Back in May, amidst the revelations of Trump's obvious attempts to obstruct justice, I wrote that Trump had already moved to his final line of defense, namely that Trump himself was not involved in collusion with the Russians. As Trump explicitly said, "There is no collusion - certainly myself and my campaign - but I can always speak for myself and the Russians - zero." I was wrong. His last line of defense will be "who cares?".
With the revelation of the senior campaign management meeting with agents openly stating that they were representing the Russian government and reportedly providing documents that contained some information on either Clinton or the DNC, the defense that there is no direct evidence of collusion has on the part of the Trump campaign has totally collapsed.
The circumstantial evidence that Trump knew of this collusion and approved it was already quite strong. Now we can add the fact that Trump stated he would make a speech laying out "interesting" information about Clinton just four hours after the meeting was confirmed. While I have no proof, I have no doubt that there were either other meetings or communications with the Russians coordinating election strategy and the timing and focus of Russian attacks. The real question is whether any one of the Trump insiders will actually give him up on direct collusion.
The distressing part is that, if and when the information of Trump's knowledge and approval of Russian collusion comes out, Trump will simply say "who cares". He has already started down this path by defending Don. Jr.'s meeting as one that "most politicians would take". The fact that this will not disturb Republicans in Congress in the least is even more disturbing. As is the feeling among Trump's die-hard supporters that the whole Russian collusion story is a tempest in a teapot.
You have to wonder what kind of country you are living in when the President will readily admit to conspiring with a foreign adversary to influence our democratic process and his party and supporters don't seem to care.
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