Democrats Would Never Have Been Cool with Trump Firing Comey

trump-apprentice fired nbc
NBC
John Hayward

One of the more curious notions floating through the James Comey termination maelstrom is that Democrats would have accepted Trump firing Comey in the early days of the new administration, without much complaint. This is a deeply silly idea. Democrats would have gone at least as bonkers as they are today if Trump fired Comey as one of his first official acts.

Some of the suggestions that Comey should have been sacked on January 20th come from well-intentioned commentators such as former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, who said in a Breitbart News Daily interview on Thursday that his “only real criticism of the Trump administration decision” is that it was not made on Day One. Bolton thought the case against Comey was so clear-cut by January that there was no reason for delay.

That may be so, but no one should be under any delusions that Democrats would have accepted such a decision like mature, emotionally stable adults. If Trump had fired Comey as one of his very first actions upon taking office, the howls of “RUSSIAGATE COVERUP!” would have been absolutely deafening, mixed with snarky assertions that Trump clearly cared more about thwarting the Russia investigation than fulfilling his campaign promises.

Democrats and their media were even obsessed with Russian election interference in January than they are today. President Trump had not yet issued his famous complaint about “wiretapping,” which has certainly caused him some grief in the long run, but also let a great deal of the hot air out of the media’s Trump investigation balloon.

Suddenly every Democrat media outlet was obliged to admit that all of their stories about secret recordings that could destroy Trump and his inner circle were pure speculation, based on untrustworthy anonymous sources. If Trump had fired Comey in January or February, Democrats would have shrieked about a conspiracy to destroy the bombshell surveillance tapes they would later admit do not exist.

Also, it was not until March that Comey gave congressional testimony to the effect that several people associated with Trump’s presidential campaign were under investigation for possible contacts with Russian officials and agents, but not Trump himself. There is still, to this very moment, great controversy over whether Comey definitively stated Trump is not personally the subject of any investigation, or whether he told the president as much. If Trump had fired Comey before March, Democrats and their media would have gone into orbit with assertions that Trump was attempting to crush an investigation that was targeting him.

Democrats are frantically trying to memory-hole their own condemnations of Comey, who is now the greatest law enforcement officer since Wyatt Earp, according to the Party nomenklatura. In truth, some of them were calling for Comey to be fired over six months ago, back when Barack Obama would have been the one signing the pink slip. But critical mass for Democrat hatred of James Comey was not achieved until less than two weeks ago, when Hillary Clinton explicitly blamed him for stealing the electoral victory from her, in one of the few major media interviews she has given since the election.

This interview and the left-wing fever-swamp reaction to it are the main reason Stephen Colbert’s audience thought they were supposed to applaud wildly at news of Comey’s firing until he set them straight about current Party orthodoxy. It may have been a little naive for Trump to take these Democrat hacks seriously and think he would make them happy by dismissing the man Hillary Clinton painted as an election-stealing stooge of Vladimir Putin, but it was not completely unreasonable for him to think a bipartisan consensus had formed. (Or, if you prefer, it was unreasonable for Trump and his advisers to think Democrats would be reasonable about this.)

The hot new Democrat talking point to cover their hypocrisy is that it would have been perfectly acceptable for hypothetical President Hillary Clinton to fire Comey, but not actual President Donald Trump. Imagine how much more quickly they would have excreted that talking point earlier in the year, when they were still mooning over the popular vote and cursing the Electoral College. 

Look back over the roller coaster of Democrat freak-outs over every Trump administration story — large or small, real or invented by the media and its favorite leakers — and try to spot a perfect moment when Trump could have fired Comey without igniting a firestorm of outrage. If he had done it during a slow news cycle, it would have given his White House one less break from hysterical media seizures. If he had chosen a holiday, he would have been accused of trying to hide his dastardly deed. If Trump had acted during one of the few moments adversary media cut him some slack — say, right after he enforced Barack Obama’s farcical “red line” against Syrian chemical weapons — he would have been derided as a bumbling amateur for ruining one of his own good news cycles.

And if Trump had fired Comey within hours of a Democrat loudly demanding a change of FBI director … well, as you’ve seen over the past few days, Democrat leaders can switch from howling for Comey’s hide to declaring that Trump caused a constitutional crisis by firing him in a matter of hours. Their convictions would have been equally supple in January, February, March, or April.

