The events of this week are revealing with a new level of clarity that President Trump and the White House have ventured far beyond unconventional levels of dishonesty. Instead, they are revealing on their part something more remarkable and challenging to our system: a kind of deep rot of bad faith — a profound contempt for democratic process and the possibility of agreement on shared reality — that is wildly beyond anything in recent memory and strains the limits of our political vocabulary.
The precipitating moment is the clash between the White House and the FBI over the ongoing investigation of possible Russia-Trump campaign collusion, and in this context, The New York Times has some remarkable new reporting on Trump’s mental state and the reaction to it of the people around him. They are absorbing the fallout, now that Trump’s tweets — in which he claimed that former President Barack Obama wiretapped him and that the Trump-Russia story was “fake news” — were effectively demolished by the testimony of FBI director James Comey:
People close to the president say Mr. Trump’s Twitter torrent had less to do with fact, strategy or tactic than a sense of persecution bordering on faith: He simply believes that he was bugged in some way, by someone, and that evidence will soon appear to back him up….
The president, people close to him have said over the last several weeks, has become increasingly frustrated at his inability to control the narrative of his action-packed presidency, after being able to dominate the political discourse or divert criticism by launching one of his signature Twitter attacks.
The president, people close to him have said over the last several weeks, has become increasingly frustrated at his inability to control the narrative of his action-packed presidency, after being able to dominate the political discourse or divert criticism by launching one of his signature Twitter attacks.
Let’s pause to consider how remarkable it is that those paragraphs appeared in a major newspaper.
