As the Trump team begins its second year in power, it's awash in questions demanding answers.
What will President Donald Trump do about those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program -- immigrants brought to the U.S. as children who are now here illegally but who've known no other homeland? Will he fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation -- or even special prosecutor Robert Mueller himself? Having raided the federal kitty to butter up Wall Street and the wealthy, how will Trump finance all the goodies promised in his State of the Union message? Will he strike North Korea?
They're critical questions. But they pale in significance to another question, the answer to which is vital to the future of the Trump administration and the welfare of the country:
What's Vladimir Putin got on the 45th president of the United States, if anything?
There's nothing casual or ad hoc about Trump's kowtowing to the Russian leader. It's a calculated strategy brought home to Americans last week by two presidential decisions:
First, Trump's failure to mention in the State of the Union speech that Moscow meddled maliciously in the 2016 presidential election. And second, his blanket refusal to implement new sanctions against companies and oligarchs with ties to Moscow's defense and intelligence services.
The sanctions law was enacted over Trump's objection. The president has given no reason for ignoring it, though the State Department muses that the mere threat of sanctions is enough to chill pending foreign deals for purchases from Russian arms suppliers. We're to take State's word for that one, I guess.
It looks even worse. Trump repeatedly cites Putin's denial that Russians did anything nasty to affect the American election. "What, us?" Putin told Trump -- in effect, "Perish the thought."
Trump believes Putin's every word. What he doesn't believe is the word of our own intelligence services that the Russians were up to their furry Cossack caps in election meddling, presumably to further Trump's campaign and cripple Hillary Clinton's.
I'm not sure about that one. The evidence made public to date raises a red (pun intended) flag, but it's less than completely clear whether and how deeply the Trumpies collaborated. The Trumpies don't strike me as capable collaborators -- or capable anything.
But I'm more inclined to believe our intel guys and the FBI than Putin. From what I can tell, Vlad is as serial a liar as The Donald is. They're a matching set.
Trump discounts the idea of Russian meddling because it would discredit his election. He's got that one right. And odds are that we won't get closure on the extent of Russian meddling until Mueller makes the call. Stay tuned.
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Meanwhile, I can envision another reason for Trump's assault on U.S. intelligence agencies: the need to protect and promote his sometimes shaky financial empire. Trump wasn't exactly the darling of American lenders, including banks, for instance. For starters, there were his bankruptcies -- the casinos, for example, four of them, as I recall.
One would think it's not too easy to go bankrupt in the gambling business, especially when you're the house. Takes some doing, but The Donald did it. Then there was his defunct airline. And the perilous purchase of the Plaza Hotel, not to mention the loss he suffered when his university went belly-up with a lot of bad publicity involving students who felt defrauded.
Along the way he acquired a reputation for stiffing contractors. And some in the financial press even questioned whether he was as rich as he so often boasted.
But for all the bad news that's buffeted Trump over the years, he found money and credit somewhere. Russia, with its Putin-connected crony capitalists, could be that "somewhere," in fact one of his sons suggested as much some time ago.
Ordinarily, Trump's financial shenanigans would seem to be outside Mueller's warrant -- but not if the Mueller's probing unearths a serious connection between the Trump operations and Russian money. We don't know how deeply Mueller has dug into Trump's financial empire -- or if he has at all -- but any serious effort by the Mueller team in that direction would likely set off a firestorm in the White House.
A potentially fruitful source of information on just where and from whom Trump has received money would be his income tax returns. Alas, unlike recent presidents, Trump refuses to release them.
Too bad. They'd go a long way to showing him to be clean as a hound's tooth -- or a president who has become a Russian asset.
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John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.