It should be trivial to find dirt on Trump. This is very plausible. Then why was the oppo research so incompetent? You have a guy with decades of mafia activity, probably the most of anyone who ever ran for office, and you can’t find it? More fuel for my thesis that the Democrats suck at fighting.

So, okay.

Let’s say that you’re Trump. You’ve spent your entire career in the vaguely mobbed-up world of New York real estate developers, and after being forcibly ejected from that by a series of bankruptcies, you enter the even more mobbed-up world of international financing for hotels intended for Saudi princelings and Russian oligarchs in countries with a lot of natural-resource wealth.

No one will lend you money through normal channels because, again, whenever anyone lends you money you piss it all away on gold toilets and giant shit-fights with subcontractors, so you have to rely on things like Bayrock Group, headquartered in Trump tower, which developers describe as just a weird giant money pipeline from Kazakhstan and Russia to New York. And in the midst of all of this, you decide that you’re just going to stop paying taxes, not pay your contractors, and basically act like a sexual-harassing parody of a 1970s boss.

It’s not that Trump can’t stand up to an investigation of his Russia ties, although that will produce an embarrassment of minor revelations immediately — Felix Sater, for instance, who’s a minor Russian mafioso who provided financing for Trump projects in the 1990s. It’s that Trump can’t stand up to literally any investigation whatsoever. Turn over literally any rock in Trump’s life, and you’ll find a weird squirming nest of maggots underneath it.

There might be not much to the Russia story: the worst of it might be that Roger Stone was scheduling document dumps with Wikileaks. (He has already strongly implied that he was doing this.) But if you start pulling on any loose thread in that sweater, the entire thing is going to come unraveled and a giant pile of borderline criminality is going to come spilling out.

I would be surprised if even Trump has a strict accounting of where all the bodies he’s buried in his career are. Which means that he has to prevent an investigation of Russia ties whether or not he’s guilty.

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