The Surreal World

I don’t have anything substantial to say about James Comey’s testimony yesterday. The entire thing is surreal. Lately Scott Adams has has been saying that Trump’s supporters and detractors are running different movies in their minds and I think that’s an apt metaphor. Everybody things that they, their side, their guy is Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart when they’re actually Claude Rains or Edward Arnold. What’s a more modern comparison? They all think they’re Tom Hanks when they’re actually Ian McDiarmid.

To my ear we learned absolutely nothing yesterday. Donald Trump is an arrogant jerk who doesn’t understand the office of president. James Comey is self-serving. We knew all of that before.

Despite all of the reaction pieces one way or another at this point I think that the odds that Donald Trump is still in the Oval Office in a year are higher than the odds that James Comey is not in jail. The answer is that it still remains the case that although Trump acted improperly and probably foolishly he didn’t act illegally but James Comey did. Some twisting of case law may clear Comey but that will be bad for all of us—a return to the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.