Comey Firestorm Sparks Return of the Never-Trumpers

Emboldened by Democratic outrage and a media frenzy over the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Never-Trumpers ran to their keyboards this week to rail anew against President Donald Trump.

“This appears to be an attack on the integrity — not just of law enforcement — but of our defense against a foreign cyberattack on the processes of American democracy,” wrote David Frum in The Atlantic. Frum is the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush who was famously fired for taking credit for the line “axis of evil,” used in Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address.

“I call them Vichy Republicans because they’re the first ones to sell out and go over to the other side.”

William Kristol, the editor at large of The Weekly Standard, went on CNN to call the president “reckless” and “irresponsible” for firing Comey, and said it clearly shows he was not prepared for the job of president.

Evan McMullin, erstwhile presidential candidate, former CIA agent and Capitol Hill staffer, jumped in, too.

“Though self-evident as such before, Trump’s firing of Comey looks increasingly like an act of desperate self-preservation,” he tweeted.

“You will not escape accountability,” he wrote sternly, in response to a Trump tweet saying, “Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington.”

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Radio talk-show host Glenn Beck, meanwhile, opened his show on Thursday by musing about “impeachment hearings” and “Watergate.”

“For the first time, I think we’re looking at an unelected President Pence by 2020,” he said.

Max Boot, the former op-ed page editor of the Wall Street Journal who now has a post at the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted on Thursday: “The firing of Comey is only the latest sign of Trump’s Kremlingate meltdown. He’s acting like a man with a lot to hide.”

Many of the above retweeted each other’s posts, and breathlessly linked to New York Times and Washington Post stories that were critical of the president for firing Comey.

Is this any way for self-described Republicans to treat the leader of their party?

“There are lots of people who are looking for an excuse to jump, to take a powder on Trump,” says Craig Shirley, Reagan biographer and long-time Republican political consultant.

Bill Kristol, he says, is “just one of many who will never be for Donald Trump.”

Shirley says he doesn’t consider people like Bill Kristol real Republicans.

“I would call them Vichy Republicans,” he told LifeZette. “I call them Vichy Republicans because they’re the first ones to sell out and go over to the other side.”

Shirley says some of them remind him of an old assistant of Karl Rove’s named Barry Jackson, who was trying to organize an anti-Reagan movement on the floor of the 1984 Republican National Convention, when Reagan was running for re-election — an exercise in futility if there ever was one.

On the Hill, several Republicans noted they were “troubled” by the firing of Comey. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) doubled down, going on CNN to call Comey “the most respected man in America.”

“When you fire probably, arguably, the most respected person in America, you’d better have a very good explanation, and so far I haven’t seen that,” McCain said Wednesday on CNN, the day after Comey was fired.

The Intercept ran a story the same day headlined, “John McCain may have killed an anti-environment bill out of spite over the Comey firing,” saying McCain appeared to suddenly change his mind on voting for repeal of a rule on methane emissions, which Trump supported, sinking the bill on the Senate floor.

Glenn Bleck, who was suspended for a week from his Sirius radio show in 2016 after seeming to muse with a guest about how Trump might be assassinated, and whose show was moved off the Sirius Patriot Channel this week to a channel that until now featured weather and traffic reports, seemed at times sympathetic with Trump on his show on Thursday morning, saying Trump must feel alone with so many leakers in his White House.

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But then he moved in with the knife.

“I don’t think he has very many friends. As soon as his ‘friends’ see that he’s a wounded animal, he’s in trouble, because they will all scramble for the hills, cause they’re weasels,” he said.

The comments by the Never-Trumpers stand in contrast to the words of the former FBI director, James Comey, who, the morning after he was fired, sent a letter to staff at the FBI, saying, “I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI director for any reason, or for no reason at all. I’m not going to spend time on the decision or the way it was executed. I hope you won’t either.”