John Podesta has published an article called “Trump’s Dangerous Strategy to Undermine Reality.”

Trump is deploying a strategy, used by autocrats, designed to completely disorient public perception. He’s not just trying to spin the bad news of the day; all politicians do that. He seeks nothing less than to undermine the public’s belief that any news can be trusted, that any news is true, that there is any fixed reality.

Trump is attempting to build a hall of mirrors where even our most basic sensory perceptions are shrouded in confusion. He is emulating the successful strategy of Vladimir Putin.

There’s that name again: Putin. For the life of me, I cannot understand why and how the GOP has suddenly become so passive and acquiescent in a President’s cozying up to Russia and its leader, a former KGB agent with the dead eyes of a shark. This is such a radical about-face that it defies explanation.

Even a mere reader and private citizen like myself has read enough to see that there are many threads that seem to connect Trump to various Russian interests, from his advisers to his loans to his real estate. Now that his National Security Adviser has been forced to resign for LYING about his contacts with Russian diplomats before this Administration took over, we have every right to demand a full and independent investigation of what is starting to look like Russiagate, complete with a coverup by the GOP.

(Footnote: did we really want a National Security Adviser who didn’t realize any phone call to the Russian ambassador was certainly going to be recorded by our own intelligence agencies? Duh).

This won’t go away. No amount of gaslighting, no hall of mirrors, will make this disappear. It is the most serious potential White House scandal with the most potential for criminal convictions that I have seen in my lifetime — and I remember Watergate.

And it is really, really stupid for this President and this White House to go on the attack, repeatedly, against the American intelligence community. They number in the tens of thousands. They are smart. They work hard. They know their work is important. And they have ALL the records, all the tapes, all the wiretaps. If he pushes them too far, payback is going to be a bitch.