Tuesday, May 16, 2017 9:02 PM
Little things go unnoticed in all the hub-bub—like the continued absence of a replacement for James Comey at the FBI. The only other FBI Director to ever get fired was fired for blatant corruption. And Comey hasn’t been criticized by Trump, in his firing—and certainly not accused of doing wrong. Trump presented it as a preference-based thing, like a re-mod he’d been mulling, just a change.
However, if Comey did no wrong and the president simply wanted someone else in there, why did he wait until the day he fired the FBI Director before he started considering a list of potential replacements? If there was no urgency to the change, why wasn’t a replacement standing by, already chosen, for being better suited to the country’s (and the president’s) needs?
That’s not what the president did—he ‘got rid’ of Comey, and worked out the next steps afterwards—Trump didn’t need someone else in that post—he simply needed Comey out of it. And that has the appearance of obstruction—even if it doesn’t meet the technical, legal definition of it.
My feeling is that Trump dropped a stitch and had planned to make a ‘contest’ out of the selection of a new FBI Director, complete with graphics and dramatic announcements—hoping to crawl back into the reality game-show realm he’s so comfortable in. Now he’s furious, because everyone else is looking at it the wrong way—and it’s ruining his contest plans. Nobody even much cared about what he and Erdogan talked about today—it’s all Comey, Comey, Comey.
Trump should have picked a replacement—he should have been getting ready to act while he waited for a ‘good time’ to act (“and, by the way, there is no good time to do it…”—our fearless leader). ‘Foresight’ is an important part of the presidency—‘Vision’ is nice, but it don’t pay the bills. In Donald Trump we are finding out what a sore lack foresight can be, in a president.
Trump is used to being the team leader—but he doesn’t know how to be a team player. A bully like him would have never made it up through the ranks of the political arena—and no one so ignorant of the backstory of America, and so unpracticed in the art of compromise—could ever become president within the ‘system’. He had to catapult in, a pure neophyte, from a world that sneers at politics. And many Americans enjoyed sneering at politics, and voted for him.
But now the harsh reality is this: our new president has less working knowledge of Washington than the littlest Congressional page, the very first-day SCOTUS law-clerk, the Pentagon private, or the least-senior White House wait-staffer. President of the United States of America is not a learn-as-you-go job—and we are witnessing the proof of that today. He didn’t even ask his wife if she’d be willing to spend four years First-Lady-ing.
Part of the problem is that Trump’s Traveling Circus becomes more and more embarrassing—and that narrows the pool of people willing to work for him, with every passing day. The Republicans are starting to realize that carrying this guy for four years of ‘legislative gravy-train-ing’ isn’t going to be as easy as they hoped. And if Trump makes it to November 2018, who knows where Congress will end up? So get ready.
