The Trump-Putin press conference was exactly the ugliness we needed

| 5:54 pm EDT July 16, 2018
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We all knew it was coming, yet the sheer level of horrifying and humiliating ugliness of it was still jarring. Donald Trump, the supposed President of the United States, stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference today and all but surrendered to him. Trump could not have come off as more of a puppet of Russia if he had tried. This nightmarish display of treason and surrender was precisely what we needed right now.

Look around at the reaction. At least three Fox News hosts have slammed Trump for the press conference. John McCain just slammed him for it. Former CIA Director John Brennan just called him “treasonous.” Paul Ryan felt compelled to put out a statement contradicting Trump’s assertion that Putin didn’t meddle in the election. Trump’s own handpicked Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats just put out a statement directly contradicting Trump. But that’s nothing compared to the public reaction.

The top trending topics on Twitter right now are “Treason” and “Impeach Trump Now,” which tells us that politically active people on social media are horrified. What’s more important, however, is how the average non-politilcal American sitting at home on the couch is interpreting this. These are the people who heard the Resistance accuse Trump of being a Russian puppet, and who also heard Trump’s base insist it’s all a phony conspiracy theory, and decided to wait until there was some proof one way or the other.

We thought we were going to have to wait until Robert Mueller revealed the evidence of Donald Trump’s treason before the people in the middle made up their minds. Instead Trump did us a favor today by standing next to Putin and all but shouting “I’m a traitor!” Trump just did Mueller’s job for him. It’s not as if a trap door is going to open up under Trump tomorrow. But he just put himself in an incredibly precarious and vulnerable position. This horrid and humiliating press conference was precisely what the Resistance needed, because it’ll wake up everyone who still wasn’t sure if Trump was a traitor or just an idiot. The verdict is in, and is just came from his own mouth: he’s a traitor.