Republican worms will turn as soon as Trump’s ratings dive over the Russia affair

These wretches have only their incomes and status to protect. Since they have proved they will do anything in that cause, it’s a gimme they will abandon Trump the moment they see him as a mortal danger to their re-election.

Donald Trump met with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov the day after firing FBI director James Comey (EPA)

When historians settle down to analyse Donald Trump’s presidency, will they fix on 10-11 May as the beginning of the end?

Reflecting on this brief yet frantic passage of time, it is hard to compute that even the grandmaster of self-inflicted disaster compressed so much idiocy, lunacy and mayhem into barely 24 hours.

It isn’t exactly that you couldn’t make it up. Whatever Richard Littlejohn’s thinking, you obviously could. If Trump’s political career teaches nothing else, it is that you can make anything up.

But why would you bother making this up when every studio executive would bin the proposal halfway through page one for being too crude and silly for the broadest satirical comedy?

A brief recap might be handy for those, like me, left breathless and bamboozled by the pace of events. When on 10 May Trump sacked FBI director James Comey, the White House line was that this had nothing to do with investigations into his Russian links. It was solely because veteran deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, eyeing up his retirement clock after a fortnight in the job, demanded Comey’s removal because he hadn’t nailed Hillary Clinton for being careless with classified material.

The following day, Trump torpedoed that hastily invented nonsense by admitting it was solely his decision, helpfully mentioning his vexation with “this Russia thing” in the same sentence.

Also on 11 May, sensitive as always to the optics, he hosted Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergei Kislyak (the guy several Trumpworld stalwarts met secretly before the inauguration) in the Oval Office. With the American press excluded from the pow-wow, the only media outlet given access was Tass, the Putin house journal which moonlights as Moscow’s leading news agency.

Until today, the episode’s gold medal for surreal derangement belonged to Sean Spicer, Trump’s adorably hapless press secretary, who briefed about Comey’s firing while apparently hiding in the bushes. I say “apparently” because he disputed this, forcing The Washington Post to correct its story. Far from being in the bushes, it amended, Spicey had been “among the bushes”.

Whether Trump was already in or among deep trouble on the Russia front, his situation dramatically worsened today. Unabashed by the prepositional debacle of last week, The Washington Post revealed that on 11 May, Trump treated the Russians, representatives of a hostile power, to information (about the alleged Isis plot to detonate laptop bombs on aircraft) so highly classified that the US hadn’t shared it with its closest allies.

Inevitably, Trump officials in attendance have issued the sort of non-denial denials that will satisfy such propaganda machines as Breitbart, but no one else. The claim that Trump prefaced his disclosure – probably treasonous from anyone but the Commander in Chief – with a babyish boast is all too credible. “I get great intel,” he reportedly told the Russians. “I have people brief me on great intel every day.”

Do you reckon Lavrov and Kislyak would have been sceptical about that claim, which is half as startling as “I have a great plane. Air Force One. Just the most tremendous 747”?

Yet seemingly fearful that the Russians wouldn’t believe that the US President is privy to intelligence reports, Trump offered a juicy titbit to slay their doubts.

There are two viable explanations for this sequence of events. One is that Trump, mightily worried about “the Russia thing”, was laying the ground for the Jimmy Savile Defence. Savile hid himself in (or among) plain sight partly by lasciviously squeezing pubescent children on Top of the Pops. If I really liked young girls, the messaging went, would I be so stupid and reckless as to cuddle them on TV? Perhaps Trump thought that if he concertina’d the Comey sacking and the Russian meeting into a few hours, the blatancy would allow him to run that defence later?

The other rationale is that he is stupider and more reckless than previously feared. I think we can guess which is the odds-on chance. But either way, his lucky streak is running out to judge by the infuriation of senior Republicans.

“The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order,” says Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “It’s got to happen.” Yeah, good luck with that one, Bob.

Political history may never have known a more nauseating bunch of invertebrates than today’s Republicans. You could look to Caligula’s Senate and similarly spineless apparats in countless tyrannies since. But they had the excuse of wanting to avoid having themselves and their families set alight, disembowelled or shot.

However impressive this homage to Caligula (and making Betsy DeVos education secretary was a match, at the very least, for making a horse consul), Trump cannot execute Republican Senators and Representatives.

These wretches have only their incomes and status to protect. Since they have proved they will do anything in that cause, it’s a gimme they will abandon Trump the moment they see him as a mortal danger to their re-election.

The Republican resistance has been a trickle until now, but Corker’s blunt outrage suggests it may be about to snowball. If and when Trump’s approval ratings dive into the mid-30s to threaten their chances in the mid-terms of November 2018, these worms will turn. Suddenly, publicly, they will notice that the only garment standing between their emperor and total nakedness is a gold-brocaded straitjacket.