The New York Times reports: President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”
In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election. [Continue reading…]
This is the first step towards firing Mueller. Sessions cannot do it and his second in line will not do it. The replacements may.
The takeaway here is that (in case we hadn’t already noticed) Trump already conceives of himself as a Putin-type “leader” — Nero or Caligula to those with classical tastes — just one who, to date, hasn’t obtained the full powers that go with his attitudes. From his point of view, this is frustrating and inexplicable. Weirdly, people seem to think that Trump “admires” rather than identifies with Putin et al. People like him do not admire other people: they either want to be them, or annihilate them, or both.
Basically, the Republicans have allowed the installation of a regime that thinks of itself almost entirely in one-man-rule terms. They are apparently happy enough to do nothing about it, as long as it hasn’t yet figured out how to control the huge machine of power.