Plenty of people were all abuzz over Donald Trump's suggestion that he might be taping some White House conversations. Of course. After all, it not only contained obvious echoes of Watergate, but as a practical matter it also raised the possibility that if anything illegal or improper has been going on, evidence might be available. Others made the sensible observation that even if nothing comes of this, the increased suspicion of taping will decrease the ability of Trump to receive candid advice from anyone. That's true, I suppose, although we have no evidence to date that Trump is willing to listen to anything that might be embarrassing if it got out.
In fact _ assuming no tapes really exist _ there's a much greater problem for Trump in his public who-said-what fight with James Comey. Yes, it's bad if the president secretly tapes his own conversations. But it's even worse, I suspect, if the president demonstrates that he's willing to outright lie about what people said to him in private.
Of course, it's possible that Trump is telling the truth and Comey's accounts of their conversations (which we only have secondhand so far, since Comey isn't talking yet) are false. I'll say, however, that I doubt very many people who need to speak with the president as part of their job trust Trump in this case over Comey. Comey has a reputation for truth-telling, perhaps to a fault (he couldn't shut up about what he actually thought about Hillary Clinton's actions). Trump ... doesn't. So Trump's problem might not be that people refuse to be candid because he might be taping them to use it against them; his problem might be that no one wants to talk to him without (friendly) witnesses.
