By doing the unthinkable, Trump is normalizing conduct that, illegal or not, is by rights indefensible, intolerable, and impeachable.
For a period of hours after firing FBI Director James Comey, the Trump administration insisted that it was only following a recommendation from the Justice Department. The claim was unconvincing, but it lent a veneer of respectability to an action that gave every appearance of impeding an investigation. And then something odd happened. President Trump demolished his own team’s story.
In an interview with Lester Holt of NBC News, he declared, “I was gonna fire [Comey] regardless of [DOJ’s] recommendation.”
Still more astonishingly, he added: “And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”
So there he was, right out in the open, volunteering that he had fired an FBI director partly because that director was investigating him. It was as if Richard Nixon, in 1974, had gone on TV, after all his aides’ denials, and said, “Sure, I told the CIA to quash an FBI investigation. When I decided to do it, I said to myself, You know, this Watergate thing with Nixon is a made-up story.”
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Was Trump’s self-exposé impulsive, as some observers conjectured? Naïve? Incompetent?
None of the above. It was an exercise of the Trump doctrine, a new, strange, and surprisingly effective hack of American politics.
You may remember Nixon’s doctrine: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” (From a 1977 interview with Robert Frost.) Trump’s variant is this: “When the president does it, that means it is not abnormal.”
What Trump seems to have figured out is that people quickly adjust to behavior that is open and legal, even if it is unprecedented, antisocial, and sinister. Instead, they focus on what’s secret and illegal, assuming that secretive criminal behavior must be worse.
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In Trump’s world, that assumption does not necessarily hold. Both as a candidate and in office, this President has been startlingly able to use brazenness as a strategic weapon. His supporters will rally to him, or at least excuse him. The public will get used to him. Opponents will be left sputtering.
The most shocking, and shockingly effective, deployment of the Trump doctrine was in July of last year, during the campaign. Well aware of credible reports that Russia was stealing and revealing his opponent’s emails, Trump said this (at a press conference, no less) :
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you’ll probably be mightily rewarded by our press. That’ll be next.”
The English language provides no clearer way to urge the Russians to commit an act of cyberwar against the United States in order to subvert our democracy. Yet when I have confronted Trump supporters with that astonishing fact, they pooh-pooh it. He wasn’t serious. It wasn’t illegal. Just Trump being Trump. He talks that way, you know.
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That is the Trump doctrine in action. By doing the unthinkable every day, Trump is normalizing conduct that, illegal or not, is by rights indefensible, intolerable, and (yes) impeachable.
He is also throwing the public off the scent. Trump (or his associates) may or may not have secretly colluded with a foreign power’s cyberattack on U. S. democracy, but he quite openly collaborated with it. First he called for it. Then he denied it, disparaged it, and distracted from it. Then he sacked the FBI director in part for investigating it. In other words, he engaged in a cover-up. Not the secret, Nixonian kind, however. Trump has invented something new, a cover-up conducted in full public view.
In that respect, the appointment of a special prosecutor is beside the point. The worst of what Trump did requires no criminal investigation and probably involves no crime-except against the integrity of our democracy.
The journalist Michael Kinsley coined a justly famous aphorism: the scandal in Washington is not what’s illegal — the scandal is what’s legal. Trump has birthed a new variant. The scandal in the Trump administration is not what’s secret but what’s right in front of our nose.
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Jonathan Rauch is the author of six books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government.
