I wrote for Politico today about the new revelations about Paul Manafort and the pro-Russia orientation of Trump campaign generally, and cataolgue the resulting bizarre inversions:
It is the outsider candidate who has a lobbyist at the heart of his campaign. And not the upstanding sort of lobbyist who merely persuades the Ways and Means Committee to bequeath tax loopholes on the likes of General Electric, but a truly sinister influence peddler who, by all accounts, made a mint working at the right hand of a small-time foreign thug and thief (Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych) who was the handmaiden of a big-time foreign thug and thief (Russia’s Vladimir Putin).
It is the candidate of the pro-Western party that traditionally champions strength abroad (i.e., the GOP), who is sending signals he wants to abandon our commitments to NATO and doing all he can to cozy up to a Russia that seeks to advance its interests at the cost of the interests — and the territorial integrity — of our allies.
It is the candidate of right-wing talk radio who has drawn a stirring defense from the left-wing magazine The Nation on grounds that he is the victim of “neo-McCarthyite” and “Kremlin-baiting” attacks.
It is the nationalist who is benefiting from the propaganda of the Russian media and whose prospects of winning the election may depend, in part, on an “October surprise” engineered by Russian intelligence or its associates.
If he were still with us, Henry Wallace, the Soviet-friendly New Dealer, might wonder what the hell is going on. We’ve come a long way from Mitt Romney calling Russia “our No. 1 geopolitical foe,” baby.