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 :

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