Sean Spicer, Rod Rosenstein and Life as a Trump Booster:

Today I watched White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s Fox News interview with Lou Dobbs from May 9th, shortly after news broke of Comey’s firing as Director of the FBI.

In the interview, Spicer promoted the White House’s initial talking points, which conveyed that President Trump accepted the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to fire Comey. We always suspected this was a false narrative, and subsequent reports in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have confirmed these suspicions. The White House’s failed attempt at spin shows, for the umpteenth time, that this president will cynically use anyone around him to make himself look good, and will ultimately destroy them in the process.

In the Dobbs interview, Spicer sought to (i) explain Rosenstein’s role as overseer of the FBI, (ii) emphasize Rosenstein’s (impeccable) pedigree and bipartisanship support (in two minutes he mentioned twice that Rosenstein was confirmed in the Senate by a 94-6 margin), and (iii) explain that Rosenstein made a determination that Comey had lost the confidence of the American people, and the president simply “concurred” in this judgment.

The next day, the Washington Post reported that: “Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.” The real story, of course, is that because of the foregoing reasons, Trump asked Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to draft a memo giving Trump the cover to fire Comey.

The Washington Post story also stated that Rosenstein threatened to resign after being portrayed as “a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on his recommendation”. Justifiably, Rosenstein didn’t like the White House spin because it wasn’t accurate and damaged his credibility. Only two weeks on the job, Rosenstein is facing massive pressure to take questionable action in order to shield the president from the Russia investigation.

We’ve seen time and time again that President Trump, the consummate “deal-maker”, views personal relationships as purely transactional in nature. In the vocabulary of philosopher Martin Buber, he has only I-It relationships, never I-Thou relationships. Spicer and other government officials are “valuable” so long as they help Trump and regurgitate the talking points that make Trump (at least in Trump’s view) look good, and will become useless if they lose their blind loyalty. Rosenstein is now learning this; Spicer has been in the vortex for months.

A frequent dilemma when working for this president is whether you support the boss or do the right thing. We’ve seen many White House officials go with the former option, such as Sean Spicer and most egregiously White House Counsel Don McGhan, who has blessed many of Trump's most pernicious decisions. We've also seen Sally Yates choose the latter. What's clear, however, is that in the long term, the sycophant strategy will destroy credibility and ultimately undermine success (see Flynn, Mike; and Nunes, Devin). Here’s to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein maintaining independence and doing what’s best for the country, even if it’s not the best for the president. Like any reasonable employee, Rosenstein doesn’t want to upset the boss. But at this point, Rosenstein's credibility, and the integrity of the judiciary branch, may depend on it.