By releasing a damning email exchange from last year revealing his own eagerness to take help from the Russian government to elect his father, Donald Trump Jr. has brought us to a watershed moment. One of the dikes blocking public understanding of the story line of potential collusion has given way. A flood of further incriminating evidence is now almost certain to follow.
President Trump is in a bind. Even if he were a model of rationality (which he is not), and even if he had retained the finest Washington attorneys to advise him (which he has not), he is confronted by impossible choices. After all, to state the obvious, Donald Jr. is his son. Jared Kushner, also tangled in the web, is his son-in-law. Even if the president himself is not implicated in the Russia trap, would he throw them under the bus? And if he is implicated, he cannot throw them there without getting crushed himself.