As Americans struggle to grasp President Donald Trump's reversal of American foreign policy -- which abruptly overturned decades of cooperation with other democracies to contain authoritarian aggression -- many observers have faltered.
Describing what Trump has done strains the usual vocabulary of analysts, who are still not fully prepared to confront this administration's insidious purposes.
Yet there is a word familiar from Trump's first term that now defines precisely what he and Russian President Vladimir Putin are up to. That word is "collusion."
For most of the past decade, nothing provoked more anger in Trump and his associates than that word, which evoked a sinister and secretive connection dating back to his first presidential campaign or in some versions much earlier.
Rumors circulated widely about his alleged status as a longtime asset of Russian security services, beginning in the Soviet era, or his supposed vulnerability to gamy blackmail by those same agencies, or his desire, eventually well documented, to build a "Trump Tower" in Moscow.
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