It is tempting to examine the crises President Donald Trump creates for himself as they come, and thus lose sight of the fact that his entire presidency appears to be irredeemably tainted.

His multipronged defense of white supremacists this month raised thorny moral and political questions, but they were the kinds of questions that treated Trump’s racism in isolation, and presupposed his presidency might be salvageable. Would and should his advisers resign? Could they force Trump to apologize? Discussing the issue in those terms made it difficult to remember that even if Trump manages to put the events of August behind him, he will not be starting from square one. Instead, he will return to a pre-August baseline of suspicion that his campaign conspired with Russian government agents to help him win last year’s election.

Reports published over the weekend and on Monday, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, have fleshed out a subplot in the Russia-Trump story, wherein the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign essentially operated as a single unit until the eve of the first primaries last year, hoping to use the campaign as a springboard for securing approval for licensing a Trump Tower in Moscow and then to somehow turn that deal into a fulcrum for helping Trump win the presidency.

In this telling—a telling that seems very clearly sourced to the Trump diaspora—the central transgression is the intermingling of Trump’s business interests and his campaign, which would indeed amount to a major corruption scandal in its own right, and would give the lie to Trump’s routine denials about his Russia ties. But if you squint at the particulars of the stories, Trump’s private financial interest starts to look like a sideshow that is being shoved into the center of the drama to distract us from the grander political scheming of two figures who have been friends from childhood, and in bed with Trump for years: Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and surrogate, and Felix Sater, a mob-connected Russian émigré who has helped finance Trump real estate deals.

Supposedly, the men’s primary motive was financial—securing a huge new Trump Tower in the heart of Moscow—and the political considerations were ancillary. But a different reading of the evidence suggests it was the other way around. That the deal was conceived and proffered not on the merits, but as a way for Russia to help Trump land a perverse public relations coup ahead of the election. That they saw it as simply one of many potential avenues for collusion.