What’s lost amid all the hoopla over Donald Trump’s firing
of James Comey is what sparked the FBI’s decision last October about a week and
a half before the election to reopen its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s
e-mails—a decision for which Trump effusively praised Comey at the time and
which now factors prominently in the tortured case the administration is making
for his firing. That investigation, and Comey’s remarks about it, had already
done serious damage to Clinton’s candidacy, as plenty of her supporters
observed bitterly at the time. It was reopened, at about the worst possible
time for Clinton, too late for her to recover from it, in response to the
discovery on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Wiener (D—NY) of State
Department e-mails his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, had forwarded to him,
reportedly so he could copy them and deliver them to Clinton. And why was law
enforcement looking at Wiener’s laptop? That was because he was suspected of “sexting”
lewd pictures of parts he should have kept more private to a teenage girl.
This was not Wiener’s first brush with notoriety on that sort
of account. He resigned his House seat in 2011 after revelations of just such
behavior involving multiple young women—a story with which New York’s tabloid
headline writers had a protracted field day. More than five years later, it
seems, he was back at it in what may rank as history’s most consequential bit
of recidivist sexual perversion.
Historians will have plenty to say about the Trump
presidency. Every day it seems to break new ground. We’ve never had a comic
opera carnival barker buffoon as president before. With any luck we’ll survive
this one and never have another. The damage we’ve inflicted on ourselves and on
our standing in the world may be contained. We may look back on the Trump administration
and miss its farcical comic side. Certainly no administration has ever supplied
better grist for comedians’ mills. But there’s nothing funny about Trump’s
ambitions. To the extent he achieves them, the damage to our environment and
our place as the world’s foremost champion of Western democratic values could
be irreversible. Momentous historical developments are generally attributed to
correspondingly momentous forces, and there clearly were such things at work in
Trump’s election victory. But there’s a good case to be made that the pivot
point on which the election swung was a dark corner of a disgraced former
congressman’s brain.
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