“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” … unless the horse was bought for you by a Russian businessman with Putin connections. Then perhaps you should take a very close look at its teeth.

A Russian businessman with connections to Putin spends hundreds of thousands of dollars making the president’s son’s private celebration lavish and memorable, while Russia deepens its relationship with Iran and is accused of providing intelligence that could help threaten American forces.

And the defence is essentially: “He’s a friend. It was a generous gift.”

Give me a fucking break.

Not everything morally corrupt arrives in a brown envelope marked BRIBE.

Sometimes the corruption is the complete absence of shame about who you are willing to take money from.

If you call yourself a patriot, there should be people whose money you simply do not touch. Not because accepting it is necessarily illegal. Because accepting it tells the world something about your judgment, your loyalties and your moral compass.

This isn't about proving that Putin personally bought a favour from Donald Trump Jr.

It's about something more disturbing:

Why would the son of an American president be comfortable being lavishly entertained by a politically connected Russian businessman in the first place?

Russia isn't Switzerland. Putin isn't some eccentric billionaire with a yacht and a taste for wedding parties. He runs an authoritarian regime engaged in war, repression and geopolitical confrontation with the West.

Somehow, when the money comes from precisely the wrong direction, the moral compass manages to point somewhere else.

Then they wrap themselves in the American flag and lecture everyone else about patriotism.

You don't get to call yourself a patriot while treating the money and hospitality of America's adversaries as perfectly acceptable, and then hide behind the absence of a provable quid pro quo.

Sometimes the absence of a moral boundary tells you more about a person than the existence of a bribe ever could.