Democrats in Peril

New English Review: I will just make a prediction and try to keep out of the swamp of Trump-obsession as the weeks unfold. The anti-Trump movement is now in inexorable decline; it is a little like the Nixon defense forces after the Saturday Night drama in October 1973, with the departure of the attorney general, his deputy, and the special prosecutor, though Mr. Nixon had broken no laws. Nearly a year ago, as President and Mrs. Trump and their entourage departed for the Middle East, the Vatican, and a NATO meeting, David Gergen, a fair and fine man intermittently rendered delirious by the swamp mosquitoes at CNN, said, “We are moving into impeachment country.” This was after the firing of James Comey as FBI director. Nate Silver of ABC said the chances of impeachment of Trump were from 25–50 percent.

Almost a year on, Comey’s deputy has been fired on the recommendation of the Department of Justice inspector general and the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and he and Comey are accusing each other of untruths (“lack of candor,” in their genteel parlance). Many high FBI officials have been demoted, and Comey, as if he inhabits a planet of different perceptions, has embarked on a book tour that is the most spectacular suicide mission since the final voyage of history’s largest battleship, the 73,000-ton Japanese Yamato. Without air cover, it set out to attack the American invasion of Okinawa. Yamato was swarmed and sunk by 360 American naval aircraft, and went to the bottom with the loss of over 3,000 Japanese sailors, having shot down about six American aircraft. Every interview Comey has had, in what was billed by his supporters at the outset as a challenge to the president’s command of media attention, has been more disastrous and self-contradictory than the preceding one. There must be millions more Americans every week who ask themselves how this vain, pretentious, and chronically moralizing hypocrite was ever set at the head of the nation’s federal police.

The Russian-collusion narrative has collapsed. The silence of Trump-Hateville is deafening. On to outrageous seizures of the papers of one of Trump’s lawyers, who has attracted attention because of the alleged consensual and genial — even if mutually unexciting – evening together of a peppy but raddled woman and the billionaire who would, a decade later, be elected president. And, in a particularly ludicrous effort to catch the fumbled and bouncing football, the Democratic party has sued the Russian government and the president’s elder sons (young Barron is spared that, if little else). These are the pathetic thrashings of denial of people who feloniously corrupted the fragile American justice apparatus in the interests of continued incumbency.  more