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. . . [F]orget about conservative dogma and doctrine. Trump made clear long ago that he doesn’t care about that stuff, and he won anyway. So, just look at basic politics. I have no problem with the argument that James Comey deserved to be fired. I’m more sympathetic to him than some of my colleagues, but that’s irrelevant. In principle, a president can fire an FBI director for any reason he wants (or for no reason at all). And there were certainly defensible reasons for Comey to go.But come on, people. The way Comey was fired was simply malpractice on a scale on par with Barack Obama’s decision to contract out the Obamacare website to the Amish community’s finest programmers. There was no reason to rush it. There was no reason to humiliate Comey while he was in Los Angeles visiting an FBI field office. There was no reason — as in “rationality” — to any of it. No reasonable person could believe that the same guy who invited chants of “Lock her up!” and defended Comey’s “guts” for reopening the Hillary Clinton investigation in October wanted to fire Comey for his unfairness to Hillary Clinton. And yet, the president humiliated the vice president and the White House communications team by letting them go out and peddle precisely that nonsense.Trump now defends the gelding of his vice president on the grounds that he’s just too busy to keep his most loyal surrogates from beclowning themselves: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!….”No one’s looking for perfect accuracy. But if the White House had waited a day, they could have avoided objective lies.The response from the drivers of the permanent wagon circle, however, is to talk about how the media coverage of Comey’s firing is all overblown. There have been inaccuracies and hyperbole, to be sure. But serious people understand — even if they won’t say so on camera — that Trump has been throwing gasoline on a firestorm for no other reason than that’s what Trump does. I keep hearing from conservatives that the media is driven by a deranged conspiracy theory about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. Maybe it is. But I never hear the second shoe drop: Trump seems Hell-bent on convincing people that he’s obsessed with the Russia story and does almost everything he can to keep it alive. Trump’s confession to NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of the Russia story, his ridiculous tweets, his letter claiming that Comey told him three times that he wasn’t being investigated: These are not things you do if you want the media, the Democrats, Congress, or the FBI to drop the subject.A friend e-mailed me yesterday that the Comey firestorm is only a big deal inside the Beltway. Maybe, maybe not. But people forget that it’s inside the Beltway where laws get made.The smart — never mind honorable — response from conservatives to all this should be the Jerry Maguire response. Rather than rationalizing and enabling this behavior, conservatives should be doing everything they can to convince Trump that he’s his own worst enemy. Mike Pence would do himself, his party, and his country a favor by telling Donald Trump, “If you humiliate me like that again, I will resign and run against you in 2020.” It may not work. But it’s a far better approach than bending over and shouting, “Thank you, sir! May I have another!?” . . .
