Why are people surprised by Trump’s odd behavior?

Ross Douthat

Throughout the 2016 primary season, two sentiments took turns reassuring Republicans as they watched Donald Trump’s strange ascent:

At some point, Trump will start behaving normally. If he doesn’t, he’ll self-destruct or quit — or else somebody in authority will figure out a way to jettison him.

It isn’t surprising that people once believed these things; I clung to the second sentiment myself. What is surprising is that after everything that’s happened, so many people believe them even now.

The reaction to the sacking of James Comey is the latest illustration. Far too many observers, left and right, persist in being surprised at Trump when nothing about his conduct is surprising, persist in looking for rationality where none is to be found, and persist in believing that some institutional force is likely to push him off the stage.

Start with the president’s Republican defenders. Not the cynics and liars, but the well-meaning conservatives who look at something such as the Comey firing and assume that there must be a normal method at work, who listen to whatever narrative White House aides spin out and try to take it seriously.

In this case this meant saying, well, there was always a reasonable case for firing Comey over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the president was just following his deputy attorney general’s advice, and anyway it would be simply nuts to fire someone out of pique while they were investigating your campaign’s ties to a foreign power, because that would just bring more attention to the investigation, so surely not even Trump would be that crazy, right?

Wrong. First the White House sprung more leaks than a cracked dike in a North Sea flood. And then the president went on national TV to explain that he would have fired Comey regardless of what his attorney general’s office recommended.

Similarly mysterious, meanwhile, is the assump- tion among liberals that Trump’s behavior must be motivated by some dark but ultimately rational calculus — that if the president fired Comey in part out of annoyance at the Russia investigation, there must be some great conspiracy he’s desperate to cover up, which if brought to light would make impeachment a near-inevitability.

Of course there might be such a conspiracy, which is why the FBI investigation must proceed — and even if it only exposes shady business ties it’s entirely worth pursuing. But given what we know about Trump’s personality, what’s in the public record, and what’s been leaked by forces with reasons to despise him, Occam’s razor suggests shadiness is all we’ll find.

But liberals need to accept that the strongest case for removing Trump from office is likely to remain a 25th Amendment case: not high crimes and misdemeanors, not collusion with the Russians, but a basic mental unfitness for the office that manifests itself in made-for-TV crises and self-inflicted wounds.

This week reminded us why Donald Trump should not be the president of the United States. But if you wish to remove him, think on 2020. The rest, for now, is noise.