Suspended Animation in the Age of Trump

For at least the past two years, Americans have lived in an extended state of suspense about what could be the most nefarious scandal in the nation’s political history. Evidence has piled up suggesting that the Trump campaign teamed with the Russian state in pursuit of electoral victory. Some of this evidence is circumstantial and hardly conclusive; some of it is pretty damn concrete.

The hard evidence, alas, reveals more about the motives of the central characters than the shape of the narrative. There’s that Trump’s innermost circle was more than willing to work with the Russians. And there’s that the Russians wanted to sway the American electorate on Trump’s behalf. Each of these is an incredible fact; each is a historic scandal unto itself. And each of these fact patterns suggests, but only suggests, that these two parties likely met in the middle to conspire. But what really happened there? Is there a crime at the center of the narrative? After two years, those of us not working for Robert Mueller are not that much closer to knowing the answer—and, given the implications, it’s almost physically painful