Is it his Nixon moment?

THEY said he’d never be able to get away with behaving like this; that the fury and threats of his Twitter feed would come up against the sobering realities of government.

But those who thought President Trump would be neutered by Washington were wrong.

His summary sacking of his FBI chief, James Comey, as the agency is in the middle of a criminal investigation into alleged links between the Trump election campaign and the Kremlin, has triggered a political earthquake.

For all his misjudged tendency to talk publicly about investigations that should be secret, Mr Comey is widely admired for his integrity and independence — not least by Trump himself, who blew him a kiss in January and praised his ‘guts’ in reopening a probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails just before last year’s election.

Ejected

Comey has run America’s most important law enforcement agency since 2013 and had six years to serve. Yet he was ejected like a losing contestant on Mr Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice, with an abrupt note telling him he had been ‘terminated’.

The White House machine attempted to insist that Comey was sacked after an investigation into his handling of the Hillary email case. But as Trump was swamped yesterday by ferocious accusations that he’s engineering a coverup and abusing his power, it was clear that nobody in Washington buys the official line.

Comey’s demise, they are convinced, is entirely to do with Russia — and Trump’s growing frustration at the FBI inquiry into claims that members of his team colluded with the Kremlin to help him win the election via the hacking and leaking of sensitive information about his opponents.

Donald Trump may have shrugged off accusations of misogyny and racism over the past year. But the suggestion that he or close aides might be Russian agents, willingly propelled into the White House by Muscovite dirty tricks, is a dark cloud hanging stubbornly over his presidency.

It was claimed yesterday that the President had been mulling over sacking Comey for more than a week after becoming ‘enraged’ by the continuing Russia investigation. He had reportedly asked aides repeatedly why the controversy — which he has dismissed as ‘fake news’ — wouldn’t disappear. Sometimes, he ‘would scream at television clips about the probe’, said one underling.

That angry petulance has long been a feature of his character. When you’re a billionaire businessman, you probably think you can yell at employees as you please. But the same isn’t true of the President.

So will Trump’s latest act backfire appallingly? Some Democrat congressmen argued that the mere fact he was willing to sack his FBI chief — the first time a president has done so since 1993 — suggests Trump is convinced that he will be implicated.

As Adam Schiff, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, put it, the sacking ‘ raises profound questions about whether the White House is brazenly interfering in a criminal matter’.

If the President’s political opponents weren’t previously determined to see the Russia inquiries through to the bitter end, they certainly are now.

Ted Lieu, a Democrat congressman, appealed to FBI agents to remember that their oath of office demands loyalty to the country’s justice system rather than to the President.

Amid all the rancour, it was deliciously ironic that the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov arrived at the White House yesterday, less than a day after the FBI director was sacked. He was there for talks on Syria and Ukraine but — in a telling illustration of a recent thawing of relations between the Trump and Putin camps — felt he could crack a joke about the biggest story in America. When asked about Mr Comey, he said with a sarcastic smile: ‘Was he fired? You’re kidding.’

The row has also reminded people of the extraordinary dossier compiled by a former British MI6 agent alleging that the Kremlin had sensational compromising information against Trump over his activities in the past in Russia.

Allegations — strenuously denied by Trump and generally not regarded as credible — referred to tawdry accounts of hijinks with escort girls in a Moscow hotel.

For all his insistence that he has nothing personally to answer in the Russia collusion investigations, the President is certainly not out of the woods.

Sources say that the FBI has what one describes as ‘concrete and corroborative evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and [ Russian] agents relating to the use of hacked material’ from Democratic emails last year.

There is no doubt that Trump and his family have had extensive and well-documented business dealings with Russians since the Eighties.

Suspicions

It is claimed that these deals helped to finance a string of his big property developments, including his residential block in New York’s Soho. Court actions taken by disgruntled investors revealed mysterious infusions of cash from Russians ‘in favour’ with Putin, and the involvement of Russians with murky pasts.

Suspicions have also been raised by the fact that a string of Trump aides have Russian links — some of which are reportedly specific subjects of the FBI inquiry.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s election campaign chairman, is said to have benefited from multi-million- dollar business deals with Kremlin- linked oligarchs, and was a PR adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced pro-Putin former Ukrainian president. Manafort denies any impropriety. Then there is Michael Flynn, ousted as Trump’s national security adviser after just a few weeks in office, when his Russia links proved too compromising. He stunned former Pentagon colleagues when he visited Moscow in 2015 and was Putin’s guest of honour at a dinner honouring RT, Russia’s TV propaganda arm.

Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy adviser, worked for Russia’s state- owned gas giant, Gazprom. He has supported Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and even compared President Obama’s treatment of Russia to slavery.

Crisis

There is no denying that Trump has links to Russia. The question the U.S. is asking is: did he abuse them to win the White House? That claim will have to be explored by someone other than the departing FBI chief, whose sacking has raised the spectre of disgraced president Richard Nixon.

He scored a spectacular own goal in 1973 when — in the socalled Saturday Night Massacre — he dismissed Archibald Cox, the independent special prosecutor investigating the Watergate case in which Nixon was heavily implicated.

The attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than be complicit in the move, and the resulting outrage of politicians and ordinary Americans only deepened the crisis for Nixon.

Forced to appoint a new special prosecutor, Tricky Dick could only watch helplessly as the new man did even better than his predecessor in bringing him to justice.

Nixon, of course, resigned rather than face impeachment, and bringing such a charge against Trump would require evidence being found of a criminal offence. While Trump was within his powers to sack Comey, congressmen and legal experts were still talking last night of a ‘constitutional crisis’ if an official investigation linked to the President is hampered, or even shelved.

So will the belligerent President survive his latest clash with his political enemies? Trump fans like to boast that his presidency is like no other. How bitterly ironic it would be if his reign ends prematurely — just like the most notorious in history.