The president's son was lured into a trap. Betrayal helped get him there.
The people who entrapped him are not his friends or the president's. They are also not Democrats.
I am not known for my sympathetic views of the first family. But even I think the president's shifting, twittered reasons for his son taking the now-infamous meeting with Russians gets too much attention. He set off another round Sunday.
The promise of campaign dirt only served as bait. The bigger, better question is: Why set the trap?
A quick recap of known, undisputed facts; Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, through intermediaries, invited the then-candidate's son to a meeting in Trump Tower. The Russian government had dirt to share on Donald Trump Sr.'s opponent, Don Jr. was told.
Don Jr. went on June 9, 2016. So did his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The lawyer then talked about adoptions. No dirt ever came up, or at least the participants say that. I tend to believe them. These rookies would have bragged about getting anything solid. They did not, so the meeting was a bait and switch.
Doing a bait and switch just to talk is no way to persuade someone to give you what you want. This is especially true when the campaign has five months to go and the talk is with the underdog. So the purpose of the meeting was not to talk about adoptions, either.
So the motive for this meeting was most likely the only thing it could and did accomplish. It lured the candidate's son and campaign into a compromising situation. Don Jr. met with foreigners in hopes of getting dirt in a domestic election. The people who lured him there were cagey enough not to implicate themselves directly: "Hey, we just wanted to talk about adoptions. It was those darned intermediaries who said this was about dirt," or something like that.
Why would the Russian regime set such a trap for a campaign they wanted to help? Because Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ilk always look for leverage, even on people they pretend to befriend. A little more, fresh collateral never hurts.
The president's defenders say anyone would go to a meeting like that in the cynical, hardball world of presidential politics. They are dead wrong, laughably so. Any political pro would have recognized that meeting as a trap as soon as the invitation arrived.
So -- why did old pro Manafort take that meeting, too? Why did he not stop it from happening? Letting it happen amounted to betrayal.
Because his real bosses wanted him to.
Manafort's ongoing trial for tax evasion lets everyone know who his real bosses were. Real bosses are the ones who pay. Manafort worked on the Trump campaign for free.
The president claims he did not know about his son's meeting before it happened. Not even I believe he is that clueless.
The president is in way, way over his head with some very bad people. He is a guy from Queens who thinks he is tough. The people he is dealing with, however, kill enemies in England by spraying toxic radioactive isotopes on doorknobs.
We should all pay less attention to whatever the latest twist or turn or tweet means for the next election and focus more on real dangers.
"The real target of special counsel Robert Mueller lives in the Kremlin, not the White House." I said that in my column on Nov. 4. Three and a half months before, I said: "What Russian leader Vladimir Putin is doing to our elections is more important than whether a Trump colluded about it."
I could go on but will end today with one I started with on July 30, 2016: "Trump promises to 'make America great again.' There's no good answer to why the Russian government would help someone who could deliver on that promise."
Republicans, the Putin regime is not your friend. Democrats, Republicans are fellow Americans. Yes, there are some Republicans who, in effect, collaborate. There are Democrats who, in effect, try to tar every Republican as a collaborator. That was a Putin goal.
I do not believe Putin's some sort of mastermind to blame for everything. I also do not believe it took a mastermind to see our racial and cultural fault lines. He is neither the first nor the only one to exploit them.
We are divided -- but not conquered yet.
Commentary on 08/11/2018