While the proper focus against Trumpism involves a zealous lawful effort against Trump and his leading operatives, there is also a problem of Trumpism down to the local level.
In both cases, officials advancing Trumpism ignore the overwhelming evidence of his betrayal of our own people to the benefit of a hostile foreign power. As with Trumpism’s other political sins, officials defending Trumpism are owed no deference – they deserve nothing beyond the minimum requirements of the law.
Below are excerpts of recent reports:
Strobe Talbot writes It’s Already Collusion:
Under Putin as a revanchist, Russia has reinstated four key ingredients of Soviet politics and geopolitics: the Iron Fist, the Big Lie, the expansion beyond Russian borders and the subversion of Western societies. He is giving another chance to a system that ended up on the ash heap of history in the last century because of its internal failures.
….
Trumpism is a godsend to Putin and a nightmare for governments in his sights—including Trump’s. The U.S. commander-in-chief is out of sync with his own administration, not to mention the government as a whole. Note his stubborn yearning to lift sanctions on Putin’s pet oligarchs.
Isaac Chotiner reports How the Times Reported the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Investigation Into President Trump: An Interview with the Journalist Adam Goldman:
the F.B.I. had specifically started looking at Trump and whether he wittingly or unwittingly had been working with a hostile foreign power. I had to look at the mechanisms that went into place to trigger this aspect of the investigation. This comes after the Lester Holt interview. [On May 11th, 2017, two days after Trump fired Comey, the President gave an interview to NBC in which he said that, when he fired Comey, he was thinking, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”] And you talk to people who are familiar with this: once he got on Lester Holt and he said this, the F.B.I. is, like, “He is telling us why he did this? The President of the United States got up on television and said, ‘I did this because of Russia.’ ” They are, like, “What the fuck?,” right?
Tom Nichols contends All signs point the same way: Vladimir Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump:
While Trump is not an “agent” of the Russian Federation (too many people use this kind of language without knowing what it means to counterintelligence officials), it seems at this point beyond argument that the president personally fears Russian President Vladimir Putin for reasons that can only suggest the existence of compromising information.
Max Boot lists 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset [asset, not agent, by the way]:
we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.
Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:
(Full list follows in the article.)