The accounts differ somewhat, probably because different sources picked up different hints of Trump’s pathologies depending on the moment, but it’s perfectly feasible that all of it is true. In both, Trump was angry because Comey was in some manner or other not cooperating with his preferred story line. Comey is either failing to make the Russia probe go away, by not sufficiently playing it down or by not doing enough to combat leaks about it. Or he’s failing to do enough to prop up Trump’s efforts to distract from it with what we might call alternative narratives.

And in both, the chronology is clear — the decision to fire Comey was made before the bogus justification for it was produced. Indeed, The Post reports that Rosenstein — who wrote the memo outlining that justification — reportedly threatened to quit when White House leaks spun a damage-control narrative in which Trump only acted on his recommendation. As the Times aptly puts it, the White House justifications for the firing have now been revealed as “shifting and contradictory.”

The common thread here is the constant need to return to the meaning of the election. The Comey letter to Congress about Clinton’s newly discovered emails is widely believed to have helped Trump win; Comey tacitly conceded that this might be true. The Russia probe continues to feed the sense that a foreign power helped tip the election to him; Comey won’t make it disappear. And, of course, there are lingering questions around the fact that Trump fired Comey right after he asked for more resources to prosecute that investigation, which of course would only further feed the sense that the Russian intervention mattered to the outcome.

This has happened again and again, beginning literally on Day One of the Trump presidency. Trump was enraged by the media’s accurate reporting of his relatively small inaugural crowd size, which immediately broadcast with terrifying vividness that he lacked popular support. So administration officials had to scramble to find photographic “evidence” that he was right, while others attacked the media for allegedly obscuring the truth. Trump also falsely claimed based on conservative media that President Barack Obama wiretapped his phones, to suggest that he, too, had been targeted by illicit efforts to undermine him during the election. That forced the White House counsel to go hunting for “evidence” of this, and when that failed, the White House called on Congress to investigate it (i.e., pretend it was real).

Still more: In the face of his loss of the popular vote by nearly 3 million, Trump claimed that he would have won, if millions of people hadn’t voted illegally. This required top officials to go around promising a commission to investigate the phantom “voter fraud” problem — in other words, to prove Trump right. And now that commission is actually going to happen. But that brings us to our next item.

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