I really don’t know how else to explain Comrade Trump’s contemptible display in Helsinki. I lack the conspiracy theory gene, but what happened yesterday is most easily explained by the conspiracy theory model (nothing happens by accident, nothing is quite what it seems to be on the surface, everything is connected). Even if we take the most skeptical approach, it’s hard NOT to arrive at this conclusion: Putin’s got something on Trump.
We’ve got Comrade Trump, a president whose licentious personal life and shady business practices make him singularly vulnerable to blackmail. We’ve got Vlad Putin, a former professional intelligence officer running the nation that basically invented the notion of kompromat. We’ve got the former insisting on a private one-on-one meeting with the latter — a meeting without the normal complement of aides and advisors, a meeting in which there is nobody taking formal notes, a meeting that lasted over two hours. And we’ve got Trump appearing with Putin immediately after that unprecedented meeting, and essentially denigrating and dismissing his own intelligence and law enforcement communities while praising Putin and Russia. And all this takes place AFTER Trump spent a few days shredding NATO, which is the sort of thing that would give Putin wet dreams.
This is Jeebus Level James Bond villain stuff. Seriously, if you submitted this in a novel manuscript or a screenplay, it would be laughed at as too implausible.
“Not a puppet. Not a puppet. Okay, puppet.”
I don’t know what Putin has on Trump. It could, I suppose, be the infamous alleged pee tape, but that just seems…no, okay, that does actually seem possible. Improbable, but certainly within the realm of possibility. It’s more likely, though, that what Putin has on Trump is something criminal rather than merely salacious.
I’m inclined to go with evidence of money laundering and criminal conspiracy. It’s not as personally humiliating as a pee tape, but it’s got the advantage of being solidly criminal. And prosecutable (my spellchecker insists that’s not a word, but my spellchecker can go fuck itself). Happily, money laundering and criminal conspiracy are exactly the sort of things Special Counsel Mueller’s team is designed to investigate.
Again, I can’t think of any other reasonable way to explain what happened in Helsinki. I think we’re sort of forced into the conspiracy theory mode in which the conspiracy isn’t only possible but probable. None of this is happening by accident, none of it is quite what it seems to be on the surface, and absolutely everything — all of it — is connected.
gregfallis.com 
Of course you do not know how to explain it, you still have no clue how Trump works.
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Maybe you’ll enlighten me? How do you explain Trump’s behavior?
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Since Billy hasn’t yet offered his explanation of how Trump works I thought maybe we could just take a look at the evidence at hand. We know THIS much about how he works.
— We know he’s filed for corporate bankruptcy six times — each time he’s left his creditors hanging while his lawyers protected his own assets.
— We know Trump had a long business relationship with Felix Sater, who was born into a Russian mob family. We know he continued to work with Sater even after Sater was convicted in a mob-connected stock swindle.
— We know Trump paid over US$1 million for a 5,000-square-foot lot owned by Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci Jr. We know they’d bought that $195,000. And we know Testa and Narducci were ‘muscle’ for Nicky Scarfo, the Atlantic City mob boss. We also know those two were referred by the FBI as the Young Executioners (these guys are worth Googling).
— We know Trump’s history of bankruptcies led to him being unable to borrow money from US bankers. We know he turned to Russian and former Soviet states for money. We know Russian gangsters and intelligence services are hard-wired into the banking systems of those states. We know Trump’s business model had depended on borrowed money up to the point he was forced to rely on Russian monies — at which point Trump suddenly began paying cash for his deals.
What we actually KNOW about how Trump works is, in itself, suspicious enough to make it possible that Trump could be, at the very least, an unwitting Russian intelligence asset.
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So? Neither does trump…
TRE45ON
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Regarding Trump’s attempted walk-back of his comments, Lawrence O’Donnell had this last night:
“No one believes what Donald Trump said today. No one. Not one member of Congress believes it. Not one elected Republican in Washington believes what Donald Trump said today. Today’s comments were aimed at Trump voters and no one else. Because Donald Trump knows no one else will believe a word of what he said today, and so the question for the remaining Trump voters tonight is… just how many insults can they take from Donald Trump? The question for Trump voters tonight is… is Donald Trump right about them? Will they believe anything that he says? Anything? Will Donald Trump voters believe Donald Trump’s ridiculous lie today which Donald Trump himself contradicted in things he said yesterday and again in things he said today after he told the lie? Only an imbecilic audience can fall for an imbecilic performance. Donald Trump proved once again today that he firmly believes that the voters that he once affectionately called the poorly educated will believe anything he wants them to believe and will accept any insult to their intelligence as long as that insult to their intelligence comes from Donald Trump, as it did today.”
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As far as I can tell, some Trump loyalists are willing to accept whatever he says as gospel. Others assume his words are often reported inaccurately or out of context. Some think he says outrageous stuff as part of a grand scheme to…something. So far, they’ve always found a way to tolerate…or actually embrace…his most offensive comments.
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