The story of a small-time ne’er-do-well becoming royalty has been a comedic staple for centuries, to be found at least as far back as The Arabian Nights, and it never stops being funny, as Groucho Marx found time and again. Maybe that explains why the sins of Donald Trump are unsettling in such an unusual way. Trump is the world’s most powerful person, but he’s also Rufus T. Firefly, the leader of Freedonia in Duck Soup. Groucho’s stock-in-trade is that he tramples on every bit of dignity associated with any office he’s given. When he’s a cigar-smoking college president in Horsefeathers, his first words to the outgoing president are “Never mind that. Hold this coat.” Then, upon being reminded that no smoking is allowed: “That’s what you said.”
Trump does this, and it has pleased many of his supporters—to some degree understandably. While Groucho always made a farce of his jobs, he also deflated every pompous mediocrity in his orbit. To see the self-satisfied and incompetent leading lights of Washington subjected to similar treatment by Trump was worth a lot to a significant segment of voters, even at a high cost. And Trump has delivered. He uses a National Prayer Breakfast to make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on The Apprentice. He says Camp David is nice for “about 30 minutes” and avoids going there. And when he fires James Comey, head of the F.B.I., setting off political turmoil, his first tweet on the subject starts with the words “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.” It hardly matters what follows.
So what we have is something that’s inescapably comical yet deadly serious. On the bright side, Trump’s clowning is so blatant that it prevents him from being half as subversive as the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney White House, which quietly politicized the civil service and breached norms far more sacred (like not torturing captives) than any touched by Trump. On the dark side, it’s early yet, and if a president can get away with firing anyone investigating White House malfeasance, then he can get away with a lot more—just about anything, really.
If the firehose of Comey coverage has inundated you, as it has everyone, then it helps to reiterate the heart of the matter: the head of the F.B.I. has been fired, and the reasons given by the White House—that Comey had improperly handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton—don’t make sense. That this F.B.I. was investigating people close to the president for possible ties to Russia, with a request made only days ago for additional funding for this effort, makes matters far worse.
The latest line from the White House is that Democrats are hypocrites for berating Trump for firing a man whose performance they had criticized. Today, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called it “startling” that they weren’t celebrating the news. Maybe that’ll work, but probably not. In the real world, how and why matter, not just what. You might think Trump is doing a terrible job. That doesn’t mean you’d be happy if Mike Pence suddenly showed up in his place and told everyone that Trump was feeling tired and quit, so let’s stop dwelling on it and move on with the business of the American people.
We now have many months of digging ahead—exasperating digging for anyone who hopes to see Trump accomplish anything, liberating digging for anyone hoping to bring his reign to an early end. Either way, it must be done. Too many questions are unanswered. Why did Trump do it? Why did he do it now? Why did he do it this way—so humiliatingly? The New York Times’s Michael S. Schmidt reports that Trump had already been looking for reasons to fire Comey a week ago, which, if true, would confirm what we all sense already: that the justifications offered publicly—in a bundle of documents—are pretexts. Incidentally, why leak that? Normally, whispers on the ship of state are intended to damage rival factions, not to sink the captain and his entire vessel. But maybe someone in the White House wants Trump out? As the Times’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush report, it took only a matter of hours after Trump decided to axe Comey for the news to escape his inner circle.
While the public evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia remains far from compelling, the firing of Comey suggests some sort of panic is at work—that Trump is hiding something. So it’s crucial that he not get away with it. That in turn depends almost entirely on who gets appointed to replace him. Will it be someone who would continue the investigations or someone who would shut them down? If it’s someone impeccably honest, we’ll be O.K. If it’s a Trump crony—someone like Chris Christie, who’s probably on the wrong side of prison bars himself, or Rudy Giuliani, who has shown zero signs that he would be independent or nonpartisan—then we’ll be in big trouble. Whether you support Trump or oppose him, the integrity of government is at stake at moments like this, and preserving it means playing the straight man and making Rufus T. Firefly pay a price.
