The emperor's new spray tan: Jason Sattler

Rep. Devin Nunes has decided that his job is to tell the world that the emperor’s new tan is real, and it’s spectacular.

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee last week went on Fox News’ Hannity — where loyal subjects of Trumplandia gather each weeknight to celebrate the emperor’s coloring — to explain why he had rushed to White House to inform the president that Trump transition officials might have been caught up in some incidental intelligence gathering and potentially unmasked.

“It’s clear that I would be concerned if I was the president, and that’s why I wanted him to know, and I felt like I had a duty and obligation to tell him because, as you know, he’s been taking a lot of heat in the news media,” Nunes said.

Ah, Congress’ sacred duty to protect the president from “taking a lot of heat in the news media!” It’s right there in the Constitution, next to the duty to keep the commander in chief’s shoes shined so as to bring out the subtle tint of buffalo-wing skin in the president’s tan. No word on whether Nunes actually brought his shine box to the Oval Office.

Why is President Trump taking a lot of heat in the news media?

You may remember that after Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from all investigations about the Trump campaign because he hadn’t told Congress the truth about his meetings with Russian officials, Trump woke up on a Saturday morning to accuse his predecessor of a high crime.

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“How low has President Obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election process,” the emperor, I mean president, tweeted. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

Evidence of this claim — which the president apparently discovered in an intelligence briefing from Breitbart, a website that once asked, “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” — has proved as elusive as a birth certificate showing that Barack Obama, "founder of ISIS," was born in Kenya.

Trump’s charge has been debunked by the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and Nunes himself. “That didn’t happen,” he said simply, in his second emergency news conference last week about alleged surveillance of the Trump team. That impromptu sideshow also featured the chairman, who was part of Trump's transition team, backing down from his claim that the team was “monitored.”

The headlines now are all about Nunes — his top-secret fill on the White House grounds, where someone had to clear him in but spokesman Sean Spicer said he didn't know who; the mounting calls for him to remove himself from his committee's Russia investigation; the rising temperature of Democratic rhetoric (California Rep. Eric Swalwell on CNN: "This is what a coverup to a crime looks like"); and even critiques from conservatives. He's running "an Inspector Clouseau investigation," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on NBC's Today. "Why is Devin Nunes still chairman of the House Intelligence Committee?" David French asked in National Review.

It's true that headlines about Sessions’ potential perjury and the cataclysmic revelation from Director James Comey that the FBI is investigating the president’s campaign for possible collusion with the Putin government all but disappeared for a while from America’s front pages.

Congratulations, Devin Nunes, you took some heat off Trump!

The chairman’s hand-waving at the smoke rising off the president’s tan might be blunting his committee's ability to get to the bottom of the most serious interference in U.S. elections in American history, but it's not impressing the public. A Quinnipiac University poll finds that two out of three Americans want an independent investigation into links between Trump advisers and Putin lackeys to determine whether they’re all just Putin lackeys.

Nunes, however, appears unconcerned that he is destined to go way down in history as the man who did his best to hide Trump’s true colors.

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Trump spent the 2016 campaign accusing his opponent of a crime and promising to “lock her up!” Now — as president of the United States — he has distinguished himself as the first chief executive to accuse one of his peers of an impeachable crime. And did it with no discernible evidence.

If you weren’t a former first lady or recently departed president, you probably wouldn’t be able to withstand the massive legal costs and irreparable damage to your reputation caused by such allegations from the most powerful man alive. Trump’s charge against Obama itself is a remarkable abuse of power that could be an impeachable crime in itself.

How did Nunes respond?

Instead of imagining that he or a potential Republican primary challenger or any member of Congress who refuses to vote for Trump’s agenda could be next, he helped spray-tan the whole situation with confusion.

Nunes should read, or reread, Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. He’ll see that after the “little child” gives the crowd the courage to laugh at their sovereign’s nakedness, the emperor “walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.”

Back inside the castle, who do you think was the first to take the blame for exposing the emperor’s derrière? How long do you think those “noblemen” remained noble? Devin Nunes may be about to find out.

Jason Sattler, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a columnist for The National Memo. Follow him on Twitter @LOLGOP.

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