Trump Just Got Scarier

Our man-child president sparks the biggest political crisis since Watergate.

- Jonathan Chait

The disorienting quality of the Donald Trump administration lies in the tension between the vastness of the threat it poses to the health of the republic and the smallness of the president himself. That juxtaposition of the terrifying and the ridiculous has been on display from the very beginning, when Trump personally attempted to bully the acting director of the National Park Service into vouchsafing obviously fake estimates of attendees at his inauguration. Every week brings new confusing episodes that could signal either a tantrum or a coup, and this has had a numbing effect on all of us observing his recent assault on the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet for all the farcical qualities on the surface, Trump’s bid to manipulate the nation’s highest law-enforcement agency presents a true crisis on a scale not seen since Watergate.

The president has the legal right to fire the FBI director. But there is a reason why FBI directors receive ten-year terms, as opposed to the normal at-will service of other Executive-branch officials, who customarily depart when the president who appointed them leaves office. The office holds vast powers, and if it is not walled off from a president’s interests it can provide almost limitless potential for abuse. A vital, bipartisan norm of American politics holds that the president can only fire the FBI director for cause— not to install a loyalist, and certainly not to influence an investigation into the president or his associates.

On May 9, the administration announced that Trump had fired James Comey at the urging of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, allegedly on account of Comey’s unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton during the campaign. The pretext that Trump had decided, ten months after the fact, to dismiss Comey for speaking