The Worst Case is More Likely Than an Innocent Explanation by Josh Marshall

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall 

I spent some time today making my way through Jon Chait’s feature in New York Magazine sketching out what we might call the ‘worst case scenario’ of Trump/Russia collusion. It’s quite good. You should read it. Here are a few thoughts as we get ready for the NATO Summit and Trump’s much anticipated summit with Vladimir Putin.

Chait is clear that we basically still don’t know what is at the heart of the Russia collusion story. But an extreme case of collusion, not just during the 2016 campaign but with roots back into the late 1980s is, as Chait argues, much more plausible than you might imagine – certainly much more plausible than most of the establishment media has been willing to consider. What Chait does is walk through, quite voluminously, all the different threads of evidence which collectively point in that direction.

He makes a compelling case.

My big takeaway reading his narrative is one I’ve been convinced of for months. Individually, each guilty-seeming or suspicious action, each lied about contact or unexplained meeting can be explained by some heroic theory of Trump’s idiosyncrasy. So maybe Trump didn’t have anything to hide in the Russia investigation. But the drive for control and loyalty made him take actions which made him seem guilty. Or Trump’s inexplicable obsession with and need to gratify Vladimir Putin may seem suspicious but is really just his fondness for authoritarian leaders or a need to show that he’s not cowed by the Russia probe.

Each of these theories are possible. But in each case an implausible and heroic theory is ushered in to avoid the more elementary explanation: that Trump has something to hide and some deep attachment to Putin.

It reminds me of looking at geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system. Before the Early Modern Era, the Ptolemaic geocentric system had a great run. And it worked. It correctly predicted where given stars or planets would be in the sky at different dates and times. But to make everything work with the Earth at the center of the solar system, the standard elongated oval orbits we know wouldn’t get it down. You needed orbits within orbits and some heavenly bodies that marched in one direction and then turned and started marching in the other direction. It was highly convoluted and required a lot of astrophysical special pleading to make everything fit. If you just put the sun at the center of the solar system everything get much, much simpler.

As you probably intuited, forcing the earth to be at the center is a bit like insisting on an innocent, trail of a thousand misunderstandings and flukes explanation of all the secret meetings, pay offs, lies and coverups we see everywhere we look in the Russia story. If you consider the possibility that Trump did something very bad and is doing everything he can to hide it, suddenly a lot of facts which otherwise require all sorts of rejiggering and creative thinking just fall into place.