Putin appears to be hanging Donald Trump out to dry

Imagine you were a self-promoting braggart, always trying to convince everybody (including yourself) that you were the best at everything — but it turned out, of course, that you were not. In fact, you were less competent than most, but had been given every materialistic break in life and mistook that for your own cleverness and skill.

And then imagine that, through a combination of luck and planning by others, you ended up in the Oval Office, as President of the United States. But politicians, reporters, and prosecutors probed the ties you had with Russia and whether or not they had conspired to put you into office for their own purposes. 

If you had begun to believe your own BS (or just couldn’t admit that it was BS), you would be offended that many Americans thought you didn’t deserve to be President. You might even lash out & mockingly say “Russia, Russia, Russia” and complain that radical liberal Dems were all promoting a “Russia hoax!” 

Would you go so far as to claim that all the evidence against you who was the result of a vendetta transformed into a “fake Steele dossier” (by somebody who previously had no animus towards you — and had even been in friendly talks about potentially doing some work for your company)? 

Would you lash out at reporters who continued to ask you about Russia? Would you fire an FBI director over it? Would you give every indication that you were involved with Russia by yucking it up with top Russian officials in the Oval Office, admitting you fired the FBI Director to relieve the pressure of the Russia investigation, and, for good measure, pass the Russians some top secret U.S. intelligence?

Would you feed your stooges in Congress, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and others information to discredit those who were on to you? Would you give two of them, Nunes and Jordan, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to honor how they mimicked your aggressive attacks against the Russia collusion rumors and the investigators? 

Would you emerge from a one-on-one meeting with Vladimir Putin in a pathetic hang-dog posture that strikingly demonstrated your subservience to him? Would you be willing to humiliate yourself in front of the world by standing next to Vladimir Putin and proclaim that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial” of interfering in the U.S. election and “he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be,” all while Putin stands there smirking like a puppet master as you parrot your lines exactly as he taught you.  

Would you confiscate the translator’s notes of another conversation you had with Putin, in Hamburg, so others could not find out what you talked about?  (Of course, Putin knows — but he would never turn on you, right?)

Would you then have the nerve to publicly claim that nobody was tougher on Russia than you? And would you become emboldened by the fact that you had either convinced your own party that Trump-Russia was nothing or that it was in Republicans’ own interest to follow your lead, even if there was something to it?

Would you try to excoriate the investigators, first in the FBI & then in the Special Counsel’s office, including Robert Mueller, who had a reputation for honesty and integrity (but no matter — anyone who could uncover the truth had to be discredited at all costs, so no one would believe their forthcoming evidence or conclusions).

Would you claim Mueller’s investigators were “true Trump Haters” and “angry Democrats,” conducting a “witch hunt,” even though Mueller himself and the man who appointed him were actually Republicans? Would you bring in a new Attorney General, Bill Barr, to distort and misrepresent the damning findings of the Mueller Report?

If so, what would you do when the Kremlin itself just leaked information on its efforts to help install you as U.S. President to promote its own agenda? Could you stand being described by Russia as an “impulsive, mentally unstable, unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”? 

What if you realize how unlikely it would be for this information to come out without Putin’s personal approval? And that would mean he no longer finds it prudent to keep propping you up politically – and maybe financially? Consider what that means, even as prosecutors in New York, Georgia and Washington DC are also closing in on you. Now you have an idea of what it must be like to be Donald Trump right now.