The news from Bob Woodward’s latest book is startling.

The legendary Washington Post journalist has reported that as the Covid pandemic raged in 2020, with supplies of tests scarce in the United States, Donald Trump, then president, secretly sent test equipment to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for his personal use. Meanwhile, in his own country, Trump downplayed – even mocked – the need for Americans to test.

Even Putin thought this would be damaging if it got out. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” he reportedly told Trump.

Since then, Woodward reports, Trump has kept in touch with the Russian autocrat. Trump may have spoken to Putin as often as seven times since he left office in 2021.

Will it matter? Certainly not to the Trump faithful.

They have stood resolutely by their man, no matter what. Trump has known this for years, reflecting in early 2016 that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”.

When, shortly before the 2016 election, NBC’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced and Trump could be heard bragging that he was such a star that he could get away........

© The Guardian