As for the future, who can say whether a better moment was coming later this month, later this summer, or later this year? Comey might well have said or done something that would intensify Democrats’ conviction that Donald Milhouse Trump was Saturday Night Massacring him.

There was little hope the investigations Democrats are so concerned about would wrap up anytime soon. As Dan McLaughlin noted yesterday at National Review, what Comey described to Congress in March is a counterintelligence investigation of Russian activity in the 2016 election, not a criminal probe, and those can go on for a very long time. “It is likely to be conducted in secret, without any endpoint, and without the goal of indicting anyone,” as McLaughlin put it.

Keeping Comey in office until such a protracted process reached a definitive conclusion would have made a mockery of Trump’s argument that Comey’s conduct warranted dismissal. “Why did you keep him around for so long if you really thought he couldn’t be trusted to run the FBI?” Democrats would have howled, in exactly the same shrill tones they are currently using to claim Comey was bounced out to keep him from uncovering the truth about Trump and Putin.

The current media narrative is that Trump ordered Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to whip up a fig-leaf report to justify what Trump wanted to do anyway. We endured a tidal wave of completely false media reports claiming Rosenstein was so upset that he was being used as a scapegoat that he threatened to quit.

But why shouldn’t we accept that Trump wanted to fire Comey for some time (as the president himself said in an interview Thursday) and was spurred to take quick action by Rosenstein’s extremely persuasive report? Look at the reaction to the Comey sacking with Rosenstein’s letter on the books, and imagine what would have happened if Trump had acted before Rosenstein was on the job to write it.

One of the most under-reported aspects of the Comey imbroglio is that just about every serious analyst who reads the entirety of Rosenstein’s letter seems to agree Comey’s termination was justified. It’s a grand slam. If Trump took it seriously, why should he have kept Comey around for a few more months, in the vain hope the Democrat Party might grow up and abandon its “Russia stole the election from Hillary” fantasy? Is there any conceivable outcome of any investigation that would convince them to drop that narrative?

President Trump is under no obligation to run the U.S. government as a nursery for emotionally unstable Democrats. The FBI is important, as everyone seems to agree in varying tones of voice today. Putting off a decision as momentous as replacing the FBI Director because Chuck Schumer might throw a fit is ridiculous. If the Democrats have proven anything since January, it’s that their little “Resistance” role-playing game will oblige them to go bananas over everything. They’re essentially trying to take the U.S. government hostage to keep their idiotic political narrative alive. They cannot be allowed to succeed.

We must also stop allowing the political class to shield all incompetent government officials from discipline and termination. That’s been going on for far too long, as the grotesque scandal of the Department of Veterans Affairs dramatically illustrates.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air argues that Trump underestimated the political dimensions of firing Comey because he is still getting used to the way things work in Washington:

The picture as it now appears seems to be that of a business executive used to acting as the full and only authority within an organization, a point to which Andrew also alludes. Governing does not work in that fashion within the American system — power is shared between branches, and officials have their own power bases even within branches. Presidents may have the technical authority to fire people on a whim (at least political appointees), but exercising that power whimsically and arbitrarily comes with significant political costs. Trump and his team hadn’t learned that yet, and it remains to be seen whether they’ve learned it from this episode. Even if they do learn their lesson, it might be too late to start the snowball effect that they’ve created.

It’s fair enough to ding the Trump White House for mishandling the politics and P.R. of Comey’s firing — but the thing is, America wanted a businessman president who would shake up Washington, drain the swamp, and put an end to the D.C. P.C. games. They wanted a guy who would fire hyper-partisan operatives, corrupt bureaucrats, parasites, bumblers, and even well-meaning folks who just couldn’t handle important jobs. They chose the man whose most famous quote, prior to the 2016 election, was “You’re fired!”

And now we’re supposed to think it’s a scandal that Trump fired an official whose competence and judgment was severely questioned by top elected officials from both parties? On the contrary, let James Comey’s pink slip be the first of many. The American people pulled off the most stunning political upset of the modern era to make this happen. They didn’t elect Hillary Clinton, the empress of Big Government, the queen of influence peddling, rent-seeking, and featherbedding. They elected the Terminator. Let him terminate.

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