BUT HE DOES AMUSE!:

Far too many observers, left and right, persist in being surprised at Trump when nothing about his conduct is surprising, persist in looking for rationality where none is to be found, and persist in believing that some institutional force -- party elders or convention delegates, the deep state or an impeachment process -- is likely to push him off the stage.

Start with the president's Republican defenders. Not the cynics and liars, but the well-meaning conservatives who look at something like the Comey firing and assume that there must be a normal method at work, who listen to whatever narrative White House aides spin out and try to take it seriously.

In this case this meant saying, well, there was always a reasonable case for firing Comey over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the president was just following his deputy attorney general's advice, and anyway it would be simply nuts to fire someone out of pique while they were investigating your campaign's ties to a foreign power, because that would just bring more attention to the investigation, so surely not even Trump would be that crazy, right?

Wrong. First the White House sprung more leaks than a cracked dike in a North Sea flood, most of which suggested that the president had acted out of personal frustration with Comey's perceived disloyalty to Trump himself, and annoyance at what he saw of the F.B.I. director on TV. And then the president went on national TV himself to explain that he would have fired Comey regardless of what his attorney general's office recommended, and by the way he had indeed been thinking about the Russia investigation and how it detracted from his glorious electoral victory when he made the decision to get rid of the man supervising it.

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