GOP leaders call President Trump a novice

WASHINGTON — In the furor surrounding former FBI Director James Comey this week, President Trump's critics and allies seemed to agree on one thing: The president had arrived at the White House woefully unaware of the boundaries, norms, and institutional controls of the office for which he had campaigned so hard.

"What people don't understand is that they elected an outsider president," Gov. Christie told MSNBC. "The idea of the way that the tradition of these agencies, it's not something that he's ever been steeped in. So I think over the course of time, what you're seeing is a president who is now very  publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation."

That was Wednesday, the day before Comey took center stage at the Senate Intelligence Committee. The next day — after Comey's scathing assessment of the president — the same argument poured forth from Republicans all over the Capitol.

"The president's new at this," Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters. "He's new to government, and so he probably wasn't steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between [the Department of Justice], FBI, White Houses. He's just new to this."

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who had a seat at the hearing room dais during Comey's testimony, had a similar take.

"Is that the act of someone who is just really angry and upset and because he's not a politician, is kind of unconventional, doesn't realize — or no one's told him that he can't do that, or was that an effort to in fact impede an investigation?" Rubio said after the hearing, according to Politico.

Taken at face value — and setting aside, for a moment, Democratic contentions that Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made sure he was alone with Comey before urging the former FBI director to back off his investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — the statements from Trump's supporters add to the pile of evidence that he had given little thought to what it would mean to be the president, and of the vast responsibilities he would inherit, before taking office.

Mostly, the Trump campaign was about him and about him winning.

To his supporters, of course, this is what many wanted: a brash outsider who would destroy crusty Washington norms and just act.

It doesn't take an expert in government, or even a longtime political insider, though, to know that law enforcement is meant to operate free of political influence, and that powerful figures — even the president — are not supposed to use their office to help their political fortunes, or get their friends off the hook.

But, at least in public, Trump has repeatedly shown little grasp of the differences between being U.S. president and private CEO, or the severity of the issues he was taking on once the campaigning stopped and the governing began.

"Nobody knew health care could be so complicated," he said in February.

Middle East peace, he asserted in May, is "maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years."

And perhaps the most telling comment came in a late April interview with Reuters, right around his 100th day in office, in which Trump said, "This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier."

Anyone with a passing interest in government would have known better than to make that assumption.

His critics question how Trump has gone from businessman extraordinaire to babe in the political woods. In his Republican National Convention speech, he assured supporters that "nobody knows the system better than me. Which is why I alone can fix it."

NBC's Tom Brokaw noted the shift on Twitter Friday morning: "Excuse me?" he wrote, "Trump ran as a big time exec, not as an apprentice."

Trump and his lawyer, of course, dispute that he did anything wrong. They denied many of Comey's assertions, including the most explosive one regarding Flynn.

It will likely take months of investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller to get to the bottom of what happened, and if any crimes were committed by anyone involved. But if he believes they were, ignorance of the law is not typically an acceptable defense.

As usual, Trump was confident it wouldn't get there. He says he did nothing wrong.

"Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication," Trump tweeted Friday morning. "and WOW, Comey is a leaker!"

This part of the job, Trump is familiar with.