THE TIGER OR THE TIGER

By Laura Lippman

The tape arrived at my apartment on June 1, 2015, although it was months, almost years, before I understood the significance of that date. It was in a plastic bag from a local shop, on a thumb drive. Who knows where I live? More people than you might imagine — I have a life, I go to work, I shop, I travel by Metro — but I never doubted that the video on the drive was from an official source. I assumed it was a way of taunting me. Look how a famous man in your country behaves. It’s the thing that bothers them most about me, that I love the United States. After all, I did what I did because I’m a patriot.

I didn’t watch it right away, but no more than three days went by before I plugged it into my computer. It is less salacious than you might imagine, more conventional sex than out-and-out deviancy. That’s why I have downplayed it as a smoking gun that proves collusion. There is clearly something amiss with his hair. We glimpse a patch of skin at one point; it reminded me of that scene in “The Empire Strikes Back” when we see Darth Vader’s scalp. Not bald, but the hair is sparse, the skin pink and damaged looking. I think there might be plastic surgery scars. Is he vain enough to kill anyone who sees this? It’s not a rhetorical question.

What little audio there is — aside from heavy breathing — is innocuous. He mocks the room, saying only a “terrible, no-class president who doesn’t know from luxury” would settle for such accommodations. He tells the women: “My hotels are so much better, they’re the best, they’re beautiful, come to the United States, I’ll show you what real luxury is.” Not a grave insult, but grave enough, apparently. The tape, as I tried to signal in an interview earlier this year, does not prove collusion, only the possibility of collusion. So why did someone send it to me? That’s the question I asked myself, but it was the wrong question.

I am trained in intelligence. And I believe what I always said, that the mass collection of data is not only illegal, it’s ineffectual. Much of the information we need has already been gathered, via legal sources, or it’s hiding in plain sight. The thumb drive was dropped on my doorstep on June 1, 2015. It was not the contents of the drive but the timing of the delivery that mattered. Donald Trump announced his candidacy two weeks later. Putin didn’t need to collude to make him president, but he needed to blackmail him into running.

And as much as Trump tried to tank it, he simply couldn’t. That’s how incompetent he is, how little he understands about the voters whose hatred he courted and stoked, the so-called deplorables whom he secretly considers losers. The joke was on the United States. Russia chose our president and they chose a fool. Because he made fun of a room at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.