Ross Douthat writes on the New York Times, at the more Conservative end of that paper's spectrum of opinion, which skews left.
His latest article is at once amusing and also possibly spot on. Like the pusillanimous observer he claims to be I withhold my judgement. Douthat will wait for the outcome of Mueller's investigation. For my part I can't imagine anything wildly incriminating coming out of that investigation, given that if there were, it would have leaked by now. But still.
A Tweet in response to the article says "I endorse this article with 65% degree of certainty". The humour in this comment becomes apparent in reading the article, the first paras of which are:
/Snip
My official pundit's opinion on Donald Trump, Russian election interference, collusion, kompromat and impeachment is that I'm waiting for the Mueller investigation to finish before I have a strong opinion. This allows me to cultivate the agnostic's smug superiority, but it also leaves me without a suitably en fuego take after something like the immediately infamous Trump-Putin news conference — not because the president's behavior wasn't predictably disgraceful, but because the nature and scale of the disgrace can't be assessed without a certainty about Trump's motives that's somewhat out of reach.
So maybe this is a good time to step back and sketch out the three main ways to understand Trump's relationship to Russia and Putin and the 2016 hacking of his Democratic rivals, the three major theories that make sense of our president's strange conduct before and since. I'm not going to formally choose among them, but for people interested in betting I will offer odds for each.
