In foreign-policy circles, people sometimes talk about “boiling the
frog”: when an enormously consequential outcome is achieved slowly,
through tiny steps rather than one giant leap. North Korea’s pursuit of
nuclear weapons is a classic example. The regime gradually improved its
nuclear and rocket technology to the point that it is now on the cusp of
becoming what the last five American Presidents said they would never
allow: a rogue state with the capability of reaching the U.S. mainland
with nuclear missiles. No isolated development along the way—despite the country’s
steady nuclear tests and missile launches—seemed, by
itself, to warrant entering a military confrontation.

Boiling the frog works in politics, too. On Monday, Julia Ioffe
reported, in The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks, which the American intelligence community says collaborated
with the Russian government to distribute Democratic Party e-mails and
try to help elect Donald Trump, regularly sent private messages from its verified Twitter account to
Donald Trump, Jr., from September, 2016, until July, 2017. Last October,
in the heat of the Presidential campaign, when top Trump campaign
officials indignantly denied having any communication with WikiLeaks,
such a disclosure would have been politically earth-shattering. But,
after a year of incremental Trump-Russia revelations, the press and
public’s capacity to be shocked by the details of the Russia scandal may
be diminishing.

According to a recent accounting by the Washington Post, “the Trump
campaign interacted with Russians at least thirty-one times throughout
the campaign” and there were at “at least 19 known meetings.” If the
full scope of the Trump-Russia story had been known all at once—Paul
Manafort’s work for a pro-Putin party in Ukraine, Michael Flynn and
Jared Kushner’s back channels to Russian officials, Carter Page and
George Papadopoulos’s machinations, Donald Trump, Jr.,’s eager embrace
of a Russian lawyer with alleged dirt on Hillary Clinton, the F.B.I.’s
investigation, the intelligence community’s warnings—it would have been
akin to North Korea going nuclear overnight. The audacity of the Trump
campaign’s lies would have been shocking.

It helps to take a step back and remember how politically explosive it
would have been, a year ago, to know that the Trump campaign was
colluding with WikiLeaks. Consider the timeline we can now piece
together. On September 21, 2016, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a
direct message to Trump, Jr., who quickly notified four top Trump
campaign officials (Jared Kushner, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and
Brad Parscale). The highest levels of the campaign knew that WikiLeaks
was in touch with the candidate’s son and close adviser. On October 3,
2016, Trump, Jr., asked WikiLeaks, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I
keep hearing about?”

Four days later, on October 7th, two important events occurred. First,
the U.S. intelligence community formally announced that “the Russian
Government directed” the theft of e-mails from the Democrats and named
WikiLeaks as one of the entities used by the Russians to distribute the
stolen material. Second, shortly after the announcement, WikiLeaks began
releasing the e-mails stolen from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John
Podesta.

Trump praised the organization in a speech—“I love WikiLeaks”—on October
10th. He tweeted about WikiLeaks on October 11th. The next day,
WikiLeaks, seemingly encouraged by the coördination, sent another
private message to Trump, Jr.: “Hey Donald, great to see your dad
talking about our publications. Strongly suggest your dad tweet this
link if he mentions us.” Fifteen minutes later, Donald Trump tweeted,
“Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information
provided by Wikileaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!” Two days later, on
October 14th, Trump, Jr., tweeted the link that WikiLeaks had
provided. The entire political world wanted to know whether the Trump
campaign was actively coördinating with WikiLeaks, an organization that
Trump’s own C.I.A. director would later call “a nonstate hostile
intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” On
October 14th, Mike Pence was asked, on Fox News, if the Trump campaign
was “in cahoots” with WikiLeaks. “Nothing could be further from the
truth,” he said.

After Pence’s comment, several Trump officials issued their own blanket
denials of any contacts with foreign entities during the campaign. As
all of these general denials have collapsed, the White House has
retreated to making more tailored denials. First, there was no contact
at all. When numerous contacts were revealed, the White House shifted to
arguing there was no coördination (or “collusion”). Now that clear
coördination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign has been
uncovered, the new line is that it wasn’t illegal. Trump and his
Republican allies are betting that each disclosure, on its own, can seem
innocuous or defensible, as the public becomes confused by the
complicated timeline and tedious details. The Trump camp’s original
broad denials start to be forgotten, and the bar for what is considered
truly inappropriate coördination gets higher. It can take a long time
before anyone realizes that the frog is dead.

This isn’t the first time that a President and his party have benefitted
from a slowly unfolding scandal. In 1998, when it was first reported
that Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s longtime
adviser Dick Morris—the Roger Stone of the Clinton years—conducted a
poll to test how the public would react if Clinton immediately came
clean. Morris’s conclusion was that, if the public knew everything right
away, especially about a cover-up that may have involved perjury and
obstruction of justice, the President might have to resign. In the cynical view of Clinton and his political adviser, it was too soon for
the American people to digest the full truth. Clinton told his pollster,
“Well, we just have to win, then.” The investigation by Kenneth Starr
continued and the gradual release of details that leaked from Starr’s
office and witnesses in the case prepared the public for a more
sympathetic reaction once the full truth was known. Many members of the
public eventually turned against Starr and congressional Republicans and
rallied to Clinton’s side in the protracted legal and impeachment drama
that followed.

The Russia investigation is occurring mostly behind closed doors in
Congress and by the special counsel, somewhat muting the impact of
revelations that regularly leak out. Will this slow and confusing
release of damaging information soften the blow to Trump? It’s too soon
to tell, of course, but what he and his team are banking on is that,
while a year ago the public might not have tolerated the full truth
about his campaign’s links to Russia, the scandal goes down a lot easier
when the details are delivered in small bites.