The nation’s toxic presidency just hit a new low. And I’m not talking about the firing of FBI Director James Comey. The administration’s rock bottom moment of the past 24 hours came when the Nixon Library told the news media to stop comparing Donald Trump to Richard Nixon.
Less than an hour after Comey’s discharge was announced, major news outlets posted sidebars recalling the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973. For those not yet on Social Security – and those recipients with memory loss – here’s a quick scorecard from that October Saturday of 44 years ago: Slowly sinking from the Watergate break-in scandal, Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, who was then leading the independent Watergate investigation. Richardson refused the president’s order and resigned. Nixon then passed the order to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused to fire Cox and resigned. That put Robert Bork, then solicitor general, in charge of the justice department. Bork carried out Nixon’s discharge order. Two days later the bumper stickers were out: “Impeach the Cox Sacker.” Ten months later, with impeachment proceedings underway, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
So, as the inevitable comparisons between Trump’s and Nixon’s motives to fire their investigators surfaced last night, this tweet, with the hashtag “notNixonian”, was sent out by the Richard Nixon Library: “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI.” You know you are in trouble when the ghost of Richard Nixon distances himself from you. In fairness to both sides of this intense Worst President Ever competition, it should be noted that Nixon didn’t have to fire his FBI director. J. Edgar Hoover died in sleep in May of 1972.
Although an obvious and inviting comparison, the 1973 “massacre” was not the first Nixonian image that jumped into my head as the Comey story broke. Instead, it was Nixon’s dogged insistence, expressed in a five word sentence at a November 17, 1973 news conference.
Here’s what Nixon said: “I am not a crook.”
Here’s what Trump wrote to Comey: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”
In Nixon’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not a crook, you can be pretty sure he is a crook. In Trump’s case, when a president is compelled to say he is not under FBI investigation, you know darn well he is under FBI investigation.
The most amazing aspect of this latest piece of Trump theater, is the president’s innate inability to follow his own script. Here’s how it was supposed to go: They get a nonpartisan, career deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, two weeks into the job, to write a memo recommending Comey’s discharge based on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump sycophant, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, concurs with his deputy’s recommendation, setting the stage for the Donald to fire Comey on the basis of a Clinton investigation that Clinton believes put Trump in the White House.
Get it? The key storyline of this script is that the discharge is wholly apolitical; it’s all about integrity and good government. That’s why he’s firing the guy who messed up his opponent’s investigation. Okay, so it’s not the most believable scenario in the world; it was still their script, crafted in an inexperienced writers room, where everyone figured that Democrats would welcome Comey’s Clinton-linked firing because they blame him for her election loss. Of course, days earlier, according to the New York Times, Comey asked the Justice Department for additional funds for the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and a possible link to the Trump campaign. But that would be omitted from the script. This was about how badly the FBI guy bungled the Clinton matter. Just stick to that storyline and the public will be none the wiser. Then the star had to go and improvise. Badly. He had to throw in that seemingly non sequitur of a phrase, “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation. . .” before telling the guy he is fired.
Early in my journalism career, I covered small town and village governments. There wasn’t a staff member in any of them who would have allowed a script like this to be performed. And there certainly wasn’t a mayoral aide who would have allowed their boss to allude to the very subject you are trying to avoid in discharging a department head. In a city of 20,000 people, political pros knew about optics, audience reaction and how to manage both. Those basics are either totally missing in this White House or are being ignored by a president who seems perpetually wired to deliver messages that go against his own interest.
Trump was madly tweeting this morning about Democrats who couldn’t stand Comey expressing outrage over his discharge. It was as if he really anticipated a Palm Sunday reception from the opposition for firing the point guy on the Russian interference investigation. The unanticipated blowback was so bad for the administration that Kellyanne Conway was released from the Witness Protection Program to run interference. She insisted to reporters last night that Comey was fired because Trump had “lost confidence in him,” not because of the Russian investigation. Think about that for a while. Based on what we know about this president, God help us all if we end up with a director of the FBI who has Trump’s confidence.