(Photo of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is from yle.fi.)We don't know what was said in any of Donald Trump's meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump didn't allow any aides to be in those meetings, and even confiscated any notes done by his translator. No one in his administration, the Congress, the press, or the American public has a clue as to what was said (or agreed to) in those meetings.
What we do know is that Donald Trump has acted in accordance with the desires of Putin. By attacking our allies, denigrating NATO (and expressed a desire to withdraw from that organization), refusing to acknowledge Russia's interference in our presidential election, support of Russia's seizure of the Crimea, and attempting to remove sanctions of the U.S. government against Russia, Trump has acted fulfill Putin's fondest wishes.
It has many wondering -- Is Trump a Russian asset (agent), or is he just a useful idiot that Putin has skillfully manipulated?
Here is just a small part of what Garrett M. Graff had to say about this at wired.com:
THE PATTERN OF his pro-Putin, pro-Russia, anti-FBI, anti-intelligence community actions are so one-sided, and the lies and obfuscation surrounding every single Russian meeting and conversation are so consistent, that if this president isn’t actually hiding a massive conspiracy, it means the alternative is worse: America elected a chief executive so oblivious to geopolitics, so self-centered and personally insecure, so naturally predisposed to undermine democratic institutions and coddle authoritarians, and so terrible a manager and leader, that he cluelessly surrounded himself with crooks, grifters, and agents of foreign powers, compromising the national security of the US government and undermining 75 years of critical foreign alliances, just to satiate his own ego.
In short, we’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Russia helped win him the 2016 election—or Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous “useful idiot,” as communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.
At least the former scenario—that the president of the United States is actively working to advance the interests of our country’s foremost, long-standing, traditional foreign adversary—would make him seem smarter and wilier. The latter scenario is simply a tragic farce for everyone involved.
We’re left here—in a place unprecedented in American political history, wondering how much worse the truth is than we already know—after four days of fresh revelations in the public drip-drip-drip of the Russia investigation. The past two months have seen the public understanding of the case advance into almost unthinkable territory. Now we’re simply trying to figure out how bad things really are.
Consider: On Friday, The New York Times reported that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of the president himself in 2017; on Saturday, The Washington Post published a story saying that Trump has gone to great lengths to cover up and hide—even from his own aides—his interactions with Putin; on Sunday, columnist Max Boot outlined the case for Trump as a Russian asset; and on Tuesday the Times came back with an authoritative recounting of Trump and Putin’s interactions, a recounting that included a bizarre telephone call from Air Force One where the president tried to argue off the record that contrary to the unanimous conclusion of his own intelligence community, “that the Russians were falsely accused of election interference.”. . .
As Esquire’s Charlie Pierce noted this week, The New York Times’ carefully written story on the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation includes a deeply pregnant phrase: “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.” No evidence has emerged publicly. But there are plenty of bread crumbs pointing to the idea that such evidence exists secretly, with investigators.
Understanding and answering those “why” questions will mark this final phase of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Only then will the nation and the world know the answer to the one big, honking “what” question that’s left: What are Trump’s motives for all his inexplicable actions? It’s hard to know which answer will be worse for the country.
