Given his braggadocio, his ignorance, his twisted tweets and more, President Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, except, of course, for Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, a past buddy of two, Stormy Daniels, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and Robert Mueller. Let’s focus on Mueller.

He’s the kingpin of the get-Trump movement, and no, I don’t mean he started it all, but this whole special counsel stuff is crazy. It got going with astonishment at Trump’s impossible election along with rumors about his colluding with Russia, and then Mueller became Sherlock Holmes leading an army. A special counsel has the power of a big, big government and millions of dollars not so much to secure justice as to ensnare the guy perceived to be bad, maybe to get him impeached, and to interfere with normal governance.

Mueller, as honorable as honorable gets, according to some, once authorized an unprecedented raid on a congressional office in alleged violation of the separation of powers and, toning it down a bit, has lately overreached in what’s happening to Trump’s former personal attorney and a campaign manager. Now he wants to question Trump in person, an obvious perjury trap as can be seen by anyone noticing Trump’s misstatement mentality.

So far, the foremost, unintended revelation emanating largely from the many-sided onslaught has been that a certain former CIA chief and key FBI players were up to their throat in misdeeds and that the 2016 presidential campaign that most needs investigating is Clinton’s.

The source of much of the garbage about Trumpian evils comes from a former English spy, Christopher Steele, who was paid by the Clinton campaign. He was getting dirt on Trump from Russians to serve her. The FBI failed to disclose what it legally should have in using Steele’s dossier in court proceedings and the CIA was involved in all the commotion in ways some find questionable.

Outdoing Trump’s lies in meaningfulness if not in number, meanwhile, have been former FBI chief James Comey and former CIA chief John Brennan, lately an aspiring TV star who does not shine.

The focus of the Mueller investigation now appears to be obstruction of justice when Trump fired Comey, something he was legally entitled to do. The real obstruction is the anti-Trump assault on his being president, of the proper functioning of the federal government, of our precious system — our republic, our democracy. The underhandedness began during the campaign but burst into flamboyant wrongdoing after the election, not the least of it being possibly felonious leaks from members of the intelligence community.

The players are not just Mueller and other bunches of bureaucrats trying to replace elections, but judges thinking they constitute the legislative branch of government as much as the judicial branch. Thus we find that one president getting rid of an unconstitutional executive order on immigrants by another president is against the law when it isn’t or that remarks in campaign speeches count for more than statutes. The great contradiction here is that all of these people doing their earnest if megalomaniacal best to save America are subverting it.

None of this is to say that Trump isn’t sometimes almost as scary as Hillary Clinton and a majority of Democrats. In a recent poll, they said they preferred socialism to capitalism without a follow-up question about whether they would like to move to Venezuela. Where Trump is usually most scary is where he aligns himself with the left, as in some of his fears about global trade. Many of his other policies are far superior to theirs. Through deregulation and tax reform, he has helped achieve a great economic boom providing jobs for just about everyone who wants one. He has functioned better with the Mueller plague than a predecessor often functioned without it, but think what might have been achieved in the absence of Mueller.

If Trump would quit siding with Pelosi, Waters, Schumer and others in running himself down with tirades meant to run others down, he just might have a much better chance in dealing with the impeachment grizzlies.

[naviga:h3]Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service.[/naviga:h3]