Thread by @EricaGrieder

Yes, we can. Whether we will is a different question, of course, but I don't think #HelsinkiSummit made that less likely, tbh. 1/

https://twitter.com/seidson/status/1018990025244061696

The thing is, what happened today was *entirely predictable.* Here is an excerpt from a piece I wrote, in December 2015. texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/a-l…

At the time, everyone thought I was being melodramatic or hyperbolic--and neurotic, in any case; it was still six weeks before the Iowa caucus.

But I wasn't being melodramatic, or hyperbolic, or neurotic. For all we know Trump might have told Putin he could have Alaska back, during their two-hour-long private meeting today.

So really, what happened in Helsinki today was that Trump made it much harder for his apologists to accuse someone like me of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" or ideologically motivated reasoning.

Trump also made it harder for his apologists to browbeat Republicans like @tedcruz into uniting behind Trump as the party leader. (Whether Republicans will defect, of course, remains to be seen, and most of them won't, probably. But they could, more easily.)

In 2015, Trump wasn't the president, and had never held elected office, so I could *posit* how he might conduct himself if elected, but couldn't falsify the theory that he was just putting on a show for the campaign season.

Now I can.

Trump's apologists, conversely, can argue that it's all worth it bc #SCOTUS or whatever but it's harder to leverage tribalism on behalf of a president who is avowedly a pawn of the Kremlin, I would think.

I mean, we literally just heard Vladimir Putin claim that the president of the United States had at least gently chided him for the annexation of Crimea, which Trump himself refused to confirm or deny. lol. #MAGA!

So, all in all, I don’t think this Trump debacle got worse today, but our ability to respond to it did and am therefore feeling more sanguine than I did yesterday.