The Siberian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate was both  a cold-war era book and movie about the son of a conservative politician who was captured and brainwashed by the communist Chinese to become their assassin.

Now it looks like the election we just endured wasn't the reality TV show that we all thought it was. It was actually a sequel to The Manchurian Candidate, called The Siberian Candidate.

For months now we've known that Russian hackers leaked emails from the DNC and John Podesta through Julian Assange and Wikileaks. American intelligence services have concluded without a doubt that Russia did so to discredit Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

When this all started it looked like Trump was denying this obvious truth because his ego wouldn't let him think that Putin handed the election to him.

But the truth seems to be much darker than this:

The chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and President-elect Donald J. Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said.

In particular:

The memos suggest that for many years, the Russian government of Mr. Putin has looked for ways to influence Mr. Trump, who has traveled repeatedly to Moscow to investigate real estate deals or to oversee the Miss Universe competition, which he owned for several years. Mr. Trump never completed any major deals in Russia, though he discussed them for years.

Was Putin just leading Trump on, suckering him with promises of sweetheart deals? Or did they come to some more sinister agreement?

It appears one reason Trump has been so nice to Putin and Russia is that they have real dirt on Trump:

The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Mr. Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel. The videos were supposedly prepared as “kompromat,” or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Mr. Trump in the future.

Trump, of course, has dismissed all this. He says it is fake news and a witch hunt. And he doesn't think there should be any further investigations into Russian hacking of the DNC, the RNC or Trump himself.

Russia echoed Trump's "witch hunt" meme, saying that the dossier on Trump is "pulp fiction."

But several Trump surrogates visited Russia during the campaign and just after it, with no explanation of what they were doing there. One of Trump's many campaign managers, Paul Manafort, was a foreign agent representing a deposed Ukrainian dictator beholden to Putin. Manafort was forced to resign during the summer when it turned out he was still being paid by shadowy Ukrainian political entities aligned with Russia.

Rex Tillerson, Trump's secretary of State nominee, has received state honors from the Russian government and has been working to derail sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Crimea and instigating a civil war in eastern Ukraine, where a Malaysian passenger jet was shot down by a Russian missile battery, killing hundreds of innocent civilians.

Michael Flynn, Trump's security nominee for national security advisor, received payments from Russia's propaganda outlet, Russia Today, and dined with Putin.

There are way too many substantive and documented connections between Russia and Trump and his cabinet to simply dismiss this as fake news. A special prosecutor should be appointed and Congress should hold hearings. Because these allegations are far worse than Benghazi and Clinton's emails. It's worse than Watergate. It is the most damaging scandal in American history.

Did Trump and his cronies commit full-on treason and conspire with the Russians to win the election? Or were they simply greedy dupes taking bribes from Russia and selling America out along the way? Or are they just victims of Russian kompromat, blackmailed by Putin's GRU?

The best-case scenario: the FBI and CIA present Mike Pence with the evidence and Trump has a "medical problem" shortly after inauguration. Trump steps down, setting the record for shortest presidency, and Pence succeeds him.

The most likely scenario: Trump blusters and threatens everyone. His administration becomes so bogged down in scandals involving nepotism, conflicts of interest involving Trump, his family members, and his cabinet, the emoluments clause and foreign bribes, insider trading, the collapse of the health care system because of a too-hasty repeal of Obamacare, weather disasters related to climate change, catastrophically huge deficits, construction delays on the stupid wall, a trade war with China, a Wall Street crash, soaring inflation and interest rates, deteriorating race relations and a few nasty riots, and general incompetence.

The Russians feel no need to leak the kompromat because Trump is an even worse president than George W. Bush and he loses the 2020 election in the biggest landslide ever. But the United States becomes a political and economic basket case, so it's a win for the Russians.

What's the worst-case scenario? It could be pretty grim.

Russia decides Trump is no longer useful since he so incompetent and compromised. So they decide to torch the United States.

Shortly after the inauguration the Russians burn him as an asset. They start leaking dirt that makes his pussy-grabbing video look like Sesame Street.

When Trump's prostitute videos come out he claims they're fake. Then he falls back on the "I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and my people will still support me" argument. It goes something like this: "So I banged some Russian hookers. Have you seen the tits on those chicks? My supporters already knew I was nailing Karen McDougal -- who was a very, very hot Playboy model, let me tell you -- when Melania was lactating -- that was so disgusting. And the weight gain -- ew! What's a couple more Russian whores? Why do you think I bought the Miss Universe pageant in the first place? Besides, it's not like I was president when I did it. Bill Clinton should go to jail!"

There are calls for his resignation from both sides of the aisle. Trump refuses. Congress is in an uproar. There is a movement for impeachment. A full-on constitutional crisis erupts.

Trump tweets not-so-veiled threats and insults to all who oppose him. He threatens to shut down CNN and NBC and NPR and the failing New York Times. He uses Rudy Giuliani's cronies in the New York FBI office to spy on journalists. He jails reporters on trumped-up charges of treason and espionage, while still obliviously praising Julian Assange. His supporters threaten congressmen with murder. Several shoot people: a reporter, a congressman, a few Muslims and Mexicans, and maybe a delivery guy who works for a pizza joint that Russian fake news falsely tied to child sex trafficking.

Some of Trump's supporters, angered that their man is going down, take up Dylann Roof's call for a race war. More black churches are burned, shot up or worse. Blacks demonstrate angrily. Cops shoot blacks. Blacks shoot cops.

Trump declares martial law, but many generals refuse his orders. A Trump loyalist tries to arrest a refusenik for dereliction of duty. American troops open fire on each other. The country descends into chaos. Or worse. Trump has the nuclear codes, after all.

And that's exactly what Putin was thinking when he installed Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office.

Russia tried for decades to defeat the United States, and failed miserably. Now they may well have fooled us into destroying ourselves.