The real reason Donald Trump just fired Peter Strzok
Peter Strzok was fired from the FBI today, even though the Department of Justice Inspector General had already essentially cleared him of any intentional wrongdoing, and even after he had delivered a commanding performance during his testimony before Congress. Donald Trump quickly took to Twitter to gloat about it, making clear that he was behind the firing. So what’s really going on here? Why now?
Unless you’ve been under a rock all year, you already know that Peter Strzok and his fellow FBI agent Lisa Page, who were having an affair at the time, famously sent text messages to each other during the election which were critical of Donald Trump. Although this amounted to nothing at all, Trump and his allies have since tried to falsely spin it into some kind of FBI and DOJ conspiracy against Trump. Based on his level of obsessions with Strzok and Page, Trump seems to have convinced himself that these phony talking points are actually real. Therein lies the problem.
Trump is clearly feeling good about himself for having managed to take down Strzok today. He’s even using it as a basis for demanding that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails “should be properly redone.” Of course that’s not going to happen, just as nothing at all will come from Strzok’s firing, other than a wrongful termination lawsuit from him, which he will win, and additional obstruction of justice charges against Trump for yet another illegal firing. So why did Trump do it?
Simply put, Donald Trump is fully divorced from reality, and he’s carrying out personal vengeance against the characters in his delusional fantasies. When Trump did the same thing to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, we saw that firing McCabe did Trump no good whatsoever. Firing Strzok will also get Trump nowhere. But Trump’s mind doesn’t participate in the real world anymore, and in his paranoid delusional haze, he thinks he won something. Meanwhile, even as Trump wastes his time and focus, back in the real world the prosecution just rested its case against Paul Manafort, who could be convicted in as little as a week or two.
