"Americans elected a president who — this is a safe
surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns
public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is
that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility
to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax
returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more
ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated
incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial
dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be
that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him
compliant.
The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man."
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.