It is about the money because it always has been about the money, and, because it always has been about the money, we suspect that the hounds now are baying loudly at the doors of the Kompromat Laundromat. This is how it could have happened: The Trump Organization, reportedly deeply in debt, needed money and couldn't get a loan from a U.S.-based bank. Meanwhile, the vicious Russian kleptocratic elite had a lot of dough it needed cleaned and was washing it through Deutsche Bank and through banks in Cyprus, an underrated spot for such enterprises. It was a profitable relationship for both parties: Both of the older Trump boys boasted in the past about how important Russian investment had been in maintaining the Trump Organization. Then Dad ran for president. Then he won. And then, by all indications, the bills came due.

One of the more conspicuous debtors to the Russians was a guy named Paul Manafort, who reportedly owed them $17 million in the days before he became manager of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. From The New York Times:

Mr. Manafort's Cyprus-related business activities are under scrutiny by investigators looking into his finances during and after his years as a consultant to the Party of Regions in Ukraine. He recently filed a long-overdue report with the Justice Department disclosing his lobbying efforts in Ukraine through early 2014, when his main client, President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia.

We can safely assume that special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into all of this, and more, but the outline of the essential corruption never has been clearer. The Trumps needed money and the Russians needed to clean a lot of it. Cui bono? Res Ipse loquitur. All of the rest of it, the dodging and weaving and, most recently, the unveiled threats to fire Mueller and unilaterally end the investigations, the almost blithe assault on all democratic norms and institutions, spin out from the possibility that Donald Trump needed money to continue to be Donald Trump to the world, and to himself, and that the easiest place to get that money was from the Russians.

(Would the revelation that he's not as rich as he pretends to be really have sidetracked his campaign? Would it have cost him votes? That's an interesting question for which we never may know the answer. However, wide public knowledge of that fact might have destroyed his self-image, which might have been all it took.)

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The Thursday night blockbuster from The Washington Post was sadly inevitable, once Trump hung Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III out to dry in the Times over the weekend. Of course these people are seeking ways to discredit Mueller's investigation. Of course they might fire him if he gets too close to the truth about how much the Trump Organization owes, and to whom, and why. Of course El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago would like to preemptively pardon everyone involved, including himself.

His entire presidency has been an exercise in playing chicken with the other institutions of government, and, by and large, because they are controlled by his own party, which is composed now of the most conspicuous public cowards in the history of the Republic, he's won every time. Why wouldn't he try it again? The Post story was somebody's idea of a warning shot. That it was handled clumsily should surprise nobody. But it was a warning shot nonetheless. Don't go near the money because it always has been about the money. His whole life. His whole image of himself. His delusions of grandeur. It always has been about the money.

Right now, we are stumbling in the dark into a constitutional crisis. During Watergate, the crisis existed in plain public sight from the moment that Alexander Butterfield told the Ervin committee about the White House tapes. There was a clear path forward. The two sides of the fight were clearly drawn and, by and large, it was a fight between the executive and the legislative that bled into a fight between the executive and the judiciary, and that finally was settled back in the legislature again, where it belonged. In this one, the legislative branch of the government has withdrawn disgracefully from the fray, so the fight is carried on anonymously between factions of the executive who are trying to save themselves. Mueller's investigation exists outside of the three formal institutions of government, but it is hostage to one of them anyway. When Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox, which caused the instant decapitation of the Department of Justice, it was a bolt from the blue, but pressure inside and outside the rest of the government forced Nixon to appoint Leon Jaworski, who finally got the tapes and ran him to ground.

Don't go near the money because it always has been about the money.

Of course, the White House will attack Mueller. Nixon fired Cox. The Reagan people and their allies in Congress put Lawrence Walsh through the wringer on Iran-Contra, and they basically won. And, yes, the Clinton White House bellyached about Ken Starr, but Starr was a special case. He had been appointed specifically to get something, anything, on the Clintons and damn the torpedoes else. If this were not the case, then the Whitewater investigation would have ended with Robert Fiske, who was fired specifically because he found nothing amiss in the land deal that was the ostensible subject of his investigation. And, of course, Starr has proven subsequently that he is incapable of managing a car wash, let alone a large institution of any kind.

Of course it will be obvious and clumsy. This is the Gilded Commode Presidency, after all. But when the smoke clears, it's going to be about the money, the way it always was with this presidency. He looks into his soul and sees a cashbox. Always did. Always will.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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