Pat Buchanan covers Rostenstein meeting with Trump, Kavanaugh showdown

Thursday is shaping up to be the Trump presidency's "Gunfight at OK Corral."

That day, the fates of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and much else, may be decided.

The New York Times report that Rosenstein, sarcastically or seriously in May 2017, talked of wearing a wire into the Oval Office to entrap the president, suggests that his survival into the new year is improbable.

Whether Thursday is the day President Donald Trump drops the hammer is unknown.

But if he does, the recapture by Trump of a Justice Department he believes he lost as his term began may be at hand. Comparisons to President Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre may not be overdone.

The Times report that Rosenstein also talked of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump suggests that Sen. Lindsey Graham had more than a small point on "Fox News Sunday": "There's a bureaucratic coup going on at the Department of Justice and the FBI, and somebody needs to look at it."

Indeed, they do. And it is inexplicable that a special prosecutor has not been named. For while the matter assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller, to investigate any Trump collusion with Russia in hacking the emails of the Clinton campaign and DNC, is serious, a far graver matter has gotten far less attention.

To wit, did an anti-Trump cabal inside the Department of Justice and the FBI conspire to block Trump's election, and having failed, plot to bring down his presidency in a "deep state" coup d'etat?

Rosenstein's discussion of wearing a wire into the Oval Office lends credence to that charge, but there is much more to it.