The video clips below speak for themselves. There’s little to add to them. I’m watching big think types on TV right now expressing outrage, surprise, bewilderment, anger that President Trump didn’t “hold Putin accountable.” Sometimes when you’re surprised again and again and again, it’s time to consider your assumptions.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’m pretty cautious in my arguments, cautious on a lot of fronts. I can be aggressive in how I frame those arguments. I sometimes speak in hyperbole. But in basic judgments I’m quite cautious. Something is fundamentally wrong here. There is no reasonable explanation for the simple facts we see other than that Russia has some kind of hold over President Trump.

I know that sounds wild and I have a very hard time sometimes quite believing it myself. But it’s so overwhelmingly obvious that we need to get real with ourselves and recognize what is happening. I don’t know what the specific details are. I don’t know whether Russia has some compromising information on the President, whether they have enticed him with personal enrichment. I truly don’t know. But none of the standard explanations – truculence, trolling, anger over questioning the legitimacy of his election – none of them remotely add up as an explanation. In the future, when we know more details, we will have a difficult time explaining how any serious people continued to think there could be an innocent explanation.

Astronomers don’t see black holes directly. They see other celestial objects being affected by them. They infer the presence of a black hole by its gravitational pull. It is a deduction but a basically certain one because objects do not bend the course of their trajectory without a massive gravitational pull. As I wrote eighteen months ago, as the Russia story was erupting, you can infer the scope and depth of a scandal by its gravitational pull, often long before you know the particular details. President Trump’s actions make perfect sense if your assumptions are correct. Either by fear or avarice or some other species of control that exceeds the capacity of my imagination Russia exerts a control over President Trump. So the US is in grave danger.