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"Fear is the tool of the tyrant," wrote suddenly former Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey to her colleagues after she was abruptly fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, no basis given, no justification suggested. The surprise is that it took Donald Trump six months before garroting Comey. Since returning to office, he's been focused on exacting revenge against those on his enemies list -- and it's a long list. Then there's the priority of getting rid of anyone whom he thinks may perform their official duties in ways that don't exactly serve his interests.

Comey was an obvious target in both categories. Her father is former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired because he wouldn't agree to tank an FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election in order to help Trump get elected. She's also the one who prosecuted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, and therefore had access to all of the material seized by law enforcement from the two of them -- materials which appear likely to refer to You-Know-Who.

You-Know-Who finds himself in a Jeffrey Epstein-based pickle these days. He was a longtime close friend of the sex trafficker, and their principal common interest does not seem to have been Parcheesi. They partied at one another's mansions in the company of beautiful young women. Numerous witnesses have attested to the closeness of their friendship over many years, and what that friendship was based on. "He's a lot of fun to be with," Trump said about Epstein before he was arrested for directing the interstate trafficking of young girls for sex with himself and his friends, doubtless referring to the always bracing Ping Pong tournaments that Epstein organized at holiday time.

After years of feverishly promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats were hiding evidence relating to Epstein, and promising that if he were elected, he would order all of "the Epstein files" released, once in office his ardor for having these files see the light of day didn't merely cool. It froze.

You don't need Sherlock Holmes to deduce the likely reason.

So now the conspiracy theorists that dominate MAGA World, promised by their hero that they would soon see whose names were in "the file," have been informed by that hero that that will happen more or less when pigs fly.

What do you do if you're Donald Trump? Easy. First you accuse your own loyalists of being idiots. Then you say that the files that you'd been promising to release never existed and were -- you guessed it! -- a "hoax." "These files were made up by (James) Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by Biden," Trump babbled nonsensically when asked about his about-face.

The firing of Maurene Comey is the latest in a flood of actions intended to send a clear message to everyone in government and the private sector alike: Do something I don't like and I will unleash the full power of the federal government against you. Trump's second term has been the same combo of John Gotti and Benito Mussolini as his first term, only on steroids. Green-lighted by a Republican-controlled Congress that asks "How high?" when he commands "Jump!" and backed by a Supreme Court run by his own appointees, which has ruled that he's immune from prosecution for any criminal acts he commits in office, Trump knows he can do what he wants. And this is not a president you want doing whatever he wants.

He's repeatedly threatened to jail journalists and Democrats, and he has an attorney general who does his bidding, no questions asked. He has used the threat of governmental action to extract massive cash payments and obeisance from ABC, CBS and Meta in response to his meritless lawsuits. He has issued executive orders directing that federal agencies do everything possible to put law firms that have represented his political opponents in the past out of business.

This president is a bully who disrespects the law and who has no intention of being constrained by it. Americans have become desensitized or cowed or nonplussed or even just fine with it.

Empires fall. Democracies die. And for the moment, that's the way things seem to be headed.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate Inc.