Donald Trump is not a subtle man. He never has been in his whole life: as a six year old child he once punched his music teacher because he thought she didn't know enough about music and was later sent to military school because he was out of control, where he soon gained a reputation for falsely bragging about girls he dated and sporting events that he had won.
In many ways his entire life is an embodiment of one of the main things wrong with this country: that the system is rigged in favor of the rich and the powerful. That a man born into a family of enormous wealth and privilege, who was given a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father when he graduated from college, could hold himself up as a self made successful businessman, even as he declared bankruptcy five separate times, is a perfect example of how the wealthy in this country do not have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. His bragging and bluster are classic symptoms of a rich white male who sees the country as his playground to indulge whatever desires he has.
He has led a life in which he has not even tried to hide his misdeeds, from his bragging about cheating on his first two wives to his refusal to release his tax returns without explanation, to the continuance of his corporate businesses as president, he clearly has never cared about things like the appearance of corruption or impropriety. He never had to before in his life, so why change now?
But has his misbehavior finally reached a breaking point? Last Friday, the Justice Department indicted 12 members of Russia’s military intelligence service for a criminal conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election and hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This follows reports by every branch of the government clearly stating that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin clearly interfered in the 2016 election in favor of Trump. The following Monday, during a joint press conference with Putin, Trump disparaged his own intelligence agencies and claimed that he believed Putin's denials of interference. In other words, we have a president who believes the corrupt leader of hostile foreign power over his own intelligence agencies! Although Trump has always denied that Putin had some kind of incriminating evidence against him (from possible financial links to Russia mob members to the infamous pee tape), it seems hard to believe that he ever could have been more toadying to Putin than he is now. Even his attempts to walk back his comments the next day by claiming he misstated a single word feel like a pathetic joke, a dodge put up his advisors after his comments were met with almost universal derision.
Even if we take Trump at his word and accept that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government, it's obvious that he knows that Putin helped put him in office and he doesn't care. The fact that Russia helping him was a criminal act by a foreign country means as little to him as the fact that as president he owns a hotel in Washington DC that visiting foreign leaders can stay in and essentially bribe him through hotel bills is an obvious conflict of interest. All his life he has advanced by never following the rules, why should he start now? The only good news here is that, as he stumbles from one reckless decision or offensive statement to another, at some point the Republican party will put country over partisanship and help the Democrats impeach him or at least replace him with another candidate in 2020. It's the only decent moral thing to do.
