You’ve heard of Manchurian candidates, people brainwashed into treason and successfully running for high office. I don’t think Trump has been brainwashed (for one thing, his brain…no, no, never mind), but I am really beginning to seriously wonder about his affinity for Putin and Russia. I think despite his birth in this country he’s actually a muzjik, a Russian peasant. Certainly he behaves like a 19th-century peasant, or how I imagine one would behave.

If I were President-elect of the United States right now I know damned well I’d like to know what a foreign country did that facilitated my winning the election. I’d be secure in knowing that there might be an outcry and a demand for a re-run, but that my party holds both houses of Congress and wouldn’t agree to that. I sure as hell wouldn’t blithely suggest it’s “time for the country to move on to bigger and better things” when the current President imposes sanctions on the country that is widely suspected of hacking my opponent’s computer systems, particularly when every US intelligence agency agrees that that’s true.

Josh Marshall has an interesting theory which might explain Trump’s seeming disinterest in the truth about the hacking. Marshall thinks

Say you’re Trump.

You have nothing to do with this. You know nothing about it. But think about all the crooks and gamers and sleazeballs around your campaign. There’s Manafort, Stone, Page … all their associates, not to mention your business associates with ties to Russian organized crime. (Stone publicly said he had some sort of a backchannel to Wikileaks.)

If you’re Trump, how confident are you that a real investigation wouldn’t turn up anything weird? Probably not very.

I find that perfectly feasible. It could be completely wrong, but it’s a theory which has merit. The best thing about it is that there is going to be an investigation which will prove or disprove it; Senators McCain and Graham are not going to let this go, and they may force Majority Leader McConnell to empanel a Select Committee. According to observers, that would make it far less likely that its results would be buried than if the investigation were to be assigned to the Intelligence Committee.

We’re still going to have a President Trump, but we might avoid having one who sells the country out to the Russians.