Insinuations not enough to take down Trump

If President Donald Trump's critics in the Democratic Party and the news media want to bring him down — which manifestly they do, at all costs — they had better come up with something better than vague insinuations and clumsy metaphor- heavy inferences. An editorial in Friday's New York Times — "The Trump-Russia Nexus" — is a fine instance of the kind of empty gesturing I mean.

The word "nexus" is itself a word writers sometimes use when they don't have something more concrete or specific to allege. It's not any one thing, the word seems to say, it's everything. Or nothing.

This nexus begins, according to the Times, with the Trump organization's considerable business dealings with Russian firms. Eric Trump said in 2013 that the company borrowed capital mainly from Russian banks — leading the Times to say that "Russians have bankrolled Trump golf courses." (A tip for writers: If it's good, you "fund" it or "finance" it. If it's bad, you "bankroll" it.) After running through similarly inconclusive "connections" — Mike Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page — the Times editors invoke the smoke/fire cliche, not by using it themselves but by attributing it to the administration: "Mr. Trump and his associates can cry themselves hoarse that there is neither smoke nor fire here." And then the clincher: "All in all, the known facts suggest an unusually extensive network of relationships with a major foreign power."

So all we have so far is an "unusually extensive network of relationships." If it were Hillary Clinton and not Trump we were talking about, this "unusually extensive network of relationships" would no doubt be counted as a strength. Behold her vast experience — she knows all the key players! Of course, if two or three states in the northern Midwest had tipped just slightly the other way in the last election, no one now exercised by this nexus would care about it.

But for some reason Michigan and Wisconsin went red — either because Clinton barely campaigned there or because Russia "hacked the election," a phrase so resonant and eerie that the resistance movement hasn't noticed it doesn't make sense, even as a metaphor.

Let's assume, though, that the Russians did attempt to influence the U.S. election. I remain unconvinced, however, that the choice between Clinton and Trump was the obvious one the president's despisers assume it was. Here I will politely differ with The Post's Anne Applebaum — who, however, at least offers a reason for Russia's supposed preference for Trump instead of simply stating it. "Russia would have needed no inducements or collusion to support Trump's election campaign," she writes. Really? Why not? "His personality is the kind they understand, his cynicism and his dishonesty are familiar, his greed is the same as their greed."

Hold on. Why wouldn't that be a reason for the Putin regime not to support Trump? Why, in other words, is it so indisputably apparent that Russia would prefer to deal with a U.S. president who combines realpolitik cynicism with sheer madcap unpredictability in proportions that vary from day to day? I would have thought the chau- vinists running the Russian government would prefer the United States to be led by a big-hearted progressive woman whose party — until the last election, anyway — didn't think Russia was a serious threat. That's at least as plausible, in the absence of hard evidence, as the assumption that Putin wouldn't like the "hawkish" Clinton — whose hawkishness, I suspect, looks hawkish mainly in comparison to President Barack Obama's indecisiveness.

Maybe Trump is precisely what they wanted, but what led Applebaum to make this assertion in this instance is not something I would describe as evidence but a collection of photographs of Trump smiling and glad-handling the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the Oval Office. These wordless images — much like photographs of then-Secretary of State John Kerry smiling with his Iranian counterparts or Obama grinning side by side with Raúl Castro — function in much the same way as ill-defined terms such as "nexus" and "hacked the election" function: They fool us into assuming we know something we don't know. Look, there's a "connection" between Trump and the Russians: They're shaking hands and smiling!

Trump's resisters won't bring him down if they keep convincing themselves that all they need are a few easy insinuations. Alleging "an unusually extensive network of relationships" won't do it. Three-and-a-half more years of this, and he won't be impeached. He'll be reelected.