President Donald Trump weighed firing his FBI director for more than a week. When he finally pulled the trigger Tuesday afternoon, he didn’t call James Comey. He sent his longtime private security guard to deliver the termination letter in a manila folder to FBI headquarters.He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said. […]Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.
The president started with the conclusion — Comey had become a political obstacle — and then worked backwards, ordering subordinates, including his not-so-independent partner in the attorney general’s office, to come up with a coherent rationale.They came up with “Comey wasn’t fair to Clinton” — a former rival that Trump and his campaign wanted to incarcerate as recently as last year — as their fig leaf.In other words, the president not only fired the FBI director overseeing a counter-intelligence investigation into the president’s campaign, he’s also lying about his motivations. It adds a layer of disgrace to an already historic scandal.What’s less clear is what Trump thinks he’s accomplished with his Nixonian abuse. The Politico piece said the president has grown “frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia,” asking why the scandal “wouldn’t disappear.” Trump clearly failed to appreciate the fact that by firing the FBI director who was investigating him, the “mushrooming narrative” is now going nuclear.If the president was furious with his inability to control this story before, he’ll soon be confronted with a familiar problem: Trump remains his own worst enemy.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."