Has Trump Been A Rational Actor All Along?

Yesterday I floated the idea that we've been fed a legacy media consensus that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic, when in fact evidence shows he's a rational actor. This certainly got started as early as his June 16, 2015 escalator ride at Trump Tower during his campaign announcement, which was almost universally treated as a vanity project that would soon fade from view. But I think it's important to start assessing Trump's statements, his postures, and his actions through a filter that gives him credit for being a rational actor.

James Comey is a key example. Since before Trump's 2017 inauguration, Comey has sought to control the narrative over his case by feeding the very perception that Trump is narcissistic, impulsive, vindictive, and erratic. In fact, I'd say Comey has been one of the chief exponents of this perception in public life -- but this is hardly a disinterested position; Comey has been flirting with indictments over this whole period, and the idea that Trump could be acting vindictively has largely protected him, at least up to now.

Comey lasted less than four months under Trump before he was fired on May 9, 2017. Comey has largely controlled the legacy media narrative ever since. For instance, pretty much everything we know about the January 6, 2017 meeting in which Comey along with James Clapper, John Brennan, and Mike Rogers met with Trump, comes from either Comey himself or his special assistant Josh Campbell (the photo above shows the two together). Campbell in a tell-all book wrote,

The four intelligence chiefs decided Comey should brief the incoming president on the [Steele dossier] one-on-one, both because the FBI had originally received the information and because Comey was the only one in the group who was guaranteed to remain on the job when the new administration came in. (Unlike the heads of the other intelligence agencies, the director of the FBI serves a statutorily mandated ten-year term, and Comey was in year three.) Conscious of the personal embarrassment this sensitive brief might cause the president-elect, the FBI director opted to discuss it with Trump separately at the end of the larger briefing on Russian interference.

. . . Aware of the unprecedented nature of an FBI director confronting a newly elected president with explosive material about his personal life, coupled with the fact that the president’s campaign was secretly under investigation for its possible ties to Russia, Comey wanted to make certain that he fully documented the interaction in writing. He would later tell me he knew it was possible the president-elect might one day lie about the exchange if it ever came to light.

. . . When Comey got to the tawdry details contained in the dossier, Trump became defensive, cutting him off and denying the allegations. “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” Trump asked. He then went on to recount, unprompted, a number of allegations against him by various women, which he claimed were all false. Comey indicated that the intelligence community was aware that the claims in the dossier were unsubstantiated, but that he nevertheless wanted Trump to be aware the information was circulating through government and media circles. Trump thanked Comey for the information, signaling the end of the short one-on-one meeting.

Let's consider this: in a one-on-one encounter with Trump, their first ever, Comey shows his hand, which is the Steele pee allegtions. Trump must certainly have been aware that these were false; at minimum, those closest to Trump say he's a germophobe, and such antics would be wildly improbable. But Trump's alleged reply, “Do I look like the kind of guy who needs prostitutes?” doesn't sit right with me, either.

Comey has just accused Trump of something both improbable and, by his own admission, unsubstantiated, thereby establishing in Trump's mind that he's completely unreliable and unserious. Trump wouldn't even want to be around someone like that. I believe the part about Trump cutting Comey off and thanking him, but not much else.

On June 8, 2017, after Trump fired him, Comey testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past.

I suspect that in that first Trump Tower meeting, Comey realized he'd gotten off on the wrong foot with Trump, and that was putting it mildly. Thus he felt the need immediately to create self-serving versions of each subsequent encounter, because he was a short-timer, and he knew it. He went on in the testimony,

The President and I had dinner on Friday, January 27 at 6:30 pm in the Green Room at the White House.

. . ,. The President began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI Director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to. He said that lots of people wanted my job and, given the abuse I had taken during the previous year, he would understand if I wanted to walk away.

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.

I replied that I loved my work and intended to stay and serve out my ten-year term as Director. And then, because the set-up made me uneasy, I added that I was not “reliable” in the way politicians use that word, but he could always count on me to tell him the truth. I added that I was not on anybody’s side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the President.

My reading of this account of the conversation is that, three weeks after Comey had given Trump a highly unfavorable impression at Trump Tower, Trump was giving Comey a chance to reset things. Not "an effort to have me ask for my job", but under the circumstances a very generous opportunity for Comey to admit that he'd blundered by bringing up the pee dossier and, in effect, set things right. Instead, Comey doubled down and made it plain that he would continue to work against Trump, and he seems to have put it in almost as many words. Next:

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President.

. . . The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone.

When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.

. . . The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share.

. . . The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President.

I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership.

It's very hard not to read this as Comey being remarkably obtuse. Trump announces that he wants to talk about Mike Flynn, who had been accused of lying to the FBI in circumstances Trump must already have recognized were questionable, but what he really wanted to talk about was leaks. Let's fast forward to late September 2025:

The two-page indictment is short on detail, but it says Mr Comey has been charged with one count of making false statements and another of obstruction of justice.

. . . The first count relates to Mr Comey telling the congressional committee he had not authorised someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about an FBI investigation into what the indictment describes as "PERSON 1", believed to be Clinton.

I take Trump's subtext in this meeting to mean that he's fully aware that Comey had been leaking, and that he made a regular practice of it. This was an implicit warning of grounds for termination. I would take this from any supervisor of mine that this was precisely that, and whatever I was doing in that direction, I should immediately stop. In fact, again, in a normal working context, I would take this as remarkably generous, since it effectively means that the boss already has grounds to show you the door but is giving you one more chance.

Comey's attitude seems to have been that he's in year three of his ten-year term, and he can't be fired. On May 9, Trump disabused Comey of any such assumption. In fact, the actual circumstances of Comey's firing struck me as consistent with a corporate firing for misconduct: Trump did it while Comey was out of the office in Los Angeles, and his electronic access and physical access to his office were terminated immediately at the same time. He would have had no way to spirit any files out before he was barred.

This isn't the usual case of a senior official being eased out "to spend more time with my family". In fact, given termination circumstances like those, I would have expected indictment for something like fraud or embezzlement to happen quickly in an ordinary business environmnent.

The more I look at Comey's accounts of his brief relationship with Trump, the more I get the impression that Trump was working with a great deal of insight into human nature, and insight into Comey in particular; and I have a sense that he almost immediately recognized that Comey wasn't just unreliable, he was completely untrustworthy and should never have been at the FBI. Under those circumstances, I think we're justified in recognizing that Trump was a rationial actor from the start of his first administration.