Opinion: ‘Thanks, Comey,’ says team Trump

View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Monday, July 24, 2017 [NYTimes.com/Opinion »]( [David Leonhardt] David Leonhardt Op-Ed Columnist The polling analysts who worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a name for the many Americans who didn’t like him but didn’t like Hillary Clinton either: “double haters.” Many of these double haters seemed likely to vote anyway, given their long voting history. “They were a sizable bloc,” Joshua Green writes in his new book “Devil’s Bargain,” the first deeply insightful political narrative of the Trump era, “3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters across 17 battleground states.” The double haters spent much of the campaign unsure what to do. In the end, as Green [told]( Fresh Air’s Terry Gross last week, “they broke to Trump.” As part of his reporting for the book, Green got access to internal polls and memos from the Trump campaign, and this material makes clear that Trump’s aides believed one factor made a bigger difference than any other. It was the memo that James Comey, then the F.B.I. director, released about Clinton’s emails on Oct. 28. The memo, Green says, “got them to come out, not to support Trump but essentially to vote against Hillary, which in the end was the same thing.” This revelation is one of the many reasons to read Green’s book. It is ostensibly about Steve Bannon, the alt-right white nationalist who remains a top Trump adviser, and it’s very informative on Bannon, thanks to long interviews with him. Yet it is also filled with insights about the 2016 campaign and Trump. As my colleague [Bret Stephens put it]( in a Times review, the book is “compulsively readable.” I started reading the book Friday afternoon and am already more than halfway through it. For more, listen to Green talk with [Terry Gross]( or [Charlie Rose]( read Marc Fisher’s more skeptical [review]( in The Washington Post; or dig deeper into the evidence on the Comey memo with [Nate Silver](. On the news: The legal scholar Richard Primus [argues]( in Politico that Trump does indeed have the “[complete power]( to pardon himself and others — but doing so could nonetheless end his presidency, given the firestorm that would result. Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter and Norm Eisen [offer]( a different take in The Washington Post. “The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and removal,” they argue. Beyond these two articles, there seems to be [widespread disagreement]( on the self-pardon question. Which is why the most clarifying piece of the weekend may have come from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, who [says]( that it will fall to citizens, not lawyers, to punish Trump for his transgressions. Citizens can protest, and they can vote. “The rule of law is precisely as robust as our willingness to fight for it,” she writes. “And to fight for it is not quite the same thing as to ask, ‘Isn’t there a law?’” The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Senator Chuck Schumer on [the next steps for Democrats](. If you haven’t read it already, I also recommend a piece by Susan Chira, a longtime top editor at The Times (who was my former boss, and a very good boss), on why [more women don’t rise to the Number 1 job at big companies](. Op-Ed Columnist [The Kook, ‘the Mooch’ and the Loot]( By CHARLES M. BLOW The communications problem in this administration is that no one cares about the truth. 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