One curiosity of the Trump age, to me anyway, relates to the public's reaction to news of Trump treachery. It seems "off"--sometimes overdone, and then sometimes oddly muted. For example, last week, after BuzzFeed reported that Trump had directed Michael Cohen to lie to congressional investigators, the I-word was on the lips and in the tweets of every committed and nominal member of "the resistance"--and it wasn't confined to that demographic, either. Then the Special Counsel's Office denied the accuracy of the report, and Trump was back to being snagged in the gills instead of flagellating with a barbed hook in his belly.
But while it's not established that Trump directed Cohen to lie, it is known that Cohen did indeed lie. What did he lie about? Lots of things, but including the Trump Organization's effort to close this big real estate deal in Moscow. It's not the case, as Cohen previously testified, that the project died in its embryonic stages long ago. According to both Cohen's new testimony and Rudy Giuliani, the project was alive and the licensing deal being negotiated during the 2016 presidential campaign (Cohen) and continuing up to Election Day in November (Giuliani). If Trump had lost, Putin might by now be boxing away some stuff in preparation for his move to the penthouse suite. But Trump won, which made it pretty hard to proceed.
So during the presidential campaign Team Trump was negotiating a business deal with an adversarial power that would have enriched the candidate by tens of millions. Meanwhile, the candidate was lying to the American people about it. If there's one thing he said more often than that Mexico would pay for the wall, it's that he had no business interests in Russia. It was a lie every time he said it. Now put that together with his uniquely solicitous regard for Vladimir Putin. President Obama is a feckless foreigner, NATO is superannuated, our allies "weak" and on the dole, the media depraved (but not Fox), the FBI and CIA compromised by their hatred of him, Carly Fiorina a horse face, "little Marco," "low energy Jeb," "lying Ted Cruz," "crooked Hillary," John McCain incompetent or he wouldn't have been captured, and on and on and on, everyone and everything an object of his contemptuous derision . . . except Putin, who is "a strong leader," "someone I respect and get along with," &c.
People were flipping out about the uncorroborated BuzzFeed story but seem relatively sanguine about the history of Trump Tower Moscow, the damning outline of which is no longer much in dispute and which aligns, perhaps not legally and technically but broadly and colloquially, with what people mean when they pronounce the word "treason."
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