If you’d got complacent about Trump, let Comey’s sacking shake you out of it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/10/trump-sacking-comey-fbi-director

Version 0 of 1.

Immediately after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January, the word of the hour was “normalisation”. That, Trump’s opponents agreed, was the danger to be resisted: the prospect that people would soon grow used to the Trump presidency – that, despite everything, it would somehow come to seem normal.

Over the 110 days since, normalisation has indeed looked possible. Partly through simple fatigue, Trump actions that should bring outrage – the egregious conflicts of interest, the naked use of public office to advance private business interests, the coddling of dictators – often produce instead a weary shrug. It’s hard to maintain a permanent state of fury, and so Americans and those watching from around the world have risked becoming inured to what is, in fact, a deeply abnormal presidency.

And then something comes along that is so big and so shocking, it snaps you out of your slumber. The sacking of FBI director James Comey is, for the moment at least, one of those events.

Obstruction of justice was article 1 of the rap sheet against Richard Nixon

It’s easy to get diverted by the circumstances around the firing. The fact that the letter of dismissal was delivered by Trump’s personal bodyguard, a move that comes with more than a whiff of Tony Soprano. Or that Comey learned he’d been booted out via the news alerts he saw flashed on TV screens while in distant Los Angeles – far away from his office and therefore unable to remove any crucial documents, had he been minded to do so. Or that even senior White House staff had no warning this was coming. Or that Trump’s inner circle is so deluded, it thought this move wouldn’t cause a firestorm but would be warmly greeted on all sides.

Or the absurdity of the supposed reasoning supplied by Trump and his lieutenants at the justice department, including the accusation that Comey had been too hard on Hillary Clinton over the investigation into her emails. As if. The idea that Trump fired Comey now, nearly a year later, for making “derogatory” remarks about Clinton in July 2016 or for revealing on the eve of the election that the FBI investigation into the emails affair had been reopened – a decision Trump praised at the time as showing “guts” – is laughable.

But to focus on any of these points, no matter how appalling, is to stray from the heart of the matter: that a president has sacked the head of the FBI in the midst of an active investigation into that president and his team. Comey was investigating the Trump campaign over alleged collusion with Russia – and Trump has fired him.

To the naked eye, that looks like obstruction of justice. It is quite true that a US president has the power to fire an FBI director. But it has only happened once before. (Bill Clinton dismissed William Sessions in 1993 for using a government plane for private business.) That’s because, as Harvard’s Prof Noah Feldman argues, the secure tenure of the FBI director has been understood as an inviolable norm, part of America’s unwritten constitution – designed to safeguard the independence of law enforcement from political interference.

That is what Trump has trampled on. It’s why scholars and others are saying that, if the day ever comes when articles of impeachment are tabled against Trump, the first will be a charge of obstruction of justice. That was article 1 of the rap sheet against Richard Nixon too – though it’s striking that the library of the disgraced former president swiftly tweeted that their man had never actually sunk as low as firing an FBI director. Trump’s position is now so perilous that comparisons to Nixon are deemed insulting … to Nixon.

Impeachment remains an impossibility, of course, thanks to Republican control of the Congress. That might change in next year’s mid-term elections. In the meantime, it will fall to individual so-called “moderate” Republican members of the House and Senate to examine their consciences and decide how long they can tolerate this. They claim their loyalty is to the country and its constitution rather than blindly to their party. That claim is now tested. Can they sit by and do nothing while a president blocks an investigation into alleged collusion with a hostile foreign power, aimed at derailing a US election? Or will they find the guts to demand an independent investigation, perhaps by a special prosecutor?

Trump will doubtless seek to distract attention again, replacing the Comey story with another one. That’s his modus operandi. But for now he has reminded everyone of what is too often forgotten: that the behaviour of this presidency is not tolerable – and it is not normal.