The real reason Donald Trump brought Putin’s guy Sergey Lavrov into the White House today

| 11:00 pm EST December 10, 2019
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

As soon as Donald Trump figured out that articles of impeachment were about to be introduced against him within a matter of days, his first move wasn’t to try to stop it from happening. It wasn’t even to try to find a way to run counter programming against the articles of impeachment. Instead, Trump’s first move was to make sure that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was going to visit the White House right around the time those articles of impeachment landed.

There’s been a fair amount of oddball speculation about why Trump decided to do this. For instance, some folks across social media seem to think that Trump was making a point of sticking it to everyone by inviting the Russians into the White House on impeachment day so they could… celebrate? That doesn’t make any sense, of course. But there’s a much more straightforward explanation for what’s going on here.

Trump is once again at a dead end in his presidency. His attempt at secretly conspiring with Ukraine to rig the 2020 election has not only failed, it’s gotten him impeached. If he was hoping that the House impeachment process might somehow magically improve his terrible poll numbers, that didn’t happen. It’s clear that the Senate impeachment trial, even if he’s acquitted, won’t help his tiny chances of winning in 2020.

So Donald Trump is doing what he’s done every time he’s found himself backed into a corner and unsure of what to do next: he’s seeking out new instructions from Vladimir Putin. In the past, Trump has gone so far as to set up an entire pointless diplomatic trip to Asia, just so he could stop and meet privately with Putin and find out what he’s supposed to do next. This late in the game, Trump is way past the point of being able to care about appearances, so he’s simply invited Putin’s man Lavrov to come over and deliver the latest marching orders.

Keep in mind that no matter how bad things keep getting for Donald Trump, he’s still primarily focused on making moves that help Putin, not on making moves that help himself. Trump is currently on track to lose badly in 2020, and to be arrested the minute he’s no longer in office. Yet he’s still eagerly seeking his next assignment from the Kremlin, because he cares more about pleasing Putin than he does about his own presidency or life. Just what is Putin holding over this stooge’s head?

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.