NEWARK, OHIO—James Cassidy didn’t need the director of the FBI to tell him Barack Obama never wiretapped Donald Trump at Trump Tower. Cassidy knew from the start that Trump made the whole thing up.He was happy the president lied.“He’s ruffling every feather in Washington that he can ruffle. These guys are scrambling. So: yeah! I like it. I think it’s a good thing. I want to see them jump around a little bit,” Cassidy, 58, said on Tuesday.It was the first afternoon of spring. Cassidy, an unemployed former construction worker, was smoking outside a bar on one of the faded downtown streets of Newark, a city of 48,000 people about 45 minutes east of Columbus. When a buddy rolled up on a bicycle, they soon got to talking about their chronic pain.Cassidy is hurting, and he wants powerful people to hurt too.So when Trump sent Congress and the media and the big intelligence agencies into a perplexed frenzy with a four-tweet lie in early March about supposed surveillance “McCarthyism” by his “sick” predecessor, Cassidy smiled to himself.Sure, Cassidy thought, Trump’s claim was obviously false. “Why would he? Why would Obama do that?” But Trump had promised to slap some sense into the out-of-touch Washington elites, and he was doing what he said he was going to do, wasn’t he?“He makes them uncomfortable,” he said, “which makes me happy.”The day prior, Trump had suffered what appeared to be a credibility catastrophe. Rarely before has a president been so publicly debunked: James Comey, the FBI chief, told a televised congressional committee that he had “no information” to corroborate Trump’s allegation about Obama. Even Republican congresspeople, the New York Times reported, were privately complaining that Trump’s tweets were undermining his presidency.That may be true. But there was no hint of a collapsing brand this wee ...
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