Trump helps Putin’s smear, hides troubling Russia ties

and, especially, unreliable. Trump validates every component of this indictment, even saying that the U.S. commitment to NATO’s foundational principle — an attack on one member is an attack on all — is not categorical.

Gingrich — who is among the supposed savants who will steer Trump toward adulthood — flippantly dismisses Estonia, a NATO member contiguous to Putin’s Russia and enduring its pressure, as “some place which is in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.”

It would be fanciful to suggest that Trump read a book, but others should read Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets,” an oral history of post-Soviet Russia, 1991 to 2012. A recurring theme is Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era: “We had a great empire — stretching from sea to sea, from beyond the Arctic to the subtropics. Where is it now? It was defeated without a bomb.”

Nostalgia coexists with Soviet-era memories like this: Twenty-seven people share an apartment with one kitchen and one bathroom, including a mother of a 5-year-old daughter and a childless woman. The mother is secretly informed against. Before being sent into the gulag for 17 years, she begged the childless woman to take care of her daughter, who comes to call the woman “Mama.” After the real mother serves her sentence, she sees her police file and recognizes her informant’s signature — her childless friend. The mother went home and hanged herself.

Putinism is bitter nostalgia on the march, and Putin is as interested in the U.S. presidential election as Trump and some of his aides are in Russian wealth. Read Franklin Foer’s Slate essay “Putin’s Puppet”:

“We shouldn’t overstate Putin’s efforts, which will hardly determine the outcome of the election. Still, we should think of the Trump campaign as the moral equivalent of Henry Wallace’s communist-infiltrated campaign for president in 1948 . ... A foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States has attached itself to a major presidential campaign.”

Speculation about the nature and scale of Trump’s financial entanglements with Putin and his associates is justified by Trump’s refusal to release his personal and business tax information. Obviously he is hiding something.

Donald Trump Jr. says, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump Sr. can end the speculation by providing information. If, however, he continues his tax information stonewall, it will be clear that he finds the speculation less damaging than the truth would be, which itself is important information.