Remember during the 2016 Presidential Campaign, when political pundits and career politicians soberly asserted that if Donald Trump won the election, he would rise to the dignity and magnitude of the office? And once he won the election and nothing changed, they asserted that spending time in the job would surely change him? And although the change still didn’t materialize, they nonetheless held out hope, pouncing on isolated incidents like his scripted first State of the Union address as evidence that now he was finally becoming Presidential. Until he returns to his usual behavior within hours.
The same thing seems to be happening in regards to Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki. Politicians and journalists have been asking aghast for over a year “How can President Trump possibly trust Putin?” “Why doesn’t he realize that Putin isn’t our friend?” etc. These questions are even asked regularly by bright commentators who should know better. Their framing of the issue in this way not only misses the mark, but imposes a naïve bias on America’s predicament which (possibly inaccurately) colors public perception about what is happening.
Nobody but Donald Trump can possibly know whether or not he trusts Vladimir Putin. It is just as possible – if not more so – that he does not trust Putin at all, but is being aggressively blackmailed by the Russian President, and is profoundly terrified of him. Of course, that is not a dignified assumption for the media to make about the President of the United States, but neither is assuming that he is some wide eyed boob who is too foolish or totalitariophilic to recognize a major and obvious threat to our nation about which he has been warned continuously and repeatedly for the entirety of his time in office.
We are in a potentially perilous time right now. Yet many of us seem to be eager to assume the best-case scenario about what is happening, even after witnessing the President’s subservience to Putin with our own eyes – his shell-shocked, slumping, dead-man-walking body language as the two emerged from their private meeting and Putin jauntily strode to the podium, his refusal to hold Putin in any way accountable for actions that America’s own intelligence community have told him undeniably took place.
We need to prepare ourselves for the very real possibility that what we are seeing is exactly what it looks like: a self-centered, emotionally immature man who has lived a life of impulsive desire fulfillment, lack of accountability, and petty one-upsmanship, whose wealth, behavior and influence brought him to the attention of Russian intelligence long ago as a U.S. person upon whom to compile a dossier of “kompromat,” who is now realizing to his own horror that his past behavior and his present job are conflicting in a way that can lead to deep embarrassment and humiliation at best, and prison time for him and his associates at worst.
The first step to acknowledging and bracing ourselves for this potential reality is to stop asking why the President does not realize that Putin is a threat, and to accept that he may already understand the threat of Vladimir Putin all to well.
– rob rünt
The Week In Trump 