The humor of James Comey
The former FBI director’s memoir captures the absurdity of the Trump era
James Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, opens with an amusing anecdote. It’s February 2017, and the then-FBI director is in a black SUV headed to Capitol Hill for a classified briefing on Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. The mood in the car is somber and serious. Comey and the FBI’s new congressional affairs head are riding in silence. In an attempt to inject some levity into the situation, Comey remarks, “How great is this? We’re in the shit!” Extending his arms to demonstrate the depth of the shit, he adds, “We’re waist deep in the shit! Where else would you want to be?”
Given the seriousness of the issues at stake and the lingering criticisms of Comey’s actions during the 2016 campaign (not to mention the decision to release a revealing memoir in the middle of an ongoing investigation for which Comey is a key witness), why does this story merit even a passing chuckle?
Because it’s a spot-on assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency and a valuable lesson in how to endure it. We are all in the shit. America is waist-deep in a moral and political morass, trying to keep from sinking further into a constitutional crisis. Whatever the author’s mistakes and shortcomings, A Higher Loyalty brilliantly diagnoses the absurdity of this situation and offers a worthy prescription for coping with it.
In Comey’s telling, the first two presidents he served shared his awareness of the occasional ridiculousness of the world and his appreciation for using humor to process it. George W. Bush, for instance, “understood that humor was essential to the high-stress, high-stakes business we were in. We could be talking with deadly seriousness about terrorism one minute and filling the Oval Office with laughter the next.” Balancing seriousness and levity was, Comey writes, “the only way to get through the job — to intentionally inject some fun and joy into it.”
Comey’s observations capture the mundane and the monumental in a dryly funny, and intensely human, way. Paninis? They “take forever,” at least in the FBI cafeteria. Hard choices? Well, “there’s a certain freedom in being totally screwed.” Avoiding Trump’s gaze by standing in a dark blue suit against similarly-colored curtains in the Blue Room of the White House? What luck, since “I didn’t have suits that blend in the Green or Red Rooms.” Appearing to share a cheek kiss with President Trump on national TV? Made worse by overhearing the score of an NFL playoff game, which Comey had DVR-ed, while sneaking out of the White House.
As Michiko Kakutani describes him in The New York Times, citing a phrase of writer Saul Bellow, Comey is a “first-class noticer,” an astute observer of details large and small. Coupled with his front-row seat to history, Comey is a particularly effective witness to the mannerisms and quirks of the current president.
Trump’s speaking style? An “oral jigsaw-puzzle contest with a shot clock.” His hands? “Smaller than mine,” but to be fair, “not… unusually so.” His attempts to impress Comey with a handwritten dinner menu? As Comey recounts matter-of-factly, “‘They write these things out one at a time, by hand,’ [Trump] marveled. … ‘A calligrapher,’ I replied, nodding. He looked quizzical. ‘They write them by hand,’ he repeated.”
The brevity of today’s news cycle and the slowly escalating, norm-shifting preposterousness of the Trump era can make it easy to forget just how absurd America’s president and its politics have become. Nothing exemplifies that reality better than the so-called Steele dossier, and Trump’s response to it. The president, for example, proclaims his innocence to Comey by insisting, “I’m a germaphobe!” Comey actually laughs out loud. “I decided not to tell him,” Comey writes, “that the activity alleged did not seem to require either an overnight stay or even being in close proximity to the participants.”
On another occasion, when Trump says to Comey that “it bothered him if there was even a one percent chance his wife Melania thought it was true,” Comey tells the reader, “I immediately began wondering why his wife would think there was any chance — even a small one — that he had been with prostitutes urinating on each other in Moscow.” His somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis continues: “For all my flaws, there is a zero percent chance — literally absolute zero — that Patrice [Comey’s wife] would credit an allegation that I was with hookers peeing on each other in Moscow.”
Those are pretty amusing lines coming from a six-foot-eight former director of the FBI whose prior public image might be described as serious and stoic. But why are these anecdotes anything more than petty jabs at the president’s expense?
They matter for two reasons — one profound and one practical. First, the profound. These stories are just a few brush strokes in a broader portrait of Trump painted by countless people who have interacted or worked with him. Taken together, they describe, with devastating consistency, a person controlled by his obsessions, insecurities, and lack of self-awareness. These characteristics — the things that make Trump seem a caricature of himself — impact far more than one man’s fragile ego.
The absurdity Comey so effectively captures is a reminder of the humanness of government and power. There’s no “Committee to Save America.” There’s no benevolent grown-up working in the background to make sure nothing too terrible happens. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Comey describes his own decision-making as that of “a deeply flawed human surrounded by other flawed humans.” That, in a nutshell, is how any institution designed and led by human beings actually works — a reality not limited to the current White House.
The second reason Comey’s stories matter is more practical. They make us laugh. They help us keep things in perspective. In doing so, they help us summon the strength to endure.
Comey’s memoir is a lot of things. It’s well-written. It’s earnest and self-serving. It’s been cherry-picked for tidbits of gossip by reporters and pundits interested only in conflict, clicks, and Hillary Clinton’s emails. And as Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes has written, it deals with issues far more serious than the length of Trump’s tie or the size of his hands.
But it’s also funny, human, and at least somewhat self-deprecating in a way that’s rare in American politics today. In some ways, it’s only fitting that a solemn and self-righteous former law enforcement official would be the guy to remind us that while the stakes are indeed quite high, we also need to laugh a little to keep things in perspective.
We’re waist deep in a dangerous and absurd time in American history. Finding a little humor from time to time reminds us that, for as deep as it may be, at least we’re in it together.
Note: The quotations from Comey’s memoir are excerpted from the audiobook version, which explains any discrepancies in punctuation or formatting.