Amid Comeypalooza and the news Sean Hannity is Michael Cohen's mystery client number three, the Russian Connection has been eclipsed—at least for this fleeting moment. But The Washington Post on Tuesday revealed that Trump is reversing his own administration's approach on new Russian sanctions:

Preparations to punish Russia anew for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria caused consternation at the White House ... Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar with the plan.

Trump abandoned the fresh round of sanctions after Nikki Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that they could be announced on Monday.

So Trump undercut his own UN ambassador—not exactly surprising—to nix his administration's plans to punish Russia for its behavior in Syria. Maybe Trump genuinely thought it was not in the United States' interests to push the issue here. Except this fits neatly into a pattern of behavior for the president, who has consistently been reluctant to criticize Russia or its authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, and to institute sanctions in response to its dangerous behavior.

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Just on Sunday, we learned that a previous round of sanctions against the Russians, announced in March to punish Moscow for the suspected poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil, sent the president into intergalactic hysterics. The plan was to expel 60 Russian diplomats from U.S. soil, which, his aides assured him, was consistent with the European response, according to The Washington Post.

“We’ll match their numbers,” Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. “We’re not taking the lead. We’re matching.”

But France and Germany then each expelled only four Russian officials—the 60 reflected the total among all European allies. The president was furious, as it looked like the United States was taking the strongest stance against Russian aggression.

“I don’t care about the total!” the administration official recalled Trump screaming. ... Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. “There were curse words,” the official said, “a lot of curse words.”

As the Post put it, Trump, who's at odds with his own administration over Russia, "instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin."

The president is screaming and cursing at his national security team because he didn't understand beforehand that the United States would look like it was leading the response to Russia's assassination attempt on our closest ally's soil. Why is President Business Alpha so desperate to just blend into the pack on this?

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And are we supposed to believe it's unrelated to the fact that it took his administration a full year to impose sanctions on Russia for its meddling in the 2016 elections—sanctions mandated by law that passed both houses of Congress? As an NBC News story flagged by Esquire's Charles P. Pierce put it at the time, this had further implications:

One U.S. official noted that the delay in initiating sanctions against the oligarchs responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has muted their effect. He said that the oligarchs have had a year to restructure their U.S. holdings. "They had to know these were coming," he said.

So, in other words, Putin's cronies had plenty of time to move their money around to avoid the sanctions.

And then there's what we've learned about Trump in private, which reflects what we've long seen in public. Part of James Comey's roving carnival book tour over the last week was his claim that Trump won't criticize Putin—even in private:

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This, of course, perfectly reflects Trump's public behavior, in which he has almost relentlessly praised Putin—and other authoritarian leaders—and signaled his desire to improve relations with Russia despite the nation's destructive behavior in Ukraine, Syria, and even Salisbury.

It's often overlooked that it's not just secret ties between Trump associates and Kremlin-linked officials that might indicate a connection between the two parties. Trump's public behavior, from day one of his campaign all the way through to his consistent reluctance to impose cutting sanctions as president, has indicated a pro-Russian persuasion that is completely inconsistent with what the Kremlin has been up to in that time period. Where did that come from, and why have Trump's preferences remained totally unchanged even as an investigation into possible Russian collusion threatens to crumble his presidency?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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