There was a time when it would have been a big deal that a lawyer for the president compared American law officers to Nazis. Unfortunately, in the Trump era, Rudy Giuliani’s reference to F.B.I. agents as “storm troopers,” made last week during a television interview, will be forgotten in days.

This is partly a matter of sheer volume. There are so many scandals that Americans have only moments to focus on one before it’s overtaken by the next. But the remark also echoes a central theme of the Trump presidency and its attitude toward the rule of law.

So let’s pause to remember what happened one year ago this week, when, on an otherwise relatively quiet Tuesday afternoon, President Trump fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey. That shocking act remains the best distillation of the mind-set of this president: He considers himself answerable to no one, and he has a peculiar notion that law enforcement should serve his political and personal interests.

The first official explanation for Mr. Comey’s dismissal was his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. If there were any doubts that this was a lie, Mr. Trump quickly erased them. In an interview with NBC two days later, the president noted that Mr. Comey had been leading the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. He said of the firing, “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.’”