that the end of Trump presidency may come about as the result of semi-military coup, with Mattis and/or McMaster prevailing upon Mr. Trump to step down.
Republicans such as Mitch McConnell have made much of the alleged “crocodile tears” of liberals who had lambasted James Comey in the past, now making him out to be a wrongly traduced hero. This is a case of deflection typical of the crafty Majority Leader. The argument to be made about inconsistency among Democrats is valid, but is really beside the point. The point concerns Trump telling everyone within his power that if you cross me there will be hell to pay—a hell for you and anyone connected with you. You will be humiliated as well as kicked out. That is a violation in spirit of constitutional democracy, and there’s no credibly spinning it otherwise. If any person can read between the lines, and if anyone can understand the importance of “process,” it’s McConnell. Whether in this case what moves him is more the usual partisanship, or fear of Trump (“Trump” standing for his rabid base), remains to be seen. Anyone conscious of the degree of Trump’s vindictiveness has to put it into their calculations.
Dark Clouds: an Agent of Distrust
Senator Benjamin Sasse (R-Nebraska) was recently interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his sober message was, in essence, Beware. The Trump firing, and the friction it has sown between and within political parties, are symptoms of a deeper and long-evolving problem, recently amplified by the potential of social media for chaos, divisiveness, and deceit. The threat of Putin, he said, was not his supporting any candidate or political party, it was rather “to make Americans distrust each other. And he’s winning.”
What logically follows—not that Sasse was undiplomatic enough to make this point—is that Donald Trump is an agent of distrust, and an agent without compare. He is in his element fomenting anger, paranoia, and divisiveness. He throws one bomb after another into an already fragile public square, and has people scrambling to gain piecemeal tactical political advantages. The only things that bring us together are sports and music, and even they have been weaponized to make one partisan point or another.
Silver Lining: A Lack of Coherence
I count among our blessings the fact that Donald Trump has no overarching strategy of governance, and no coherent plan to put his agenda (such as it is) into action. Some pundit (I forget who) raised the question of, if Trump really wants to remake the system, why has he not availed himself of all the tools at his disposal—in particular, making the hundreds of appointments that might put systemic power into his hands, top to bottom? The sort of plays a Hitler, or a Stalin, a Saddam Hussein, or an Al-Assad would make, en route to true dictatorship. Instead, Trump seems to preoccupy himself with grand gestures, settling personal scores, and selling his political brand. On a day-to-day basis, he is driven by impulse, veering from one position to another at a pace that leaves his own advisors and spokespeople gasping for breath, and groping in the dark, for explanations and excuses.
* For a parallel drawn between Trump and The Godfather, see this piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in the New Yorker: Comey’s Firing and the Look of Power