Failure Is a Contagion

Last Friday night, Barr claimed, falsely, that Berman had resigned. Jay Clayton, a golfing buddy of Trump’s who is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, would be the nominee to replace Berman, Barr said; in the interim, the job would go to Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey. But Berman replied that he had not resigned and would not resign. Because the attorney general has no power to get rid of a court-appointed U.S. attorney, Barr had to backpedal and enlist the president’s help. On Saturday, Barr announced that Trump was firing Berman at his request. Trump tried to sidestep the mess: “I’m not involved,” he told reporters.

As the president and his attorney general passed this bag of waste back and forth, their plan for the Southern District fell through. Because Berman is court-appointed, his interim replacement has to be his deputy, Audrey Strauss, the first assistant U.S. attorney. Strauss is a veteran prosecutor, respected by her peers, thoroughly versed in the cases that threaten Trump, and—though it should be irrelevant—a Democrat who donated to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump and Barr are stuck with her. It isn’t clear that either of them understood or foresaw this. The administration’s actions have always reflected a mix of malevolence and incompetence; these days, the balance is shifting toward the latter.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Three plausible—and troubling—reasons why Barr tried to force Berman out

Even if Berman testifies before the House Judiciary Committee, we might never find out exactly why he was fired. But the reasons are less important than the implications: A president who aspired, with the help of an ideological attorney general, to exercise authoritarian power over his government is stumbling into blunders that are destroying any illusion of control, and with it the grounds for fearing him. The triple crisis of the spring of 2020—the coronavirus, unemployment, protests—and the elusive basement campaign of his Democratic challenger have Trump swinging wildly and connecting with his own face. All the tricks that once kept him on the offensive—rallies and purges, insults and race-baiting—are no longer working. Barr, who seemed so formidable just a few months ago, is flailing. Accomplices such as Senator Lindsey Graham (who made it clear he won’t allow Trump to ram a replacement U.S. attorney through the Senate Judiciary Committee) might be taking early steps to extricate themselves from a presidency that’s beginning to smell like defeat.

None of this means that Trump is going to lose in November, or that he will leave quietly if he does. Nor does it mean that the government he’s spent the past three and a half years trying to destroy is actually in good health and fighting back. Incidents such as the bungled Friday-night massacre are signs that the federal bureaucracy is still alive, not that it is well. But Berman’s defiance, like that of the retired military officers who recently criticized Trump, seems part of a larger collapse that will build its own momentum. Failure is a contagion.