James Comey’s extraordinary attacks on Donald Trump as “morally unfit” to be president are more than a ploy to sell books. The unprecedented phenomenon of a fired FBI director taking on a sitting president is also a symptom of the most fundamental challenge facing the U.S. political system today.
Put simply: There’s no single, nonpartisan trusted source of authority. In the recent past, nonpartisan law enforcement would have been trusted by broad swaths of the American people. Centrist news media would have been accepted by most members of both parties as authoritative.
That world is gone.