Donald Trump’s Russia scandal just got even uglier for him

| 8:20 pm EDT July 1, 2020
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Day by day, it’s getting harder to sweep Donald Trump’s criminal betrayal of the United States under the rug. Unfortunately for him, by pretending that he was never briefed on the matter of Russian bounties on US soldiers, he provoked the ire of intelligence communities yet again, and we may inevitably have congressional investigations coming. Even without them, we’re already seeing the scandal get uglier.

A number of people in the resistance might think this is something that Trump will get away with, that he’ll win somehow. The thing is that so far Republicans don’t yet know how to spin it. Of course there will be the die-hard Trump supporters who will stay with him no matter what, but the GOP desperately needs to come up with some line or story the whole party can get behind and use to defend him. Joe Biden may have thwarted that when he spoke in Wilmington on Tuesday, suggesting that Trump committed a dereliction of duty if he failed to read his briefing – pointing out that when he was vice president, he did so every day.

It’s pretty plausible that this is what happened – and even if Trump didn’t read his briefing, it’s almost certain he found out about it some other way and chose not to act. More important was the way Biden put a face to the story. He told of when he and his wife first heard the news and Jill Biden asked him how he’d react if his son Beau was still on active duty when this information came out.

Biden urged Americans to think of the numerous military families that lost loved ones as a result of Trump’s negligence. These are the people who should be the focus of the story every time the media reports on it, and the ones who deserve answers. Biden made that clear in his speech, promising that he intends to take the job of being president seriously.