We begin today’s roundup with Ryan Cooper’s analysis at The Week of the Trump administation’s corruption:

Are we really to believe that [Trump’s desire to help Chinese phone company ZTE]  has nothing to do with China loaning $500 million to a huge Trump-branded development in Indonesia days beforehand? It simply beggars belief — indeed, there is practically no other comprehensible explanation.

Then there is the Russia investigation. As David Klion writes, the thing to remember about “Russiagate” (an unfortunate appellation, but one which seems to have stuck) is that Russia as such is only an incidental part of the story. Nearly all the major players are American, and if Russian efforts to influence the election did actually succeed to some degree, it’s only because America’s democratic institutions are rotten nearly to the core. Nations meddle in each other’s elections all the time, for good reasons and bad. The United States has done it dozens of times, and often immensely more aggressively than anything Vladimir Putin allegedly did in 2016. The remarkable thing was that such relatively moderate and cheap efforts actually […]