The news in Bob Woodward's latest book is surprising.
The legendary Washington Post journalist reported that as the Covid pandemic raged in 2020 and with testing shortages in the United States, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent testing equipment to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use. Meanwhile, back home, Trump downplayed – and even ridiculed – the need for Americans to test.
Even Putin believed that it would be harmful if it came to light. “I don't want you to tell anyone because people will be mad at you, not me,” he reportedly told Trump.
Since then, Woodward reports, Trump has maintained contact with the Russian autocrat. Since leaving office in 2021, Trump may have spoken to Putin up to seven times.
Will it matter? Certainly not for the Trump faithful.
They definitely stood by their man, no matter what. Trump has known this for years when he mentioned in early 2016 that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose voters.”
When an NBC Access Hollywood tape surfaced shortly before the 2016 election and Trump could be heard boasting that he was such a star that he could get away with grabbing women's private parts, his campaign took it as a death knell.
But that wasn't the case. He got away with this too.
Why does this continue despite every scandal and misdeed, two impeachments, 34 criminal convictions, countless insults and lies? Why Teflon?
Perhaps the point is simply that Trump's attractiveness to voters is not based on ethics, character or patriotism. Rather, it is distinguished from the world of facts and responsibility. In many ways, it's not about behavior at all, at least not for a traditional candidate.
It's about who he hates and who his followers hate.
“He's a character, an embodiment of a certain set of grievances,” Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. recently noted on MSNBC. The complaints are rooted in fear: suspicion of the “other,” portrayed as an immigrant killer, an outsider who will take away your job and safety and your daughter's place on the sports team.
United in grief, voters and candidates cannot be separated by something as relatively powerless as betrayal of the country or lack of humanity.
However, for those who are not in the cult, each new transgression seems to be the end.
How could I Ten one – such as the debate rant that Haitian immigrants in Ohio “eat dogs, they eat cats” – wasn't the end?
But the end never comes.
“Imagine that we learned today that Kamala Harris talks regularly to Vladimir Putin, sent him a special Covid testing kit, falsely claimed to have visited Gaza, repeatedly lied about the federal response to the hurricane, and claimed that the country has bad genes,” wrote anti-Trump lawyer George Conway.
The media would go into a frenzy, the negative attention would be relentless, and it would all lead to her campaign being turned upside down.
But Trump keeps sailing. Imagine if Kamala Harris first agreed to an interview on CBS's “60 Minutes” and then backed out of it, as Trump did – at least in part because he didn't want to be fact-checked or asked difficult questions.
By now, eight years after the Access Hollywood tape, various sets of standards had already been implemented. One of the candidates – whether Biden or Harris – was judged in the old style, with every word analyzed and criticized.
The second is held to almost no standards because its base simply doesn't care.
And the scandals overlap. They overlap and intertwine.
Thus, the report about Trump and Putin maintaining contact adds a completely new dimension to the knowledge that the former president had a trove of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago and was reluctant to hand them over.
This adds a whole new dimension to Trump's pressure on Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine.
It provides a deeper understanding of Trump's words that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia would never have started under his administration and that it would end immediately if he won another term. We know what that really means; Putin would simply have his way.
Former Trump officials, up to former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as some conscientious Republicans, condemned the former president and even supported Harris. Knowledge.
However, poll numbers and support for Trump do not appear to be changing. The faithful remain faithful, unshakable – immersed in their indifference, as Paul Simon's lyricist put it.
Trump rarely tells the truth. But as for his observation about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, he was right.
