If Donald Trump had just gritted his teeth and lived with James Comey as F.B.I. director, everyone would have been spared a lot of grief. Paul Manafort might still be cutting shady deals; Stormy Daniels wouldn’t be a household name; and none of us would have had to endure Comey’s book-selling-ethical-leadership tour. Now Comey is once more back in the headlines, because Rudy Giuliani—fast overtaking BP’s Tony Hayward as the world’s worst spokesman—put forth a new reason for Comey’s firing, namely that Comey wouldn’t publicly declare that Trump “wasn’t a target of the investigation.” (The White House should have stuck with allegations that Comey is a “showboat” and a “grandstander,” since, on that front, we’re seeing that Trump had a point.) So we can expect Comey to make the rounds once more.

If the conversation surrounding James Comey—much of it dominated by Comey himself—reveals anything, it’s mostly the strangeness of Washington’s moral framework. For all his foibles, Comey seems to be fundamentally a decent person who comes across convincingly as someone who means well. At the same time, much of Comey’s mindset is emblematic of respectable opinion in the age of Trump. That is to say, it’s evidence of Trump’s tendency to make formerly stable people lose their minds. Comey isn’t that far over the edge, but there’s still a loss of perspective that some of us find mystifying.

This isn’t to slam Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, which could be a lot worse. Despite a seeming attraction to the spotlight, Comey writes of weaknesses and humility, highlighting his own limitations, in a manner that comes across as sincere. The second sentence of his author’s note even observes that “a book about ethical leadership can come across as presumptuous, even sanctimonious.” When he speaks of how lies can overtake an institutional culture—with “those unwilling to surrender their moral compasses pushed out and those willing to tolerate deceit brought closer to the center of power”—anyone who has studied totalitarian regimes, or merely corrupt business, will recognize the cogency of his words.

For those who groan over the man’s self-promotion, let’s remember that these things can be hard to get right when everyone’s calling you. Also, appalling treatment at the hands of a powerful person can destabilize nearly anyone. Comey wasn’t merely forced out of his role years in advance of his expected retirement; he was also informed of it in the most hurtful and humiliating way, ambushed by television chyrons announcing the news. Subjected to such indecency, people can be prompted to go on a crusade. When the White House of George W. Bush outed Valerie Plame as a spy, Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, became kind of a joke in Washington, D.C., for rushing in front of every camera to rail about it. But can you blame him?

Here, though, we come to Comey’s blind spot, or to mine, for it seems to this reader that Comey’s revulsion toward Trump as a human being—and no one would hold up Trump as a model of behavior on any front—causes him to lose all perspective on the threats and sins he has witnessed in public life.

The genuinely chilling chapters in Comey’s book concern the behavior of the Bush White House, in which Comey served as the U.S. deputy attorney general. We read about how Bush administration lawyers who reviewed the basis for Bush’s wide-ranging surveillance program, called “Stellar Wind,” found it to be so far beyond the realm of legality that they had to insist on pulling the plug on it. Not only did the White House initially disregard these arguments, but Bush’s enforcers rushed to the bedside of a hospitalized John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, in an effort to strong-arm Ashcroft into signing off on a renewal of the program. Comey felt obliged to rush to the hospital to prevent this.