THE GOP IS MIA
Seeing someone stand up to a bully is cathartic. That feeling is magnified when the bully is the president of the United States and his abusive behavior cries out for a response from honorable people.
The problem is that a vast majority of the people in the best position to put weight behind such a response, Republicans in Congress, have kept silent.
So it’s understandable that many Americans delighted in the rare, remarkably aggressive display of anger directed at President Donald Trump over the weekend by some of his favorite targets — the nation’s formerly highest-ranking law enforcement and intelligence officials — following Trump’s predictable gloating over the late-Friday-night firing of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI.
McCabe accused the president of waging an “ongoing war on the FBI.” James Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director last May, tweeted, in reference to his forthcoming book, that Americans would soon be able to “judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.” And John Brennan, who ran the CIA under President Barack Obama, unloaded on Trump: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.”
Declarations like these may be important to make and gratifying to read, but they really shouldn’t be coming from those whose integrity depends on their remaining outside the political fray. For starters, they make it easier for Trump and his defenders to argue, as they already do, that crucial witnesses in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia are biased against the president.
It’s not that Trump is more credible than these men. It’s that this is how Trump likes it: He drags people down to his level, forcing them to choose between retaliation and silence.
Their decision wouldn’t be so hard if the GOP leadership in Congress were not, as usual, morally absent. Cynical as ever, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has said nothing in the face of the president’s degrading tweets and renewed attacks on the Mueller investigation. House Speaker Paul Ryan sent a spokeswoman out to issue a milquetoast defense of the special counsel. By keeping mum as Trump marauds across American democracy, they are forcing the targets of his attacks to defend themselves and also abetting Trump’s assault on the credibility of the FBI and the Justice Department.
A handful of Republicans have spoken up — like Sen. Jeff Flake, who called the firing of Mueller “a massive red line that can’t be crossed,” and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who repeated his warning to Trump that it would be “the beginning of the end of his presidency.”
Republicans should be pushing back on Trump now in part to keep him from firing Mueller, a move that could strain our institutions past their breaking point.
Even better, they should pass legislation protecting Mueller from being fired without good cause. The need for such a law grows more urgent daily. In his weekend Twitter outburst, Trump for the first time targeted Mueller by name, and on Monday, The Times reported, he added to his legal team a lawyer who has argued on television that FBI and Justice Department officials framed the president.
Meanwhile, Comey, McCabe and the others who face Trump’s taunts and provocations should remember the old warning about wrestling a pig. You only get covered in mud — and, besides, the pig likes it.