Former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden, now a private security consultant and George Mason University professor, writes in the Washington Post that a Trump presidency would be tantamount to handing America over to Russian power interests.

We have really never seen anything like this. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell says that Putin has cleverly recruited Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

I'd prefer another term drawn from the arcana of the Soviet era: polezni durak. That's the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.

That's a pretty harsh term, and Trump supporters will no doubt be offended. But, frankly, it's the most benign interpretation of all this that I can come up with right now.