This Changes Everything

The most telling thing from Trump's meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin was in the various handshakes. With everyone else - at least everyone he sees as a political adversary - Trump pulls the other person in, a power move meant to show his dominance.

Two previous shakees, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and French president Emmanuel Macron, pulled back, tussling comically with Trump, who dragged the handshaking on in a ridiculous contest of faux manhood.

What this ritual showed is that Trump didn't dare engage in handshaking macho with Putin. He showed great deference. He was on good behavior with Putin - at least good behavior to Putin. He showed similar good behavior to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, but not the deference he gave to Putin.

This changes everything. It has been plainly obvious to anyone with reasonable intelligence that Trump is a criminal sociopath who colluded with the Russian government - Putin's government - to gain enough advantage against Hillary Clinton to "win" the 2016 presidential election. He acts like a guilty man. His pleas of "No collusion" are too much too often. He may receive the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a courtroom, but he's not in a courtroom, and we can presume whatever we want, and the public evidence indicates that he is a guilty as a man can be.

Trump has long been eager to ingratiate himself to Putin, but now he has done it on a world stage, with no distractions and no ambiguity. His two-hour private meeting with Putin is highly suspicious, and it is entirely consistent with Trump's suspicious behavior before, during and after the election. He is a criminal, and he actively sought the help of Russian hackers and meddlers in order to become President of the United States. His presidency is illegitimate, and for the crime of stealing an election he should be prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his misspent life.

His guilt of course doesn't rest on his polite handshakes with Vladimir Putin. There's plenty of evidence we know about. And, as the Mueller investigation progresses, so does the trajectory towards a collusion charge. The momentum Trump has been building since he announced his campaign in 2015 is now in rapid reverse. He is through. As I have been saying since he assumed office, it is only a matter of time. #YesCollusion #GoneByLaborDay #ItIsTimeToRemoveTrumpFromOffice
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Here's a song. Here's another. And another. Trump might appreciate the irony of this song.

Update, July 18: Someone else is referring to Trump as a sociopath. Madison's local "leftist" radio station played the July 17 interview with former CIA intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman. He calls Trump a sociopath. It still goes in one ear and out the other for almost everyone, largely due to the need to look at everything in terms of "ideology," and it obviates the ego need to whinge and prattle on endlessly about what Trump thinks and believes.

It is easier to call him a racist (or r-r-r-racist), fascist, nationalist, nativist, misogynist, homophobe and "right-winger." Ahh, yes, Donald J. Trump, the ideologue, the man of political philosophy, the deep thinker. These people, of which there are plenty right here in Madison, never question why they get absolutely nowhere in their whinging. Indeed, whinging is something of a one-upping contest here. It can get pretty intense, and of course goes nowhere, always nowhere.