Quote (Santara @ 30 Dec 2021 00:10)
Trump fired dozens of US attorneys, so clearly he was prepared to go after anything he saw as a political enemy. He failed to do so with the FBI, which clearly means he didn't view the FBI as a political opponent.
Quote (Sioux @ 30 Dec 2021 00:13)
Lol Trump was a lot of things, afraid of media criticism was not one of them
Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ 30 Dec 2021 00:49)
He fired Comey. There was no fear of that. He cleared people out in favor of loyalists. The fact that he didn't touch most of the FBI shows he didn't need to.
Your logic is flawed. Trump not clearing the FBI does not prove that he didn't see them as political opponents, perhaps even saw them as allies - it only proves that he deemed it politically unwise to clear them.
Tldr: the Comey saga showed Trump that the FBI higher-ups were too entrenched, backed by institutions, "the system" and public opinion, to be up for grabs. He realized that he couldn't politically get away with firing high-ranking FBI members or blocking FBI investigations without having a damn good justification.
Trump is a simple man, he does what he thinks is good for himself. He wasn't afraid of many forms of negative coverage in the mainstream press because it actually reinforced or expanded his power. But the Comey case taught him that it is bad for his position/power to be too brazen with his interference with the FBI, or the intelligence community more broadly. If (!) he ever intended to "drain the swamp", these attempts were dead the moment he fired Comey, a corrupt swamp creature who absolutely deserved to be fired, and had to pay a hell of a political price for doing so.