The most startling feature of James Comey’s campaign against President Trump is that he’s pursuing precisely the line of attack that failed Secretary of State Clinton. This is the business about how Mr. Trump is “morally unfit to be president.” Mrs. Clinton used that line over and over again during the campaign, arguing at one point that Mr. Trump was “temperamentally unfit — this is not someone who should ever have the nuclear code.”

How did the 50 states, which choose the president of America, react? It looks to us like they weighed the fitness question seriously. How could they not? Everywhere she went, Mrs. Clinton kept pressing the fitness button over and over again. Then the people of the 50 states went to the polls and instructed 30 of the states to send to the Electoral College delegates pledged to the man who is now president. Now comes Mr. Comey with a copycat campaign.

It’s not our purpose here to suggest that Mr. Trump’s presidency is going to survive all this. The New York Times is so cocksure that the President will be impeached that it is out this morning with an editorial seeking to suborne the institution that would be the jury, namely the Senate. Even before charges have been handed up, it’s encouraging the jurors to come over to its side. If it were a court case, it would be journalistic jury tampering.

Impeachment, though, is not a court case but, like what passes for journalism these days, a political process. On the one hand, that works in favor of the Times, the Washington Post, and the other big political players. They can say whatever they want, without any semblance of waiting for the judiciary committee or the House itself. By doing so, on the other hand, the political press gives the President himself license to treat it all as a political matter.

Which is what Mr. Trump seems to be doing. And what Jas. Comey and his ilk are doing. No FBI director working on a criminal case, no potential witness in a criminal case, would bring out a book or take to the airwaves and talk the way Mr. Comey has done. He’s horrified his erstwhile colleagues in the FBI, according to a dispatch in the Daily Beast (no friend of Mr. Trump). What this really does, though, is liberate Mr. Trump to fight this out in the political arena.

Hence the survival of the fittest. It may be that Mr. Mueller will come up with something shocking about Mr. Trump; he hasn’t yet put any of his cards on the table in respect of the President. It may be that the investigation into his lawyer will ensnare the president. Our prediction has been only that we sense Mr. Mueller will move, if he moves against the president, in the form of an indictment, which would be an admission that he fears the political arena — leaving it to the House — more than Mr. Comey does.