Where There’s Trump, There’s Fired

From The New York Review of Books:

After months of talk about what it would take to get Trump impeached, analysts are calling this the “smoking gun” that could actually bring his downfall. Why does the occasion feel so momentous (other than because we want it to be)? After all, we learned only that Don Jr. said in confidence roughly the same thing that his father said for all the world to hear. But the news has been as shocking as it has because, after all this time, we still have not learned to take Trump’s public utterances seriously.

Trump’s public statements and tweets pose an obvious challenge to conventional interpretation because he lies so often and so blatantly. (A recent New York Times analysis found that he had said “something untrue” on at least 75 percent of his days in office. “On days without an untrue statement, he is often absent from Twitter…”) But that is not all. His speech exposes us to a view of the world that is so strange, so antithetical to the norms of American political culture, that many Americans find it basically unbelievable. Through Trump’s statements, especially when they concern Russia—whether Trump is calling on Putin to hack Hillary or expressing his admiration for Putin’s gift for power, or promising to cooperate with Russia on securing America against cyber attacks—we get a glimpse of a world run by a fellowship of rich powerful men bound by no principles, beliefs, or understanding of history. This is indeed the world in which both Trump and Putin live.

…

The Goldstone letter seems to dangle the promise of a similar accusation that could have been leveled against Hillary Clinton herself. But nothing of the sort has ever emerged. Nothing of the sort has even been rumored to exist. It seems that nothing like that was or could have been brought to the table by Veselnitskaya. If anything is safe to assume, it’s probably that Hillary Clinton has not had dealings with Russia that could be used to discredit her with American voters.

“Waking Up to the Trumpian World”, Masha Gessen, The New York Review of Books