If you managed to tune out the news over the weekend, sit down and take a deep breath, because of all of the “if this was fiction we’d say it was too over the top” bursts of news Donald Trump has caused, this is probably the most outrageous and over the top. It kicked off Friday evening with a New York Times report that the FBI investigated whether Trump was secretly working for Russia in the aftermath of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey. Because not only did Trump fire Comey, he then went on to admit that he had done so in part because of the Russia probe that was already happening.
That should have been enough of a bombshell to be the story of the year. But the weekend had just gotten started.
Just to drive home the point that there is something serious going on between Trump and Russia, the Moscow Project/Center for American Progress released an analysis showing more than 100 contacts between Team Trump and Russia-linked operatives during the 2016 campaign and transition—and they tried to cover up every single one. There were “at least 15 different instances in which the Trump campaign issued blanket denials about its contacts with Russia.”
The covering-up didn’t end after Trump’s inauguration, though, and the weekend’s huge news didn’t end early Saturday. As president, Donald Trump has worked hard to hide what was said at his meetings with Vladimir Putin, excluding key officials and aides from the meetings and even confiscating his interpreter’s notes. This is a mind-blowing paragraph from the Washington Post:
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Take a minute to let that one really sink in, because this is a story—a series of stories—that should be punching through all the news fatigue. It should be punching through the loyalty of Trump’s base, but that’s unlikely given how clear people in that base have made it that they put Trump before anything else.
After all that Russia news, the report that someone on Trump’s national security team asked the Pentagon to draft plans for a military strike on Iran seems like nothing … except that in normal times, it would be a huge story. As would the news that the sitting president called a cable news host to issue thinly veiled threats to his longtime personal lawyer who is now preparing to testify to Congress, prompting the chairs of three House committees to warn said president against obstructing an investigation. As would the fact that the ongoing partial government shutdown is now the longest in U.S. history. But all those stories fall by the wayside when the competition is the FBI investigating the president as a possible foreign asset and the president hiding details of his meetings with the leader of the nation whose asset he is under suspicion of being.
Seriously, would scriptwriter or novelist would have the nerve to try to sell us a story this wild? As real life, though, it’s plain terrifying.