Trump Meets Putin While America Confronts Russia

Donald Trump’s scolding of NATO allies, his digs at Britain’s prime minister, and his dismissal of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election as a “rigged witch hunt” even though he knew Russian intelligence officers were about to be indicted back home for messing with American democracy—all right before meeting with Vladimir Putin in Finland—have revived a long-running narrative: The president of the United States, wittingly or unwittingly, is doing Russia’s bidding.

“I’m not ready to say that our president is a Russian agent, but I have an agent, and he doesn’t do as much for me as Trump does for Russia,” the comedian Stephen Colbert . A more serious argument goes thatTrump is undermining not just but the whole post–World War II “Western order: our security relationships, our trade relationships, our special friendships with the U.K., Canada, Germany, and institutions like [the] EU, WTO,the columnist Nicholas Kristof . “This is Putin’s dream.”