Until now, the notion of an American president controlled by a foreign adversary was confined to fiction.
In thrillers, no plot is too paranoid or absurd. Imagine this one: A hostile power ― for verisimilitude, Russia works best ― installs a compliant U.S. president by tampering with our election. When our traitorous leader begins menacing officials who suspect his perfidy, the Russians unleash a torrent of propaganda to support him, using front people to conceal their role. Soon, they have divided America into warring camps, buying their puppet time to cover up his actions while they continue to pull his strings. Desperate, a former director of national intelligence warns that Russia’s despotic leader ― a murderous former KGB agent ― is handling our president like a Russian “asset.”
America has stepped through the looking glass. The intelligence director is James Clapper. The Russian spymaster is Vladimir Putin. The American president is Donald Trump.