The problem is the president
By
LeRoy Goldman
Columnist
BlueRidgeNow Online
May 21, 2017
I’ve
got this feeling I can’t shake. For me, that feeling goes back to
late 1972, about six months after burglars were arrested in the
headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate
Complex in Washington.
I
believed that what appeared to be an insignificant burglary was in
fact something much more sinister that reached into the White House.
At that time, I was staff director of the Senate Health Subcommittee.
I shared my belief with colleagues in the Senate. Every one of them
had basically the same reaction: “Dream on, Lee.”
You
know the rest. On Aug. 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned to
avert impeachment. Happily, that ended a constitutional crisis.
Today
we face another constitutional crisis. How and when it will end isn’t
clear. But there is no doubt that, only four months into the Trump
presidency, the White House is in self-inflicted disarray.
The
chaos is now to the point that the president is reported to be
considering a wholesale restructuring of his White House staff. That
won’t solve the problem because, although the staff is a joke, the
problem is the president.
Philip
Rucker reported in The Washington Post on May 13 that a GOP figure
close to the White House “mused privately about whether Trump was
in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.” Panelists on
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” have reported alleged occasions in which
the president is overheard screaming at the television. There are now
legitimate questions concerning the president’s emotional
stability.
With
the exception of Trump’s successful nomination of Judge Neil
Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the rest of the past four months has
been an unfolding nightmare. But now the president’s firing of FBI
Director James Comey has taken him beyond the point of no return.
It’s the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back. The
straw will be called obstruction of justice.
The
unfolding saga of Trump’s firing of Comey is nothing but bizarre.
Inexplicable doesn’t even come close. The president summoned
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein to the Oval Office and requested a document that laid out
the basis for Comey’s dismissal. Rosenstein complied and drafted a
document that asserted Comey had done serious damage to the FBI’s
reputation by violating Department of Justice policies concerning the
2016 Clinton email investigation.
On
its face, the document doesn’t pass the smell test because
candidate Trump heaped praise on Comey’s handling of the Clinton
email matter several times last year. Nonetheless, that was the basis
that the White House press secretary and the vice president used to
defend Trump and describe why he had fired Comey. But within 24
hours, they were all made to look like fools by President Trump.
n
an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, the president linked
Comey’s firing to the ongoing FBI investigation of Russia and
possible Trump campaign collusion. He stated, “I said, you know
this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” He
also called Comey a “showboat” and said that he had on three
occasions asked Comey if he, Trump, was under investigation.
Finally,
Trump said Comey told him he was not under investigation, and he
tweeted that Comey needed to be careful by suggesting that their
discussions may have been taped by the White House.
The
day after firing Comey, Trump met with the Russian foreign minister
and its ambassador to the United States. In that meeting, according
to The Washington Post, Trump gave the Russians “code-word”
information, our highest level of classified information, concerning
intelligence on the Islamic State.
It’s
inconceivable that Comey would have answered the president’s
inappropriate questions respecting whether he was under
investigation. The president has trapped himself. It was only a
matter of time before the deputy attorney general appointed a special
prosecutor (he named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special
counsel on Wednesday). It’s now only a matter of time before
Comey tells us his version of his discussions with the president. And
it’s only a matter of time before Congress will be forced to
initiate impeachment proceedings.
In
a piece in The Atlantic on May 12, James Fallows, who began his
career writing about Watergate, details the reasons the Comey affair
is worse than Watergate. In it, he states that Trump “is impulsive,
and ignorant, and apparently beyond the reach of any control, even
his own.”
The
only way I can comprehend the president’s behavior is to assume
that when he goes to sleep every night, he erases all memory of what
happened that day. Thus the president awakes with no knowledge of
what he did the day before, and no way to learn from his past
behavior.
It’s
a new Groundhog Day in the Oval Office every day!
Times-News
columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at :
