If the President of the United States is letting a Chinese madam sell access at Mar-a-Lago to Chinese business people while his friends are getting serviced at businesses she started, he is making himself and the country vulnerable to massive blackmail risk. It is a textbook story of how foreign actors gain leverage over senior officials.

That point should not be lost amid the eye-popping prurience that runs through this tale, tempting though that might be.

We’re talking about Florida, right?

It has long been established that Florida is where the crazy goes to happen in America. It is where the rich go to play, the old go to die, political candidates claim they have been abducted by aliens, and everyone seems to want to rob the local convenience store with the aid of their pet alligator. So, when a story about a billionaire being arrested at a Jupiter, Florida strip mall sex spa breaks, our reflex is to snicker and write it off as another case of too many Sunshine State UV rays.

And if that story were soon to develop to reveal that the billionaire was a friend of POTUS and that the founder of the spa also was a Mar-a-Lago regular who actually ran a business selling Chinese business people access to the president and his family, we might say, “Well, take Florida and add our zany, sleazemonster of a president and what do you expect?”

Set aside the gut-wrenchingly horrific details of the sex trafficking that is at the heart of this story for a moment, and you might even see a choice irony in a madam who moved on from selling hand jobs to selling grip-and-grins with a president who himself has made pimping out his high office a signature part of his job.

But don’t shrug it off. And don’t let the crazy details of the story lead you to speculate wildly about what else might be going on with Cindy Yang, Donald Trump, the Orchids of Asia massage parlor or Yang’s other venture, GY US Investments. Just take what we know now, thanks to the great reporting of the Miami Herald and Mother Jones, both of which have broken a series of important stories about this tangled web of creeps trying to make a buck in the worst ways possible:

Cindy Yang founded a chain of massage parlors. One of those was busted by Florida police. Robert Kraft, owner of the perennial Super Bowl champions New England Patriots was arrested for what he allegedly did at that spa, as were other prominent men according to several reports.

The spa allegedly was engaged in trafficking young women from China, turning them into sex slaves locked into horrendous lives of serial rape and squalor. While Cindy Yang sold the massage parlor in question, she continued to own others that were suspected of also doing a brisk business in sexual services.

But Yang also founded a business with her husband in 2017 called “GY US Investments” which offered itself, according to the Mother Jones account, as an “international business consulting firm that provides public relations services to assist business in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace.”

While that sounds like typical consulting firm gobbledygook, the rest of the site makes it clear that what the company did was promise access to the President of the United States, his family and his resort Mar-a-Lago as a way of helping Chinese businesses establish themselves in the U.S. and worldwide.

Pictures have emerged of Cindy Yang with Trump at a party celebrating the victory of Kraft’s Patriots in the most recent Super Bowl. Pictures have emerged of her with many local and national GOP figures including rabid Trump defender Matt Gaetz, who happens to have been the only member of Congress to vote against a bill opposing sex trafficking.

Pictures of her clients with the Trump sons Eric and Don Jr. adorn her own website. She has, it turns out, been a big donor to Trump and to the GOP, even appearing in one picture with Don Jr. while holding a “MAGA” clutch purse.

In other words, she is one of the denizens of the Mar-a-Lago demimonde who, like the half-dozen others who have become ambassadors and those who have used their access to plead their special interests with Trump, have seen the Trump administration as a giant cash machine available for their exploitation.

That’s corrupt. But it is hardly shocking in an administration in which the president and his family openly cash in on Trump’s high office, from receipts at Trump Hotels to deals done by the Trump organization to trademarks won by Ivanka Trump from the Chinese.

But lurking beneath the surface is the question of blackmail and worse.

Consider this for a moment: If the Steele dossier had contained speculation that the president and his family were giving access to a Chinese woman who runs a string of sex spas where rich, powerful friends of the president were getting sexual services, would it have been any less shocking or disturbing than alleged stories about golden showers with Russian hookers?

The fact is, given that this particular story continued long after Trump became president and was easily documented, it actually would be much worse. And that is not just because this story is likely to contain many more revelations. It is because we now know it to be a symptom of one of the many serious ailments from which Trump and his presidency suffer.

As foreign governments have recognized since Trump became a candidate for president, his deeply flawed character presents them with myriad opportunities to influence him and, by extension, U.S. policy. They could do it by playing to his greed, to his insatiable desire for flattery, to the needs of his businesses, or by threatening to expose his sleazy or perhaps criminal behavior.

The intelligence community saw this early on and their awareness of it fed the instant distrust that existed between them and Trump. They knew that any individual with just one or two of Trump’s vulnerabilities, misdeeds or other “red flags” certainly would be denied security clearances and be kept far from sensitive issues. Truly the only way Trump could get a security clearance was by being elected president—which, of course, he did with the assistance of a foreign enemy.

This case deserves further investigation by the FBI and perhaps congressional investigators. But, the story of Cindy Yang and her profitable venture in Trumpworld, based on what we know today, without an additional fact coming to light, underscores yet again both how unfit the president is for office and how his business practices and associations have created a national security risk for the United States.

It also reminds us of the section of the Steele Dossier which stated that some Republicans welcomed the “distraction” of the Russian interference story because it “deflected” attention from “TRUMP’S business dealings in China and other emerging markets. Unlike in Russia, these were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.”

To be continued.