ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

In the near-year he has been president, he has done or tried to do all of the things I flagged:

He has demanded substantive outcomes from investigations.

He has demanded investigations of political opponents.

He has raged against the norms that prevent these wishes from being fulfilled.

He has attacked--publicly and by name--people who have acted honorably to defend those norms.

He fired the redoubtable FBI director whom I flagged as an inconvenient bulwark--for precisely the reason that James Comey was functioning as an inconvenient bulwark.

He has harassed Comey's management team and demanded publicly their replacement.

He has made the environment for those assistant U.S. attorneys committed to their jobs so uncomfortable that one literally sat in my office and told me that he was going to resign because "I don't want to stand up in court any more and say, I'm [his name] and I represent the United States."

He has appointed an attorney general he specifically intended to protect him and go after his opponents.

This is banana-republic-type stuff.  One year into Trump's term in office, his character has not changed. The president of the United States--as John Bellinger warned as early as December 2015 and as I elaborated on in March of 2016--remains the principal threat in the world to the national security of the United States. His aspirations are as profoundly undemocratic and hostile to the institutions of democratic governance as they have ever been. He announces as much in interview after interview, in tweet after tweet. The president has not changed, and he will not change. Whether he has grown or will grow is not even an interesting question.

The interesting question, one year in, is how the apparatus of democratic government is weathering his onslaught. The answer to this question is complicated but, I think, ultimately encouraging.

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