Other Papers Say: Trump admits his campaign colluded; is this acceptable?

The following editorial originally appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

President Donald Trump took to Twitter last week to finally acknowledge the obvious about his son’s 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian in Trump Tower: The intention was to gather dirt on his campaign opponent from America’s most powerful geopolitical foe. He added, ludicrously, that it is “totally legal and done all the time in politics.” It is emphatically neither.

With the president now openly admitting his campaign attempted to garner assistance from a foreign government — and implicitly admitting his previous lies to the country about this — Republicans can no longer get away with changing the subject and mumbling about the great economy. They and every other Republican who draws support from this increasingly rogue president’s loyal following must answer a simple question, yes or no: Is collusion with Russia acceptable?

To review: On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort met with a group that included a Russian lawyer with close Kremlin ties. Trump Jr. initially claimed the meeting was about Russian adoptions. He later admitted this was false, and Trump’s attorney admitted the president himself dictated this lie. As emails from the meeting’s organizer confirmed, the meeting was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

That alone was confirmation aplenty of campaign collusion with a foreign government, but the president has now provided more. “Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump tweeted last Sunday. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

To be clear: 52 U.S. Code 30121 makes it a federal crime for any American political campaign to accept or even ask for a “thing of value” — which would certainly include opposition research — from a foreign national. As a legal matter, Trump’s assertion that “it went nowhere” is irrelevant; consider the bank robber caught breaking into a vault that turns out to be empty.

Now that the president himself has admitted his campaign’s attempted collusion with Russia, elected Republican leaders deserve to be pressed relentlessly until they answer: Is this acceptable? If they won’t answer the question, that alone should be sufficient grounds for voters to reject them.