Trump's latest maneuvers pressuring Rosenstein to "investigate" the FBI shouldn't surprise anyone. People in positions of power have power. Call it the tautology of power. It also means that challenging anyone in power is very, very difficult because they have institutional support structures designed to insulate them from the consequences of their misdeeds.
What about checks and balances, you say?
Yeah, those... don't work anymore. And that's kind of my point. So, at this point, we always turn to James Madison. "If men [insert comment here] were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men [uh...] neither external nor internal controls over government would be necessary."
Donald Trump is a reprehensible... thing. Remember those external and internal controls Madison mentioned, though. Trump is such a piece of shit that it isn't even worth examining him for my purposes here. Freud has been basically relegated to the scrapheap of psychology history, and that's saying something given the replication crisis (look it up, kids), but we're going Freudian today, because nobody is more penis-obsessed than Donny-boy. More importantly, despite the colloquial use of the word, "ego," in Freudian terms, Trump is basically just "id." Poorly developed ego, and no superego. Just id. He acts on base desires and impulses. That means he is not really the one to examine. Yet, he is in a position of power.
We, however, are not currently in a tribal warlord society in which the guy who can defeat anyone in deadly combat rules the tribe, even if he acts on pure id. That's not how our polity works. What allows someone like Trump to attain and hold a position of power? He is put in a position of power, and allowed to keep it.
The important people to understand, then, are the enablers. The support structure. The corruption of someone like Donald Trump exists because other people in positions of power not only tolerate it, but protect him for their own reasons. If you want to understand Trump's place in American politics, you need to understand who put him there, and who ensures that he is allowed to keep doing whatever he wants. I'm not even talking about the voters. I'm talking about the institutional figures. In particular, the ones who understand that Trump is a sociopath. Trumpists who actually, truly like the guy are uninteresting. The ones who are important for us to understand are the ones who hate him, and know he is corrupt, but back him anyway. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan do not act on pure impulse. They don't like or respect Trump. They make conscious calculations that their incentives are to protect Trump-- a man they detest, don't respect, know is corrupt, but will go to the political ends of the earth to protect because they have made that political and moral calculation.
I'm going to do a series about this. Let's get this thing going. Where's it going? I don't know. To quote Indy, "I'm making this up as I go."