Rachel Maddow is right about what Donald Trump is doing right now

| 11:10 pm EDT September 30, 2019
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We all expected Donald Trump’s whistleblower scandal to get worse today – and we all expected Trump to say and do even more embarrassing, incriminating, and incoherent things today. Sure enough, all of the above happened. But something else also played out today, and it’s been bothering me because it didn’t entirely make sense even by Trumpian standards. Then came Rachel Maddow’s show tonight, and as often tends to be the case, she took the confusing part and managed to distill it.

Here’s the thing. We all understand why Donald Trump tried to extort Ukraine into helping him promote the phony Biden scandal, as Trump thinks he’ll be facing Biden in the 2020 election. It was risky, stupid, and treasonous, but it had its own logic. Then today we learned that Trump recently called the Prime Minister of Australia and pressured him to dig up something that might undermine the legitimacy of Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation. This was the part that didn’t fully add up.

In electoral terms, Trump gains nothing at all by trying to get Australia to help him paint the Trump-Russia scandal as a hoax. Trump’s supporters don’t care that he conspired with Putin to rig the election. His detractors already know that he did it. And everyone else doesn’t care. Would Trump really be willing to take the risk of committing an act of treason, just so he can convince himself that he didn’t need Russia’s help to win in 2016?

This evening Rachel Maddow laid out another reason for why Donald Trump would have gone this route: Vladimir Putin has lost a lot of money as a result of the increased worldwide sanctions that Russia was hit with after he got caught rigging the 2016 U.S. election. If Putin can fool some of the world into believing that it never happened to begin with, some of those sanctions might get lifted. Trump called Australia and asked for help with this because Trump is Putin’s puppet to the end, and Trump is trying to help Putin while he’s still in a position to do so.