Billionaire Donald Trump seems to be having the time of his life. All his life he could say “you’re fired” and sack people in his family-owned company and nowhere else other than in his own reality TV serial crudely enacting the heartless rigour of business life. Now, at last, he commands not a company but the world’s most powerful state.
Boy, doesn’t he love it? He jets down to sunny Florida for golf and dinners with visiting heads of state, including another of the world’s most powerful, as well as some of the most demonised. Within days he orders the world’s biggest conventional bomb dropped on one country (Afghanistan) and a salvo of medium scale missiles fired at another (Syria) – both countries oceans away from America, of course, and cannot fire back. With North Korea, this President is only bombastic, not a bomber.
He gets to freely tweet what he likes including badmouthing his country’s closest and most intimately connected neighbour, Canada, and, also his domestic political rivals – including falsely accusing out-going President Barack Obama and calling him ‘sick’.
The icing on this cake is that he gets to ‘fire’ not just his business minions but national Attorney Generals and Directors of the FBI among many other US public service middle rankers who are political appointees.
The latest is the sudden and summary sacking of the Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the national agency responsible for countering domestic criminal and subversive activity. In a cruelly summary manner, the White House did not even wait for the letter terminating Director James Comey to reach him before leaking it to the news media.
The poor man was in the middle of a speech to a whole FBI state office in California when he saw his own sacking announced on a TV in the meeting room.
We, in our one-time ‘banana republic’, would have thought that this kind of crudity would happen only in these banana republics. Evidently, it is not so.
If the announcement was crude, the sacking, itself, of the head of a probe into Russian collusion with the Trump presidential campaign, certainly recalls the ruthless behaviour of banana republic dictators. We thought that it was only in the under-developed world that such summary sackings of top government officials occurred when they became too inquisitive about The Leader’s doings.
The FBI, after all was in the middle of a most explosive probe. Initiated entirely on their own initiative on the basis of their regular surveillance findings, The FBI probe focussed on the scale and depth of Russian covert interference in the US political system, specifically during the last presidential elections (which include, also, election to half of the House of Representatives and some state legislatures).
Ironically (if not terrifyingly, for Americans), the probe was prompted by findings during the FBI’s regular surveillance of foreign agents, notably in interactions with key members of the Trump presidential campaign team. Imagine having an elected President who is suspected of quiet dealings with your country’s biggest ‘enemy’ since the Second World War and the most dangerous one at that!
Of course, President Trump himself is seemingly not directly implicated in these suspect dealings now being investigated not just by the FBI but also now by both Senate and House sub-committees of Foreign Relations as well as Intelligence. The opposition Democratic Party is now charging that the sacking of the FBI head is part of an attempt to blunt the probe into the Russia dealings which are damaging to not only the ruling Republican Party but also to the President himself.
The probe has only just begun into what is becoming the most serious investigation of unconstitutional and treasonable activity inside the US presidency since the illegal political surveillance and sabotage actions that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. Some American activists would argue that another such treasonable action occurred when President George Bush Jr invaded Iraq without proper congressional approval, thereby violating the constitution and placing the country in danger. That, yet, remains for history to decide.
The way Donald Trump is going, history may decide on his proprieties much faster.
The Acting Director of the FBI has already told a probing House of Representatives sub-committee that the Bureau was in shock over the Comey sacking and had had no issues of ‘confidence’ with Comey, and, most importantly, was firmly committed to proceeding with the Russia probe.
Both the Senate and House probing sub-committees also seem determined to proceed.
With the mainstream media alertly monitoring the investigation and the White House’ attitude towards it, there is every possibility that these probes will indeed go through and establish the real facts whether harsh or comforting. The US intelligence agencies seem convinced that Russia is carrying out numerous interventions to influence the American body politic.
This, in itself, is not something new in human history. Interference and interventions in the internal life of polities (kingdoms, chiefdoms, republics) by foreign powers has been political practice since time immemorial.
What will be revealing will be the extent of the interventions and the identities of the Americans involved in such treasonable collusion with a hostile state.
And most scary is the suspicion that the collusion may even touch the retinue of the country’s head of state himself.
The removal of Comey is actually not surprising and can easily be justified given his record of public posturing and even announcements concerning investigation status made without the authority of his superiors in the US Department of Justice.
As some conservative US news channels have pointed out, Comey had already crossed some lines of discipline and propriety during the presidential election campaign when he made revealing statements about Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton’s email misdemeanours.
Thus, the argument made by the recent, Trump-appointed Deputy Attorney General that Comey had damaged public confidence in the FBI can be seen as valid.
That this sacking was, thus, genuinely motivated and not the beginning of a cover up will only be demonstrated if the Russia probe is allowed to continue transparently and rigorously.
In the case of Nixon, American liberal democracy triumphed in that the institutions of justice and government as well as the institution of the news media, all persisted in finding out the hard truth. And this resulted in a change in the presidency. The world will continue to watch to see if American democracy will again triumph.
Meanwhile, this domestic uproar in Washington drew the world’s attention away from a political event of far greater significance to the world when compared with the Comey firing.
That is the finalising of a new trade agreement between the US and China which will open up both countries’ markets to vital exports from each other. The US will get to sell beef products for the first time to China’s vast consumer market. In exchange, the US will allow Chinese banks – now among the world’s wealthiest – to enter the US market.
Thus, Washington has clearly indicated that the fire spouted by Donald Trump against China during his election campaign will not influence actual bilateral dealings. In any case, President Trump, after a single dinner chat with Chinese President Xi, seems to have suddenly decided that China is better as a friend than a rival.
In fact, after ranting against North Korea, Trump has already conceded that Beijing has the greater influence over Pyongyang.
Soon to be tested will be Washington’s relations with South Korea following the victory of the new liberal President Moon Jae-In who has promised to improve relations with Pyongyang. The new President is known to be against the deployment of American missiles in the Korean Peninsula.