The G.O.P.'s "Boil the Frog Strategy" to Save Trump (Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker)

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In foreign-policy circles, people sometimes talk about “boiling the frog”: when an enormously consequential outcome is achieved slowly, through tiny steps rather than one giant leap. North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is a classic example. The regime gradually improved its nuclear and rocket technology to the point that it is now on the cusp of becoming what the last five American Presidents said they would never allow: a rogue state with the capability of reaching the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles. No isolated development along the way—despite the country’s steady nuclear tests and missile launches—seemed, by itself, to warrant entering a military confrontation.

Boiling the frog works in politics, too. On Monday, Julia Ioffe reported, in The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks, which the American intelligence community says collaborated with the Russian government to distribute Democratic Party e-mails and try to help elect Donald Trump, regularly sent private messages from its verified Twitter account to Donald Trump, Jr., from September, 2016, until July, 2017. Last October, in the heat of the Presidential campaign, when top Trump campaign officials indignantly denied having any communication with WikiLeaks, such a disclosure would have been politically earth-shattering. But, after a year of incremental Trump-Russia revelations, the press and public’s capacity to be shocked by the details of the Russia scandal may be diminishing.

According to a recent accounting by the Washington Post, “the Trump campaign interacted with Russians at least thirty-one times throughout the campaign” and there were at “at least 19 known meetings.” If the full scope of the Trump-Russia story had been known all at once—Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Putin party in Ukraine, Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner’s back channels to Russian officials, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos’s machinations, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s eager embrace of a Russian lawyer with alleged dirt on Hillary Clinton, the F.B.I.’s investigation, the intelligence community’s warnings—it would have been akin to North Korea going nuclear overnight. The audacity of the Trump campaign’s lies would have been shocking.

It helps to take a step back and remember how politically explosive it would have been, a year ago, to know that the Trump campaign was colluding with WikiLeaks. Consider the timeline we can now piece together. On September 21, 2016, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a direct message to Trump, Jr., who quickly notified four top Trump campaign officials (Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Brad Parscale). The highest levels of the campaign knew that WikiLeaks was in touch with the candidate’s son and close adviser. On October 3, 2016, Trump, Jr., asked WikiLeaks, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep hearing about?”

Four days later, on October 7th, two important events occurred. First, the U.S. intelligence community formally announced that “the Russian Government directed” the theft of e-mails from the Democrats and named WikiLeaks as one of the entities used by the Russians to distribute the stolen material. Second, shortly after the announcement, WikiLeaks began releasing the e-mails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

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