President Donald Trump fired James Comey as the head of the FBI. He has described Comey as a liar and a leaker. He has said he did the country a favor by firing Comey.
And on Sunday, this from Trump’s Twitter feed: “Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!”
But just hours after Trump’s tweet, even Comey himself admitted that, against his better judgment, he has grown sort of numb to all of Trump’s taunts.
“I kind of shrug and sometimes smile and laugh about it and then I have a secondary reaction, which is to be horrified at my own numb reaction, right?” Comey told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace at an event Sunday night in New York. “We have to remind ourselves the President of the United States of America is publicly announcing that people are committing crimes, that they should be in jail.”
So say we all.
What Comey is tapping into is the sort of survival mentality that is the sort of de facto approach to the Trump presidency. Trump says and does so many things that are abnormal — not just for politicians but for people — that it is impossible to properly contextualize all of it. The mind reels. And the response is often to laugh, roll your eyes and move on. It’s a coping mechanism — and even James Comey uses it.
While it’s an understandable reaction, it is, as Comey notes, not the right one. Whether you like Trump or loathe him, you have to acknowledge that nothing he is doing is anything like what any past president has done. He is charting his own course — at all times.
The Point: None of this is normal. None of it. Remind yourself of that the next time Trump says something that is demonstrably false about a private citizen. Or a politician. Or anyone.
