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| President Trump boards the Marine One helicopter in Maryland, January 26, 2017 |
The president has become
a farce to be reckoned with.
The media, the opposition, the resistance, and indeed the rest of
the Free World are playing by outmoded rules of engagement with regard to the
man in the White House. The thing is, you cannot rise above Donald Trump,
you cannot go under him, and you cannot engage him in a conventional way.
Before he became president, you could basically ignore him—he was a local joke,
after all. Now that he’s commander in chief, you must resist him, with
everything that is in you and in every way you can. As anyone who has followed
his jerry-rigged career from the 1980s onward will tell you, Trump just drags
you to the bottom of the pond every time. Decades ago, he was a short-fingered vulgarian tooling
around town in a mauve stretch limo, reeking of Brut. In those days,
competitors, subcontractors, politicians, and wives were the ones who found
themselves mired in the Trump muck. Now it is the country that’s up to its
knees in it.
With
Trump, everything past is prologue. On the day after his inauguration, while
millions in the U.S. and around the world protested his improbable election,
Trump went to C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. The ostensible purpose
of the visit was to patch things up after he had repeatedly trashed the
intelligence community in the weeks leading up to his swearing-in. Trump’s
speech was short, just 15 minutes, but even here, after paying lip service to
the C.I.A. and its heritage, he went off piste,
claiming that his beef with the intelligence community was a figment of the
media’s imagination—as was the slim size of the crowd at his inaugural. These
complete fabrications were made despite all printed, oral, and visual evidence
to the contrary. That he spoke these words standing before the marble wall of
117 stars representing the lives of the men and women from the agency who had
died in the line of duty was troubling enough. Across the hall from him,
however—and in plain sight—was another marble wall, with a clearly visible
quote from John 8:32 put there by former C.I.A. director Allen Dulles: AND YE
SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.
Had
Trump heeded those words, his presidency wouldn’t be so trussed up in the
Gordian knot of his appalling lies, contradictions, and deceptions. His
presidency is effectively doomed—it’s only a question now of how and when it
will end. Treason? Impeachment? Incapacity?
Until that day, you should be forgiven if you think you are suffering from
extreme, full-blown P.T.S.D.—President Trump Stress Disorder. You are not
alone. A serial liar in the office or home is one thing—and stressful enough.
But a serial liar in the highest office in the land is something else
altogether. Couple that with an erratically fragile ego, a severely diminished
mental capacity, a lacerating temper, and access to the nuclear codes, and it’s
going to get a whole lot hotter in here.
If
you think you are having a tough time of it since
the election, please have some sympathy for the journalists, career civil
servants, and White House supplicants who have to deal with Trumpian levels of
insanity on a minute-to-minute basis. Trumpian! The word “trump” formerly was a verb
used in polite bridge and whist circles. Trump, the man, is now up there with
Hercules and Sisyphus with his own branded adjective. I’m not completely sure
what it stands for. But when it finally settles into the lexicon, I’m certain
that it will be a disconcerting combination of petulant, preening, ignorant,
shameless, vulgar, paranoid, vainglorious, reckless, imperious, impulsive,
unhinged, callous, corrosive, narcissistic, intemperate, juvenile, disloyal,
venal, chaotic, squalid—what have I forgotten? Oh, yes!—and just
mind-numbingly, epically incompetent.
In
removing not only F.B.I. director James Comey but
also Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, in the middle of sweeping
investigations into Trump’s links to the Russians as well as their role in the
election, the president committed about as open-and-shut a case of obstruction
of justice as you are going to find outside of a banana republic. Comey’s
contemporaneous notes to himself of an Oval Office meeting involving the
investigation of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn—“I hope you can let this go,” the president
urged—are merely proof of what was already clear. I suspect we’ll be seeing a
lot more of Comey’s detailed and verbatim accounts; he will not be an
unpublished author for long. In the olden days, when Trump sent threatening legal
letters to competitors or journalists (and I was on the receiving end of a
number of them), they were generally first sent to the New York Post’s “Page
Six,” which is where most of the targets read his complaints about them for the
first time. When Comey learned from a television report that he had been
sacked, it came as no surprise to serious Trump scholars. The F.B.I. chief was
just the most recent victim of the president’s rules of combat. The Oval Office
cameos the day after the Comey firing, by the Russian foreign minister and
ambassador, followed by Richard Nixon’s Angel of Death, Henry Kissinger, added
a Marx Brothers Night
at the Opera element
to the whole episode. It was later revealed that only a TASS photographer had
been allowed into the Russkifest and that Trump had divulged classified
information about ISIS to the Russian guests, compromising the source and
jeopardizing a key intelligence relationship. A different Marx—not one of the
brothers—had a famous remark about history repeating itself first as tragedy,
then as farce. Trump has it the other way around.
As
the country emerged from the ill-fated first 100 days of the Trump presidency,
the odor of permanent scandal was already palpable. The Comey firing, the Comey
memo, the secrets spilled by Trump to his Russian visitors, and the appointment
of Special Counsel Robert Mueller were merely the capstone to weeks of chaos
and conflict of interest. Gobbling up headlines before Comeygate were Flynn’s
paid links to Russian president Vladimir Putin and
the Kushner family’s craven attempt to lure Chinese investors to a New Jersey
luxury-apartment project with the promise of EB-5 visas and a tacit connection
to the White House. When it comes to the president’s extended family, if this
is what they think they can get away with out in the open, you can only imagine
what they are up to in the shadows. Trump says that he has no business dealings
with the Russians. My guess is that this is an out-and-out lie. If, on the
outside chance, he doesn’t actually have Russian investors, it certainly hasn’t
been for lack of trying. And it would prove that even Russian oligarchs have
their standards.
In
describing the events surrounding Russkigate, making any sort of reference to Seven Days in May—John
Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller about the attempted overthrow of a president
going easy on the Soviet Union—is almost too obvious. Instead, you could cast
the entire Comey affair with actors from Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Jimmy Stewart as Comey, Claude Raines
as Jeff Sessions, Eugene Pallette as Steve Bannon, Guy Kibbee as Sean Spicer, Porter Hall as Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein, and devilish old Edward Arnold as Trump himself. Sadly, though, the
Trump administration is no Capra movie. If anything, it will probably end up
being more like a Quentin Tarantino film—the final act being a Mexican standoff
with all the participants’ lawyers in a circle, aiming their guns at one
another.
Please
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