We begin today’s roundup with Ryan Cooper’s analysis at The Week of the Trump administation’s corruption:
Are we really to believe that [Trump’s desire to help Chinese phone company ZTE] has nothing to do with China loaning $500 million to a huge Trump-branded development in Indonesia days beforehand? It simply beggars belief — indeed, there is practically no other comprehensible explanation.
Then there is the Russia investigation. As David Klion writes, the thing to remember about "Russiagate" (an unfortunate appellation, but one which seems to have stuck) is that Russia as such is only an incidental part of the story. Nearly all the major players are American, and if Russian efforts to influence the election did actually succeed to some degree, it's only because America's democratic institutions are rotten nearly to the core. Nations meddle in each other's elections all the time, for good reasons and bad. The United States has done it dozens of times, and often immensely more aggressively than anything Vladimir Putin allegedly did in 2016. The remarkable thing was that such relatively moderate and cheap efforts actually made any sort of difference — and in such a rich and powerful nation.
Paul Krugman writes about the Trump love for ZTE as well:
[T]wo weeks ago the Pentagon banned sales of ZTE phones on military bases, following warnings from intelligence agencies that the Chinese government may be using the company’s products to conduct espionage.
All of which made it very strange indeed to see Trump suddenly declare that he was working with President Xi of China to help save ZTE — “Too many jobs in China lost” — and that he was ordering the Commerce Department to make it happen.
It’s possible that Trump was just trying to offer an olive branch amid what looks like a possible trade war. But why choose such a flagrant example of Chinese misbehavior? Which was why many eyes turned to Indonesia, where a Chinese state-owned company just announced a big investment in a project in which the Trump Organization has a substantial stake.