Unlike love and God, Donald Trump does not work in mysterious ways.

Trump's emergency declaration is unconstitutional – ask his lawyers | Lloyd Green Read more

Since Andrew McCabe’s barnburner of a book landed late last week, the 45th president has tweeted more about the ex-acting director of the FBI than he has about his beloved and utterly bonkers wall along the southern border. Talk about a national emergency.

He even commemorated Presidents’ Day by accusing McCabe, along with the leaders of his own justice department (DoJ) and most of western civilization, of acting illegally because they had the temerity to question the loyalties and legalities of one Donald Trump. This is surely what past presidents and Congresses had in mind when they created a national holiday to celebrate the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

“Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI director Andrew McCabe,” tweeted our oh-so-surprised commander-in-chief. “He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught…”

So many lies from such a disgraceful man! Just as well he got fired for lying by someone who knows a thing or two about people who plan very illegal acts!

Sign up to receive the latest US opinion pieces every weekday

But wait. There’s more to this Agatha Christie mystery that was solved by presidential thumbs at 7.30am, right around the time all the morning TV shows were collectively aghast at McCabe’s revelations.

“There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who had just elected a president who they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more,” Trump explained, running out of characters to detail all the great jobs he’s done that make he so darn likable. “This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”

Now, as it happens, there’s a whole government agency devoted to investigating illegal and treasonous acts, especially those instigated by foreign intelligence services. That same agency has a remarkable track record of investigating crooked officials and professional criminals. Between the divisions of counter-intelligence, public corruption and organized crime, the FBI could really cover the waterfront of this presidency – if only by following all of his tweetable thoughts.

Which helps explain the moment our presidential antihero first laid eyes on McCabe, a lifelong Republican so steeped in FBI and DoJ custom that he actually interned there.

Trump gave McCabe “almost a gleeful description” of his firing of his boss, James Comey, claiming that “people in the FBI were thrilled about this”. This was something of a surprise to McCabe since he had just left an FBI building where hardened G-men were crying in the hallways.

“As he went on talking about how happy people in the FBI were, he said to me: ‘I heard that you were part of the resistance,’” McCabe recounted to CBS News’ 60 Minutes. When McCabe asked him what that meant, Trump obliged as follows: “I heard that you were one of the people that did not support Jim Comey. You didn’t agree with him and the decisions that he’d made in the Clinton case. And is that true?”

Like so much else in Trump’s life, it was spectacularly false and ignorant: a self-fulfilling prophecy of stupidity

Sadly for the McCabe-Trump relationship, it wasn’t. In fact, like so much else in Trump’s life, it was spectacularly false and ignorant: a self-incriminating, self-fulfilling prophecy of stupidity.

“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage,” McCabe said. “And that was something that troubled me greatly.”

You’re not alone, Andy. We do understand your shock at hearing that Trump believed Vladimir Putin’s assessment of North Korea’s missiles rather than trusting US intelligence on the subject.

But the rest of us are a little perplexed by your meticulous need to investigate whether your old boss Jim Comey was fired because of the Russia investigation. You see, the man Bob Mueller describes as “Individual 1” gave this rather telling statement to a national news anchor known as Lester Holt back in May 2017: “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.’”

There are useful idiots and there are useless idiots. Donald Trump may be the most useless of them all.

Way back in the 1990s, the last time the nation endured the trauma of impeachment, White House aides spoke glowingly of the president’s ability to compartmentalize his business. Of course, that man was Bill Clinton, whose role in our current trauma is non-negligible.

Trump, in stark naked contrast, is no more capable of compartmentalizing his thoughts than restraining his tweets when he watches his TV. Which is pretty much all day.

If his political opponents style themselves as the resistance, then Trump must have his own resistance inside the FBI. If Trump is being investigated for illegal acts, his investigators must be investigated for illegal acts. If there are accusations of collusion against him, that’s because there’s collusion against him.

Barack Obama’s staff liked to say that he played chess while everyone else played checkers. Donald Trump struggles with both, but he has mastered the card game known as snap.

Sadly McCabe’s insights into what passes for Trump’s mind weren’t even the most jaw-dropping of his gob-stopping revelations. That prize goes to the portrait McCabe paints of an FBI and DoJ leadership grappling with the unprecedented realization that the president himself was the greatest threat to the very rule of law and national security they were supposed to defend.

In revering Trump, the religious right has laid bare its hypocrisy | Samuel G Freedman Read more

McCabe launched a counter-intelligence investigation into Trump because, duh, how could you not? What followed pushed his boss – the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein – into the kind of insane scenario that seems perfectly logical to anyone dedicated to the rule of law.

Should he wear a wire when talking to the suspected Russian agent known as the president? The FBI’s general counsel “had a heart attack” about that, McCabe said.

What about invoking the 25th amendment to remove the president from office? “It was really something that he kinda threw out in a very frenzied chaotic conversation about where we were and what we needed to do next,” McCabe said.

McCabe may have been fired, along with Comey. Rosenstein may have been forced to quit, along with his astonishingly racist and stupid boss Jeff Sessions.

But that very frenzied chaotic conversation about where we are and what we need to do next are still very much with us. Along with the subject of the counter-intelligence investigation, known as Individual 1.