James Comey’s firing reveals Donald Trump’s true weakness: he doesn’t know who his enemies are

| 1:30 pm EDT May 14, 2017
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Donald Trump could have fired FBI Director James Comey back in January and gained points for it. The left would have been glad to be rid of the guy who sabotaged Hillary Clinton in the election, and the right would have hailed Trump for not being beholden to anyone. But Trump misread Comey entirely, and by the time he finally fired him last week, Trump had been wounded – both by leaving Comey in place to investigate him for so long, and by finally firing him at such a controversial time. It’s been part of a pattern.

Because James Comey tipped the election in Trump’s favor, he assumed Comey was a fan of his. He thought leaving Comey in place at the FBI was a good way to protect himself against investigation. He never did figure out what the rest of us could see when the most serious leaks began: that whatever Comey’s motivations had been during the election, his goal now was to take the Trump presidency down in well deserved flames. In fact Trump didn’t seem to figure it out until he heard Comey announce the investigation on national television a few weeks back.

What this means of course is that Donald Trump is such a narcissist, he can be rather easily manipulated by those willing to play the game. Anyone who wants to undermine him, or take advantage of him, simply has to be talented at puffing up his ego and kissing his ass. If Comey had been more skilled at being devious, he might still have his job — and he might still be in a position to keep investigating Trump right under his nose, as he’d been doing for months. This also applies to everyone on the inside and the outside of Trump’s orbit.

I was reminded of this while reading an insightful new piece from Axios today, which reveals that Trump is sore at various cabinet members because they’re not publicly praising him enough, but he’s thrilled with Rex Tillerson for doing so (link). What this tells me is that Tillerson is simply better at playing the game than the others. So long as he keeps praising his boss, he can get away with anything he wants. If Tillerson is incompetent, or if he’s a puppet of Vladimir Putin whose true aim is to dupe Trump into giving in to Russian oil interests, Trump will never figure it out – because Trump is too much of a narcissist to figure out who his enemies are.

If you’ve been following the mechanics of the Trump-Russia investigation closely and you know where it’s at and where it’s heading, then you know that Donald Trump is firing all the wrong people in the hope of stopping it. I’m not going to sit here and tell him who the right people are to fire, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. Trump fires the people who won’t kiss up to him in public, and he trusts the people who do kiss up to him. So my word of advice to those who are working to expose his scandals from within: just keep kissing his ass in public while you’re investigating him in private. He’ll never figure out you’re the enemy until it’s too late. Help fund Palmer Report