Comey Whines About the 'Four Stages' of Being Called Out by Trump: 'Rocks Your World'
Political scientists may, in the coming decades, identify former FBI Director James Comey as the first emo government official.
Emo, for the uninitiated, is a style of music noted for its weepy, dejected lyrics. However, as Dictionary.com notes, it could also apply to “a fan of emo, especially a person who is overly sensitive and full of angst or adopts a certain style characterized by dyed black hair, tight t-shirts and jeans, etc.”
So the fashion sense doesn’t jibe with Comey. (And one hopes it never does; even the mental image startles me.) Otherwise, you can’t say he doesn’t fit the role.
James Comey has been a very wronged man. Just ask James Comey. In interviews, he bristles sadly at the idea that some people think he cost Democrat Hillary Clinton the 2016 presidential election or that his handling of the Russia collusion investigation wasn’t just sloppy but improper. He seems like a man who could use a bottle of wine and a dirge-like album cued up on Spotify — The Cure’s “Disintegration” sounds about right.
It’s not just his public mien. His social media feed is strangely dotted with wistful pictures of him out in nature, deep in mercurial contemplation:
Geologic time offers useful perspective. pic.twitter.com/tbnjjbt8rE
— James Comey (@Comey) March 23, 2019
Yeah, so he actually dragged someone else out there so he could share this deep thought with us. Just to remind you, this guy once led America’s most elite law enforcement bureau.
Anyway, the final piece of the puzzle for political scientists of the future looking to identify Comey as patient zero of the emo politician may be an Op-Ed he wrote in The Washington Post published Monday describing in detail the four stages of being called out by President Donald Trump. Yes, there are four stages of it. It’s kind of like the five stages of grief, although I think the Kübler-Ross model may be a bit more scientific and fleshed-out.
It begins with a title that assumes we know nothing of what happens when Trump isn’t happy with you: “This is what it is like to be attacked by the president,” the headline blares. But we’re aware of this process. If you read or watch cable news, it should be familiar to you.
But no — the cut goes much deeper for Comey, because it happened to him.
The nonsense begins in the first paragraph, in which Comey says he’s “watched friends and former colleagues deal with vicious, repeated assaults. The attacks have interfered with their ability to find work after government service, as even employers who see through the lies fear hiring a ‘controversial’ person or being attacked themselves.”
I’m going to throw the challenge flag on this one. There’s no high-level government servant or elected official who, after being called out by Donald Trump, wouldn’t put it as line one on his or her resumé. Comey himself has made being Trump’s bête noire into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, including getting a gargantuan advance on a book no one really read.
But I digress. You’re no doubt eager to find out the four stages of Trump-based grief, so here you go.
”At first, the attack is stunning and rocks your world,” Comey wrote. “Waking up to find the president has tweeted that you are guilty of treason or committed assorted other crimes and are a [insert any one of this president’s epithets here] is jarring and disorienting. That’s the first stage, but it doesn’t last.”
Now, let me here state that a) James Comey is a big boy and b) as a media-consuming member of the human race, he was under no illusions about how one Donald J. Trump expresses his displeasure. If this kind of thing “is stunning and rocks your world,” perhaps you ought to consider literally any other line of work.
“The second stage is a kind of numbness, where it doesn’t seem quite real that the so-called leader of the free world is assailing you by tweet and voice. It is still unsettling, but it is harder to recapture the vertigo of the first assault,” Comey wrote.
“But the longer it goes on, the less it means.”
Then comes the point when you realize Donald Trump and all of the people who support him are just cantankerous peons who don’t get what an amazing public servant you are.
“In the third stage, the impact diminishes, the power of it shrinks. It no longer feels as though the most powerful human on the planet is after you,” Comey wrote.
”It feels as though a strange and slightly sad old guy is yelling at you to get off his lawn, echoed by younger but no less sad people in red hats shouting, ‘Yeah, get off his lawn!’”
“In this stage, President Trump seems diminished, much as he has diminished the presidency itself. Foreign leaders laugh at him and throw his letters in the trash. American leaders clap back at him, offering condescending prayers for his personal well-being. The president’s ‘trusted’ advisers all appear to talk about him behind his back and treat him like a child. Principled public servants defy his orders not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. His record in the courts is similar to the Washington Redskins’ on the field.”
So several things here. First, it’s the “Washington Football Team,” you racist jerk. Second, send out an email blast: Comey has learned how to use the phrase “clap back” and thinks that “American leaders” have been doing it to Trump effectively.
The rest of this is cherry-picking and confirmation bias — and while this is an Op-Ed and you’re supposed to do these sorts of things to get other people to see your point of view, this is again the former director of the FBI talking about how it’s important he reassures himself that nobody likes the guy who’s attacking him. This is a 59-year-old man, folks.
Finally, the fourth stage of Trump attacking someone is … for all of us to awaken out of our political torpor and go after Trump.
In this stage, Comey argues, “we need to fight through our fatigue and contempt for this shrunken, withered figure. Spurred by the danger he poses to our nation and its values, we have to overcome the shock and numbness of earlier stages. We must not look away.”
He then quotes Alexander Hamilton, which I’ll spare you because as even the devil can quote scripture for his own uses, so can a former bureaucrat and object lesson in the Peter Principle quote a Founding Father to fit the expediencies of the moment.
You may notice something missing from the piece, which is any mention of the inspector general’s report released earlier this month. That’s the primary reason Comey is in the news again. It identified no less than 17 lapses the FBI made under his watch in their surveillance of individuals associated with the Trump campaign. When Comey talks in any specificity about what happened during his tenure of the FBI, he doesn’t exactly come off looking as good.
So here’s what we have instead: A guide to how it feels if the president attacks you. Just a brief summary, in case you need a TL;DR version:
- It’s “stunning and rocks your world.”
- You get numb to it.
- You reassure yourself Orange Man Very Bad and nobody really likes him, anyway.
- Everyone fights back against Trump because he attacks people, even though I thought this was supposed to be about him attacking you.
My reaction to Comey’s Op-Ed could be summed up best by one of Comey’s emo/nature tweets:
So many questions. pic.twitter.com/66KaR52Kk8
— James Comey (@Comey) March 24, 2019
My main question, however, is this: Jim Comey has been a cog in the Beltway machine for quite a while now. The idea that personal attacks are somehow a novel invention of the Trump administration is prima facie farcical. The difference is that instead of passive-aggressive barbs, Trump goes for, well, aggressive-aggressive barbs.
If this is something James Comey couldn’t handle — particularly given how he bungled the multifarious investigations that ran parallel to the 2016 election — why is he under the impression his firing, the invective from the president and the criticism he’s encountered aren’t deserved?
I’m sure there are plenty of Comey supporters, something in which the former FBI director will no doubt take some amount of solace. However, pretending that criticism of his tenure as the head of the FBI is just the result of a few acid-tongued Trump remarks and a legion of “sad people in red hats” engaging in poisonous groupthink all directed at him isn’t healthy.
It’s immature. It’s myopic.
It’s, well, emo.
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