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I haven’t written much in recent days because my family suffered an unexpected loss last week. I was in one day and kept up on the toplines of the news. But I was generally too insensible to write, even as the new revelations piled up. Everything I’ve seen at a distance over recent days brings me back to this post I wrote on Thursday. Helsinki seems like an inflection point. On a long drive yesterday I listened to cable news chatter and I noticed a difference: the default assumption was that President Trump is compromised in some way. Or perhaps it’s better to say that there was a common assumption that the most logical explanation of Helsinki and what we’ve seen before and since is that Vladimir Putin has some leverage over the President. One former diplomat who said something like this pointed out that it’s not the only possible answer, just the most likely one. He’d really like to find another answer. But he hasn’t.
I continue to be struck by how resistant the system is to this now elementary conclusion. In this case, I don’t mean the formal constitutional framework or “the system” in some ’60s Marcusean sense. I just mean a more general function or consensus of elite opinion, what is an acceptable premise of discussion and what is not. But this resistance is hardly a surprise. It is an almost fantastical proposition, something out of cheap finish-it-in-90 minutes TV movie fiction. And yet here we are. It is hardly unimaginable if we set the context with everything we’ve seen over the last two years. And just in recent days the pace of revelations, always matched by new flare-ups as rage covering for feelings of threat.