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From a longer piece (which you should read in full for the bit about Bannon and taxes), via Maureen Dowd for NY Times
Why doesn’t Trump channel all that bile against the establishment and show us his purported negotiating skills by sitting down and working out an actual deal that could benefit a lot of the people in Trump country who need health care rather than backing the “mean” House and Senate plans that are going to hit rural America particularly hard?
Instead, he is down the rabbit hole with Vladimir Putin. Much of his base does not appreciate it when the American president stands in the Oval Office yucking it up with Russian diplomats, oversharing our secrets and calling the F.B.I. director he just fired “a nut job.”
Even a lot of Trump voters are mystified about why Trump can’t put a lid on his id long enough to acknowledge that Russia besmirched our elections.
“It could very well have been Russia but I think it could well have been other countries, and I won’t be specific but I think a lot of people interfere,” President Trump said in Warsaw. “Nobody really knows.”
He inanely tweeted from the G-20: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!”
Even for a U.F.O. believer like Podesta, Trump’s claim was out of this world.
In his attenuated first meeting with his side bae, Trump staged a Kabuki show of confronting the former K.G.B. agent.
Their conversation boiled down to this:
Trump: “Did you do it?”
Putin: “Nyet.”
Trump: “Whew! Glad that’s out of the way. So let’s do a joint cybersecurity program and share our passwords.”
Putin: “Da.”
He should have had a showdown to rival the one Adlai Stevenson had at the U.N. with the Soviet ambassador on the Cuban missile crisis. “I am prepared to wait for an answer until hell freezes over,” Stevenson snapped.
Trump should have slapped down the evidence and doled out the punishment. Instead, he and Putin commiserated about bumptious journalists.
“Polonium works well,” Putin was probably saying.
“Spasibo,” Trump probably replied.
In the end, Trump and fellow bumbling neophyte Rex Tillerson opened the portal wider for Putin to sneak through in coming elections.
I don’t know how much information the tyro pol in the Oval has absorbed – or even wants to absorb – in his dumbed-down briefings. But, brainwashed by his father’s exhortation that the world belongs to “killers,” Trump clearly doesn’t recognize the danger before him.
This is a simple fact he might want to let sink in: The Russians do not have our best interests at heart. They are conjuring Trump’s worst “1984” fear: playing him for a sucker.
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Dumb, dumber, dumbest. Nuff said.