Professional distress

All this teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing about the Rob Foster affair is pretty easily explained. Trump, as a living, breathing relic from 1956, could not care less if a staffer slaps the old lady around a little. Not a prob. Wife-thumping is simply not a fireable offense, but more like something to chat about while waiting to tee off on a crowded par 3 (although one can’t help but wonder what would happen if Ivanka showed up to work one morning with a petite little shiner). Well, let’s just move on to the next crisis, shall we?

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Retrumplicans attacking the credibility of Christopher Steele completely sidestep the fact that intelligence heavyweights like Clapper, Brennan and Comey all consider the guy to be an impeccable pro. Indeed, comparing Steele’s believability to Dum Dum’s is like comparing the Beatles to the Archies (the timelessness of “Sugar Sugar” notwithstanding).

So when Steele, a veteran spy who’s been around the block a whole bunch of times, says stuff like he was “shocked at the extent of collusion his sources were reporting,” and that reading those source reports was “a life-changing experience,” well, these are comments that carry not just excellent melodrama but also some real weight—way more than most. And when Steele grew concerned enough to call his FBI contacts to meet him in Rome for show-and-tell, he described their responses to his data as “shock and horror.” Is it not really seriously significant that these reactions are reported by experienced agents who aren’t shocked or horrified easily?

At that same Rome meeting in September ’16, Steele admitted that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” When we ask why he felt so strongly about a possible President Dum Dum, we get directly to the beating heart of the Mueller investigation.

Retrumplicans try to use Steele’s statement as proof that he was prejudiced against Twitler, which is bullshit. The more accurate interpretation here is the obvious one—Steele, in the course of his investigation, had his fucking mind blown by the sheer size and extent of Trump’s financial entanglements with Russians. And when you throw in some juicy bonus goodies, like a very naughty video taped in the Moscow Ritz, well, you have yourself an agreeable candidate. One you can really work with. One who will simply decline to install congressional sanctions against Russia. One who will never tell you when he talks to the Big Bossman.