So El Presidente is heading off to Europe, where he will finish his trip by meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
IN PRIVATE - No advisors or staff present.
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine wonders:
Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler?
A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html"And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility.
"What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect. After all, treating a small probability as if it were nonexistent is the very error much of the news media made in covering the presidential horse race. And while the body of publicly available information about the Russia scandal is already extensive, the way it has been delivered — scoop after scoop of discrete nuggets of information — has been disorienting and difficult to follow. What would it look like if it were reassembled into a single narrative, one that distinguished between fact and speculation but didn’t myopically focus on the most certain conclusions?
Chait notes that Trump first started blabbering about politics back in the fall of 1987 - a few months after he visited Moscow to talk about building a hotel there. Chait also notes that Russia has always played the long game, cultivating overseas "assets" for possible use in future decades.
And if there's "nothing to see here", why do all of El Presidente's foreign policy moves seem designed to favor Russian interests? Weakening NATO, supporting Russia's admission to the G-7, eliminating the White House's top cybersecurity position, handing secret Israeli intel to Russian diplomats....
It's a long read, but only because the possibility that our president is a Russian agent is too serious to ignore.