Illustration by João Fazenda

In “Seven Days in May,” a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States, whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in “Fail Safe,” and of civilization, in “Strangelove”—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart.

The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published “The Threat,” a book about his tenure at the F.B.I., which ended with a brief, tumultuous period as its acting director. The focus of his narrative is not seven but eight days in May of 2017, between President Trump’s firing of James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and the appointment of Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy.

McCabe’s book offers a fitting overture to the next important act in the Trump melodrama: the completion of Mueller’s report, which appears imminent. If the Justice Department approves its public release—William Barr, the new Attorney General, has waffled on that question—the report could provide the unified narrative that the story of Trump and Russia has so far lacked. The details have emerged incrementally in the past two years, and it’s been difficult for even attentive consumers of the news to keep track. McCabe’s book speaks with bracing directness about what was going on and why it matters. For the most part, he writes in the just-the-facts style that we expect from a career G-man—that’s how Mueller’s report will likely read, too—but that restraint makes his conclusions all the more devastating. Trump, McCabe writes, “has shown the citizens of this country that he does not know what democracy means. He demonstrates no understanding or appreciation of our form of government. He takes no actions to protect it.” Rather, McCabe adds, “The president is doing exactly the thing a president is not supposed to do.”

And what thing is that? Here the story is less complicated than it sometimes appears. Ever since Trump learned, in January of 2017, that the F.B.I. was looking into possible ties between his campaign and Russia, he has sought, if not to end the probe, then at least to curtail it. He demanded “loyalty” from Comey. Then he asked him to be lenient toward Michael Flynn, his original national-security adviser, who later pleaded guilty to lying during an interview with the F.B.I. On May 9th, after Comey’s responses proved unsatisfactory, Trump fired him. McCabe, who was Comey’s deputy, then became the acting director, and Trump’s interactions with him during the next eight days are a study in personal and political pathology.

Virtually everything that Trump tells McCabe he disputes, starting with the claim that he received “hundreds” of messages from F.B.I. employees supporting his decision to fire Comey. Soon convinced that McCabe, like Comey, is disloyal to him, the President begins taunting him in person and on Twitter. The tweets take on an alarmingly unhinged quality, as in: “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey—McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”

McCabe is, perhaps, an imperfect avatar of the truth, because last February the Justice Department’s inspector general found that he had made four false or inaccurate statements in the course of an investigation of his own dealings with the media. Trump’s subordinates used that report as an excuse to fire McCabe on the day before he became eligible for early-retirement benefits, after twenty-one years of service. But anyone who has followed Trump will recognize the accuracy of the portrayal of him in “The Threat.” And Trump’s disrespect for the norms of American democracy extends well beyond his personal dishonesty and pettiness. It can be seen at the level of policy, too, and his transgressions in that realm are now threatening the constitutional order.

In an attempt to force Congress to fund his pet project, a wall along the Mexican border, Trump shut down the government for more than a month. When that bid failed, he signed a budget that contained much less money for border security than he had demanded. Rather than accept a defeat, as previous Presidents have done—Congress has the sole power to authorize spending—Trump invoked the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to reallocate funds for the wall. The law is of dubious constitutionality, but it has never been tested by the courts, because Presidents have used emergency powers in relatively uncontroversial ways. (President Clinton, for example, invoked the Act to ban the importation of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone.) Certainly no President has ever used the law in an explicit effort to overturn the expressed will of the Congress. A number of lawsuits have already been filed, on several grounds, including that the Act violates Congress’s powers under Article I of the Constitution, and that, even if the law is constitutional, Trump has not proved that an emergency exists. Indeed, of all the threats facing the country—global warming, gun violence, voter suppression, to name a few—the absence of a border wall ranks among the least significant.

Still, these days the courts are nearly as tribal in their inclinations as the voters are, and it’s conceivable that the President will achieve this fundamental reordering of our constitutional arrangements—all to build an unnecessary wall and, more to the point, to repair his injured vanity. It’s hardly a surprise that Trump puts his own interests above those of our democracy. We’ve heard this story before; McCabe has now told his version, and Mueller’s variations on the theme are to come. The warnings are familiar. The question that remains is whether, and how, the people and their representatives will respond to this threat from the office that once seemed to be liberty’s foremost guardian. ♦