A Scandalous Resignation

When Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, in 2017, I was about to drive my daughter and some of her friends to a soccer tryout. I remember that the news came moments before we left; once we arrived, I sat on a bench next to the soccer field, scrolling through incredulous and fearful reactions on Twitter. The news was widely considered akin to Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, one of the most odious scandals in American history. TRUMP FIRES COMEY AMID RUSSIA INQUIRY, screamed a banner headline on the front page of The New York Times.

Now Trump, preparing for his second term as president, has decided to replace the FBI director again. The figure he picked to replace Comey—the lifelong Republican Christopher Wray—proved unable to meet Trump’s expectations for the position, which are (1) to permit Trump and his allies to violate the law with impunity, and (2) to investigate anybody who interferes with (1). Wray, wrestling with the problem of Trump’s desire to separate him from a job he apparently liked, chose to step down on his own. This raises the likelihood that the media will treat the replacement of Wray as normal administrative turnover rather than as a scandal.

But a scandal it most certainly is. By tradition, FBI directors serve 10-year terms, a norm designed to insulate the FBI from pressure to serve the president’s whims. Trump supporters have two philosophical rationalizations for his demand to violate that tradition. The lowbrow, populist version favored by Trump cultists is that Trump is beset by a “deep state” conspiracy that has kneecapped him at every turn because it is loyal to globalists, neoconservatives, or some other corrupt network. The highbrow version, preferred by conservative-movement elites, is that presidents possess an inherent right to control the executive branch from top to bottom, and all norms designed to prevent the president from abusing that power are an affront to the Constitution.

Neither theory can explain why Trump continues to go to war with people he appointed himself. Wray is not a Democrat, nor is he a Never Trumper. He’s a Republican picked by Trump. So was former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist, and his successor, William Barr, who auditioned to succeed Sessions by performing even more obsequious loyalty to Trump.

The problem that keeps arising is that there is no way to remain in Trump’s favor while following the law. In a celebratory statement posted to Truth Social, Trump claims, “Under the leadership of Christopher Wray, the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause.” Had the FBI raid actually been illegal, he could have proved that in court. He didn’t, because by taking massive troves of classified documents when he left office, keeping them in a wildly unsecured location, refusing multiple requests to return them, lying repeatedly about it, and engaging in a clumsy cover-up, Trump had given the bureau no other choice. For Wray to allow this brazen defiance of the law would have been to simply admit that the law doesn’t apply to Trump, in or out of office.

[David Frum: A constitutional crisis greater than Watergate]

But that is precisely the credo Trump demands that the bureau follow. It is why he has selected Kash Patel, a sycophant so childishly worshipful that he spelled out his loyalty to Trump in a literal children’s book portraying Trump as a virtuous king and himself as Trump’s loyal wizard. Perhaps Patel (or whomever Senate Republicans ultimately confirm for the position) will, once in office, somehow develop an adult, professionalized understanding of the rule of law. More likely, Trump’s FBI director will discover that actually locking up Trump’s enemies is hard. This was the anticlimactic outcome of the Durham investigation, Trump’s first-term campaign to imprison his foes, which resulted, after months of conservative-media salivating, in two embarrassing acquittals in court.

Still, the risk of turning the bureau over to a director who intends to abuse its powers is quite serious. Republicans tended to downplay these risks during the campaign, pointing to Trump’s first term, when Democrats and the media loudly decried Trump’s norm-violating authoritarian gambits, only for the system to hold. The fact that Trump is hunting down the very people who made the system hold is a logical flaw these Republicans have steadfastly refused to consider.

Discouragingly, Republican willpower to resist Trump’s most corrupt impulses appears to be a finite resource. When Wray announced that he was stepping down, three years short of completing his standard 10-year term, he poignantly confessed his regret: “It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway—this is not easy for me.”

It is, however, easy for Donald Trump. The president-elect had been facing the unpleasant task of firing a lifelong Republican whom he had selected himself, inviting the national media to raise ugly questions about his oft-confessed desire to turn the federal criminal-justice apparatus into a weapon of political vengeance. Instead, Wray, like so many Republicans who couldn’t stomach Trump’s demands, decided to go gentle into that good night. Nobody except Wray will remember where they were when Christopher Wray resigned.