2017 May 13^th

President Trump will speak at Liberty University’s commencement today. He will have an enthusiastic welcome at Liberty but he doesn’t get an enthusiastic welcome everywhere. He had thought to talk to the FBI foot-soldiers to explain the necessity of his harsh removal of their chief but he was advised against it. He is not universally popular with the FBI guys and gals. Trump doesn’t like to appear where doesn’t get a rousing welcome. His skin does not thicken with age.

 In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump claimed that Comey asked to have dinner with him and at that dinner announced that he, Trump, was not himself a target of any FBI investigation. He also, according to Trump, asked about his job security.

Trump’s version of this conversation is at odds with the sort of conversation that might be expected of an FBI agent. Comey’s intimates say Trump, not Comey asked for the dinner meeting. That certainly makes sense. Who calls the President of the United States and asks if they can have dinner at his house---particularly if he’s the boss. Then there is the oddity of Comey confiding in Trump that he was not under investigation. None of this holds together.

Then we have Trump’s unhappiness that Comey’s version of this dinner does not agree with his version. Trump says that if Comey produces a version of the meeting at odds with his he had better hope that there were no recording devices present. Now, hearing the phrase recording devices, we return to yesteryear and Tricky Dick Nixon. Given that Trump is paranoia personified it should surprise no one if he records every conversation he has. I would guess he carries a live recording device with him at all times and would as soon be without it as he would be without his gun.

If Trump does produce a “tape” of his conversations with Comey how would anyone know it hadn’t been altered? Altering a voice recording can’t be difficult if you have the technical expertise available that is surely available to Donald Trump. Trump’s reputation for veracity cannot get much lower so who would trust any voice recording he produces.

Trump recognizes the discrepancies between his pronouncements and those of his flacks and his vice president. He just moves so fast you see. This difficulty surfaced when his people claimed that the Rob Rosenstein memo was the stimulus Trump needed to fire Comey. You may remember the badly overused phrase that, “President Trump took strong and decisive action.” That was uttered by Pence (several times) then by Sanders and by Spicer. Then, a day later with his NBC interview he cut the ground from under all of them by declaring unequivocally that  Rosenstein’s memo was irrelevant because months earlier he had already decided to fire Comey.

The blowback from that has now encouraged him to declare that he, as president, just moves so fast that his poor staff can’t keep up with him and it isn’t fair to expect them to do that. In a Fox News interview Trump speculated that he might stop having daily briefings altogether because his schedule is just too busy for his staff to keep up.

Of course it’s not that at all; Trump simply doesn’t know what he will do from one day to the next, so how can the people supposed to inform the public keep the public informed?  The result is that they all look as if they don’t know what they’re doing…and that’s exactly right, they don’t, and it’s not their fault.