The President No One Wants to Talk To

Plenty of people were all abuzz over Donald Trump's suggestion that he might be taping some White House conversations. Of course. After all, it not only contained obvious echoes of Watergate, but as a practical matter it also raised the possibility that if anything illegal or improper has been going on, evidence might be available. Others made the sensible observation that even if nothing comes of this, the increased suspicion of taping will decrease the ability of Trump to receive candid advice from anyone. That's true, I suppose, although we have no evidence to date that Trump is willing to listen to anything that might be embarrassing if it got out.

In fact -- assuming no tapes really exist -- there's a much greater problem for Trump in his public who-said-what fight with James Comey. Yes, it's bad if the president secretly tapes his own conversations. But it's even worse, I suspect, if the president demonstrates that he's willing to outright lie about what people said to him in private.