The Nation: We may be witnessing the unraveling of Donald Trump's Presidency
In his paranoia about his legitimacy as president, Trump is pushing us to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
By Joan Walsh
https://www.thenation.com/article/we-may-be-witnessing-the-unraveling-of-donald-trumps-presidency/
Donald Trump began his presidency in a troubling crisis of legitimacy, given charges
that Russia meddled in the election to help him defeat Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton
won the popular vote nonetheless. This crisis is now devouring him.
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Trump’s cover story for Comey’s dismissal—that brand new deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted him gone, ironically due to his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices last year—has completely come undone in 24 hours. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Comey told Congressional leaders that days before his firing he’d submitted to Rosenstein a request for resources to expand the Russia probe. By Thursday morning, a half-dozen major news outlets produced deeply reported pieces, some based on as many as 30 sources, revealing that Trump has been seething over Comey’s handling of the investigation into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials—and that his anger hardened into a plan to fire him last week. The Washington Post reported that Rosenstein threatened to resign, angry at being falsely depicted as the person behind Comey’s firing. (The Justice Department is denying that report.)
It seems that on May 3, Comey committed his unforgivable sin while testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump signaled his anxiety with a tweetstorm the day before. “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” one tweet read. Comey sealed his fate when he acknowledged his actions might have played a role in Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. It made him “mildly nauseous,” he said, to think he tipped the race to the Republican. Comey himself was confirming Trump’s darkest fear, the font of his angsty, crazy late night and early morning tweets: that he hadn’t won the presidency legitimately.
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If there’s any remaining doubt that his personal legitimacy crisis is driving his crazy behavior, Trump is dispelling it by choosing today to sign an executive order establishing a commission to investigate (false) charges of voter fraud, headed by ace voter-suppressor Kris Kobach. Trump seems so comfortable with the rule-breaking and corruption he mastered in the private sector, he doesn’t completely understand that he might want to shield his personal motivations more artfully. He’s claimed Clinton built her popular vote margin with illegal voters; now that he’s dispatched with Comey, he’ll use Kobach to slay his other legitimacy phantom.
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