What he hopes the Nunes memo will sell
By Masha Gessen
February 2, 2018
Let us begin with a close reading of a .. tweet. "The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process," the President wrote, on Friday. His use of the word “politicized” taps into the broadly shared image of politics as something dirty and discredited: to politicize something is to sully it. One might argue that, although law-enforcement agencies should be protected from the forces of electoral and party politics, they are, by definition, political: they insure the observance of laws that result from the political process ...
In the world that Trump has always inhabited, all that has ever mattered, apparently, is who is in charge. If something or someone went against his wishes, he fired that person. The more people he fired, the more successful he was, and the more successful he was, the more people he fired. As President, Trump has been shocked to discover that firing people is both harder and less effective than he has always known it to be. He fired James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and it didn’t stop the investigation. Trump, a man who generally has no time for the actual workings of government, is concerned enough with the difficulty of firing federal employees that he included the issue among his major policy proposals in his State of the Union address: he said that he would ask Congress to authorize every Cabinet member to summarily fire people in his or her agency. That was an applause line (among many applause lines). And yet here he is, the most powerful man in the world, helpless to quash an investigation that annoys and frightens him ...
... It contradicts Trump’s understanding of the world precisely because political institutions work differently than business, especially the sort of twentieth-century family-owned business that has shaped Trump’s understanding of norms ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-trump-hopes-the-nunes-memo-will-sell
