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And somehow, because of his prior unseriousness, and his what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature, the braggart businessman, with his bankruptcies, casinos, and beauty pageants, had avoided serious vetting. For Trump students—which, over his thirty years of courting attention, many in the media had become—the New York real estate deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured into the Trump candidacy—that, after all, was the platform he was running on. /’// do for you what a tough businessman does for himself. To really see his corruption, you had to see it on a bigger stage. Foer was suggesting a fabulous one. Assembling a detailed road map for a scandal that did not yet exist, Foer, without anything resembling smoking guns or even real evidence, pulled together in July virtually all of the circumstantial and thematic threads and many of the various characters that would play out over the next eighteen months. (Unbeknownst to the public or even most media or political insiders, Fusion GPS had by this point hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate a connection between Trump and the Russian government.) Putin was seeking a resurgence of Russian power and, as well, to block encroachments by the European Union and NATO. Trump’s refusal to treat Putin as a semi-outlaw—not to mention what often seemed like a man crush on him—meant, ipso facto, that Trump was sanguine about a return of Russian power and might actually be promoting it. Why? What could possibly be in it for an American politician to publicly embrace— sycophantically embrace—Vladimir Putin and to encourage what the West saw as Russian adventurism? Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen. Foer recounted Trump’s longtime fascination with Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who visited Trump Tower in the 1980s, and his many fulsome and unnecessary “odes to Putin.” This suggested a lie-down-with-dogs-wake-up-with-fleas vulnerability: consorting with or looking favorably upon politicians whose power lies partly in their tolerance of corruption brings you closer to corruption. Likewise, Putin was drawn to populist strongmen in his own image: hence, Foer asked, “Why wou/dnt the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?” Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business set, feeding off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to move cash, much of it from Russia and China, out of political harm’s way. Such money, or rumors of such money, became an explanation—still only a circumstantial one—in trying to assess all the Trump business dealings that largely remained hidden from view. (There HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019959