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Staffing
I am impressed by Rod Rosenstein, who is clearly managing to just do his freaking job, as honestly and transparently as possible, while the rest of Washington is collapsing in chaos. He has gone from Unknown to Important in a bit over a week.
And there's an amusing lesson here. While we have a long ways to go before this saga plays out, history may well decide that Trump's biggest mistake was his failure to deal with staffing. Everyone remarks on it -- the way that so few of the important seats in the federal government have been filled yet. It isn't at all clear whether this is due to a knee-jerk Bannon-esque dislike of the bureaucracy, or (more likely) simple incompetence, but the result is that Trump still has relatively few allies in the administration he notionally heads. As many have remarked, he could have fired Comey on Day 1 and only gotten a little grumbling -- this crisis is specifically because Trump waited to fire him only after it become publicly clear that Comey wasn't going to be a loyal yes-man.
That may (God willing) prove a fatal mistake. Because the thing is, if you want to set yourself up as a strongman dictator (and I no longer think it's controversial to say Trump does want that, given his outspoken admiration for people like Putin, Erdogan and Duterte), you need to fill the government with your own placemen. Fascism depends on everyone at the center following your orders. It's not easy to make that happen in the US, but Trump has barely even tried. And hopefully he's already spent so much political capital that it's just going to get harder from here.
We'll see where it goes. But it may well turn out that, in a year where it is hard to respect any of the elected politicians in Washington, it might yet be the civil servants who save the day...
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