WASHINGTON _ Donald Trump's response to the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is in keeping with his longtime modus operandi in business. He has bragged that he never settles court cases against him and always wins.
As with so many of his other claims, this one is erroneous, as seen in his recent settlement of civil fraud lawsuits against his Trump University. He paid out $25 million to plaintiffs, albeit without admitting wrongdoing.
In his current effort to derail the investigations into Russia's meddling in the election and into the misconduct of his fired national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's legal defiance is again on display. Yet this time Trump has taken on a much more formidable legal adversary: his own Department of Justice and special counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed by acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein, standing in for recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Mueller has yet to tip his hand on how he will proceed with his investigation, other than to say he intends to take up the mandate given him to get to the bottom of the Russian and associated legal and political sagas. A Trump insider has floated the notion that the president might fire Mueller as his next step to muddy the waters in an already murky course toward justice.
Doing so, however, might only set off a string of replacements of lower-echelon officials who refuse to do the firing. That's what happened in 1973 in the Watergate scandal, when Attorney General Elliot Richardson and deputy William Ruckelshaus declined to remove special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and the task was accepted by Solicitor General Robert Bork, No. 3 at Justice.
Trump has hired a private lawyer to deal with the investigation, ostensibly to move the case outside the White House. It's being contended that a president cannot be criminally indicted, and that the only avenue for removing him from office is House impeachment and Senate trial. In the Watergate case, Nixon lacked sufficient Republican support in Congress and so resigned.
His ouster marked the end of a thoroughly corrupt regime and a return to normalcy under his bland and straight-arrow vice president, Gerald Ford. The White House tapes captured Nixon plotting a cover-up and bribing the Democratic Party headquarters burglars to clam up.
The impeachment charges against Nixon included the same allegation of obstruction of justice now facing Trump in his reported "hope" that former FBI Director James Comey would let Flynn off the hook for lying about conversations with the Russians.
But Trump's arrogant and reckless assaults on the rule of law embodied in the Constitution, including his disdain for the separation of powers, is more institutionally destructive.
Up to now, Trump has weathered the political storm by retaining much of his political base as a dispirited Republican leadership stands by unwilling or unable to rein him in. But his bull-in-a-china-shop presidency already seems to be running the country like a banana republic.
The judiciary has made a good start of asserting its power to hold the executive branch within the constraints of the Constitution by opposing Trump's heartless travel ban targeting Muslims from certain countries. Now it's up to the legislative branch, on a bipartisan basis, to halt his assault on our post-Cold War foreign policy, which is undermining America's long-time global leadership.
Politically, a key now is next year's congressional elections, which will provide a tangible opportunity for voters of all parties to declare they have had enough of Trumpism, or at least to apply the brakes on his hostile takeover of the world's greatest experiment in democratic self-government.
Only five months into the Era of Trump, the train of state is already off the tracks and headed to even more dismal embarrassments. Where are the Republicans of conscience to get hold of the controls?
