“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” These days, when bravado about hand size is what passes for political erudition, it was a welcome delight to hear James Comey and Angus King riffing on the Henry II and Thomas Becket story.
That narrative is worth a brief review. It is, in interesting ways, more complex than the expected trope of a power-hungry king brutally murdering the good and godly man who stands in his way.
For many years Henry II and Thomas Becket were great friends. Henry was an intelligent ruler who believed in a principled government in which justice would be available to all, and Becket, whom the king appointed as his chancellor, served him well. Henry was a man who downplayed materialism, while Becket reveled in the wealth and power that his position brought him.
When Becket ascended to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162, however, he underwent a transformation. He became an ascetic – he is rumored to have been wearing a hair shirt at the time of his murder – and he fought for the power and autonomy of the church in ways that were threatening to Henry’s vision of secular humanism.
More to the point, their battle for power became vindictively personal, and what had been a great friendship dissolved into viciousness. All came to a violent end when 4 knights, responding to Henry’s lament about the meddlesome Becket, murdered him at Canterbury Cathedral.
The complexity of the story reminds us not to reduce our narratives to simple binaries. This reminder applies to the Trump-Comey story as well, where it is worthwhile to look beyond the seductive tropes of good vs evil, and truth vs lies, to the more layered dimensions of the confrontation.
On the surface, the Trump- Comey story is portrayed as a struggle over who is telling the truth? At the risk of being simplistic, one has to be a “nut job” to believe anything other than that Comey is telling the truth and Trump is lying. Donald Trump is a pathological liar. His acknowledgment that he lies may be one of the few honest things he has ever said. Comey, meanwhile, has a long history of trying, to the best of his ability, to be truthful.
A central theme in today’s America is that we are divided, that we speak different truths, that these truths are equally valid, and that each side does not appreciate the legitimacy of the other. Often this is accurate. Sometimes it is a dodge. Some narratives are simply more true than others, and sometimes the liberal gesture of giving both sides equal legitimacy can be a reflection of our inability to know what is true, or to have the courage to stand for what we really believe. In this case, the two equally valid stories angle is baloney. One of these men is trying to be honest, the other is lying.
But the meaning and relevance of the Trump-Comey story goes much deeper than the simple question of who is telling the truth.
Comey is meddlesome to Trump and his minions for many reasons. The charge of obstruction of justice is serious. What Comey knows about Russian interference in the election is legally dangerous for the Trump team. The story of Russian interference, which Comey refuses to silence, undermines that which, more than anything else, Trump needs to survive; it interferes with his ego’s insatiable and desperate need for inflation. There are many reasons why this meddlesome director had to go.
What Trump and his followers find most meddlesome about Comey, however, runs deeper.
Most of the time the truth is a pretty big place. While we can be confident that Comey’s relationship with what is true is more reliable than Trump’s, it is also certain that Comey’s version of what happened, what was said, and what was intended, is shaped by the lens of his subjectivity. This is not meant as a criticism, more as a reflection on the fluid nature of “truth”. And herein lies the whole point. While the question of whether what Comey is saying is true, or whether it is more true than what Trump is saying, is important, what is more important is that Comey cares to tell the truth, even if the truth he tells is imperfect. Because the truth is imperfectly knowable, what matters is less that we get it right and more that we have the integrity to try, however hard it is, to say true things. Comey is a problem for Trump less because he cares to try to say what is true.
In today’s political universe principles have been suborned by partisanship, “facts” are mutilated in the service of self-interest, and “truth” has been weaponized in the service of greed and power. The creative post-modern take that truth and objectivity are impossible to fully know because they can only be apprehended from within the confines of one’s own subjective mind has been perverted. Instead of post-modernism’s disciplining reminder that while there may be a “there” there, we can never fully know it, now we are led to believe that there is no longer even a “there” there. The only “there” that is there is the one constructed by the needs of our own subjective convenience.
In this regard, it isn’t really accurate to call Trump a liar. Liars know what is true, and they willfully deceive. Liars, in other words, understand that there is a “there”, there. By definition Trump is incapable of lying because he does not admit the existence of a truth that he then hides or distorts by way of deceit. The only world he knows is the one that lies within the bounds of his own self-interested solipsism.
Comey is dangerous to Trump because Comey wants to have a relationship with truth. While one senses that he understands that truth can only be asymptotically approached, he nevertheless finds it meaningful to try to approach it. In this regard, the Comey-Trump showdown more parallels that between Galileo and the church than it does Henry II and Becket. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 for his understanding that the earth was not the center of the universe. With this meddlesome “fact” he challenged the idea that man, and his god, were the center of the universe. He, like Comey, confronted, through his will to know what was true, the narcissism of his time.
Narcissism, in its essence, involves colonizing truths, facts and objectivities that lie outside one’s self with the subjectivity of one’s own mind. Narcissism suborns reality, or what is true, with self-interested subjectivity, or what we wish to be true. Facts, science, curiosity, open-mindedness – all things that involve a commitment to learning about truth – are narcissism’s kryptonite. Comey, as the embodiment of this kryptonite, is more than meddlesome to Trump. He is a dangerous and potentially lethal threat.