AP Photo Swamp Diary Week 3: The President Raves About the ‘Nut Job’s’ Notes Trump mistakenly thinks Comey’s testimony gave him the exoneration he craved.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

“No, I can definitely say the president is not a liar,” deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the White House press corps this week. Sanders’ context was James Comey’s June 8 testimony before the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence, in which the former FBI director found several ways to accuse the president of lying. In the showstopper of the session, Comey said he created contemporaneous memos of his private encounters with President Donald Trump because of anticipations that Trump "might lie" about their meetings in the future.

In labeling Trump a non-liar, Sanders etched into the public record a line that may be cited in the future when the discussion turns to the 45th president’s unique relationship with the truth. Linguistic scholar George Lakoff was among the first to acknowledge the Sanders milestone, comparing it to a President Richard Nixon quip from 1973. Lakoff tweeted, "When you negate the frame, you activate the frame. When Nixon said, ‘I’m not a crook,’ people saw a crook." Lakoff didn’t go there, but President Bill Clinton likewise negated the frame to activate it in 1998 when he insisted that he had not had "sexual relations with that woman."


Sanders’ assertion aside, Trump’s liar status has long been cemented. He has lied in the opening months of his presidency. He lied throughout the presidential campaign. And he lied over the course of his business career, extolling his clever reality-bending as "truthful hyperbole" in his 1987 best-seller, The Art of the Deal. After that heap of lies, what’s another pile?

Trump's reputation as a liar has become so fixed that even his Republican allies and his personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, rely less on what he says in defending his presidency than on what his adversaries say about him. The scandal that has yet to be named is in search of its narrator, and Comey—a man Trump called a "nut job" behind his back to the Russians—is it. This week, Trump’s Republican defenders and Kasowitz swarmed Comey’s words, but mostly to endorse them. They accept Comey as the scandal’s narrator as long as it fits their interpretation of events, jettisoning it when it does not.

In Kasowitz’s interpretation, Comey clears Trump of having impeded the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 campaign—a reading of his statement and testimony that’s both fair and accurate. But in his next breath, Kasowitz states that Comey also clears Trump of charges that he tried to stop Comey from investigating former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn! How? Kasowitz performs this magic by dismissing Comey’s explicit assertion that Trump said he should let “Flynn go,” but embracing a separate section of the Comey statement about Trump’s directive to “find out” if there are “some ‘satellite’ associates of his who did something wrong.” Because Trump said to go after the “satellites” and did not exclude Flynn from the “satellite” category, Kasowitz deduces, he could not have told Comey to lay off Flynn. It reads like madness, I know, I know, but that’s what Kasowitz said.

Even Trump found “vindication“ in the Comey testimony, “despite so many false statements and lies.” Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee was issuing talking points to its faithful, telling them to use Comey’s words to prove that “there was no obstruction of justice” by Trump, even though, as USA Today put it, Comey never said such a thing. He deferred that question to special counsel Robert Mueller. Instead of offering vindication, Comey said Trump hadn’t asked him to shut down the Russian campaign probe and that Trump wasn’t under investigation—at least earlier this year. It’s like Lee Harvey Oswald’s estate directing its supporters to use the Warren Commission Report to build a case that he couldn’t have shot John Kennedy because his Marine ranking was only “sharpshooter,” hence he couldn’t be a good enough marksman to make the shot.

Comey’s statement, released at his request the day before his testimony before the committee, worked as a sort of shooting script for the televised hearing. The president repeatedly beseeched him to "lift the cloud" from his administration, presumably the ongoing investigations. The senators did very little rewriting or polishing of his seven-page version of the truth, accepting his implied camera angles and cutting suggestions. Most of the revelatory new information came not in response to tough questions from the senators but volunteered by Comey. In an off-handed way, he shared the fact that he had succumbed to pressure from Attorney General Loretta Lynch to call his investigation into the Hillary Clinton email a “matter” rather than an “investigation,” which is what it was.

With the same studied spontaneity, Comey coughed up his spectacular account of how the contents of his contemporaneous memos about Trump had made their way into the pages of the New York Times. He used a cutout—a law school professor friend—to mule them over to a reporter to block Trump from rewriting the history of their relationship, should he make good on the veiled threat he made on Twitter of having secretly taped their meetings. “I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel,” Comey said of his decision to steer the memos to the media.

That the White House has turned to the “disloyal” Comey for a lifeline says volumes about Trump’s desperate quest for self-preservation, to finally free himself from the oppressive “cloud” of personal suspicion that has ground him down. From inside, the White House Trump has been singing arias of fury, according to the reporting of CNN’s Gloria Borger. “The president has been bad-mouthing Jeff Sessions to anyone who will listen, and he’s bad-mouthing his counsel, his in-house counsel, Don McGahn,” she said Tuesday. “He’s bad-mouthing people on his staff, all of whom have been quite honestly quite loyal to this president, including Sean Spicer.”

Abusive father or unruly child? Fletcher School prof Daniel W. Drezner has been successfully dredging the news for a month for examples of news reports in which Trump acts like a toddler. Each Drezner tweet contains the same text—“I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his supporters stop talking about him like a toddler”—and then provides the link to the buttressing Baby Donald news account. Studying the reports, that run the full range of the media from the Wall Street Journal to Politico to the Washington Post to Axios to the New York Times to Reuters to reporters’ tweeted observations, the portrait emerges of a man suffocating in a “cloud” of his own making.

For students of Trump’s history, the current drama resembles a grander remake of his previous housing, tax, sex, “university,” charity and loan intrigues, one with higher production values but the same basic plot: Trump plunging Trump into trouble. Inside his head, the president has got to be replotting the usual escape plan that has saved him when he’s found himself cornered. He’ll offer to buy his way out of trouble by paying a large fine but admit no wrongdoing.

Watch this place for his future plea bargains.



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What to name the scandal with no name? Here’s more of my readers’ thinking on the topic: The Hunt for Red Hacker (Vince Castillo), Smoking Kalishnikov (Larry Williams), Red Don (Rachel Braunigan), Gorky Snark (Rick Frei), Trollhouse (Adam Nelson), Trumpery (Saeeda Batra), Kushnikov (John Clark), Trumpdump (Jim Vaughan), Russian Roulette (Edmund Beard), Trumpsickle (Fran Recht), The Very, Very Big Scandal (Shari Lindsay), Rusghazi (Francis Rush), Scandy McScandalface (Bonnie Petsche), Krussia (Marilia Duffles), Travda (Tony Telford), and Derp Conspiracy (Bela Selendy). I’ve made no pick yet, but am being guided by one reader who observes that the most successful political scandal names usually anchor themselves to a real geographic place, like Teapot Dome, Watergate, Chappaquiddick, My Lai, Abu Ghraib and Iran Contra. Satisfying that condition in my current batch of names are 5th Avenue Shootout (John Drogan), Mar-a-Putin (Kirk Saville), Russcabal (Frederick Rosenthal), Peepot Dome (Andrew Wender), and my current favorite, Moscomms (Walrave Tuininga). Send additional scandal names to [email protected]. My email alerts have defected to the Russians and my Twitter feed to the Chinese. My RSS feed has decided to stay and fight for this country.