Fournier piles affair allegations, Chinese spy claims and Nvidia money into a Trump scandal. But where’s the evidence connecting them?

Fournier is doing a lot of insinuating here. He starts with the alleged affair and the communist spy angle, uses anonymous accounts of private conversations to paint Trump as indifferent to national security, then drops Nvidia’s $26 million in contributions right next to the investigation into chip exports to China. What exactly is the connection? Did those contributions influence the export decisions? He doesn’t show it. He just puts the pieces next to each other and lets readers draw the conclusion. Then come the Watergate comparisons and the character attacks about adultery and self-dealing. That’s a lot of drama wrapped around a story where some of the most serious allegations still need to be established. If Fournier has evidence, he should show it. Otherwise, he’s asking readers to mistake suspicion for proof.

FOURNIER: NVIDIA Scandal Plays to Trump’s Type: Adultery, Self-Dealing, and Delusion

AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT has a wealthy friend whose business is propping up the U.S. economy. At least twice, the president is warned that his pal is sleeping with a communist spy and almost certainly compromising U.S. national security. The president does nothing about it. The affair goes public. A global scandal ignites.

Any past president facing these facts would denounce his friend, or at least distance himself from the embattled CEO. Not our president, not Donald J. Trump, the serial adulterer and self-dealer.

He called Jensen Huang on Tuesday, two days before the Nvidia chief resigned in disgrace, and urged him to keep fighting for his job, The New York Times reports in an explosive story. Here’s the heart of it:

The president’s advisers said he was blasé about the national security implications when told of the intelligence community assessments related to Mr. Huang. One aide said that Mr. Trump saw the episode mainly through the lens of adultery, and that the president dismissed the idea of Mr. Huang’s entanglement posing a threat to the country.

Mr. Trump saw Nvidia as essentially too big to fail, aides said. The company, one of the world’s largest by market capitalization, has played a vital role in the global economy and underpinned the president’s hopes for A.I. dominance over China.

Advisers to Mr. Trump gave several explanations for the way he had handled the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. Chief among them was that the president had invested greatly in Mr. Huang, whom he saw as a modern-day Henry Ford, leading in a technology that could define the century.

Mr. Trump viewed Nvidia’s fortunes as bound up with those of the U.S. economy and the stock market. When reports surfaced that the company’s board was considering removing Mr. Huang, Mr. Trump asked confidants what they thought would happen to the markets. He was worried that Mr. Huang’s ouster could cause a sharp downturn.

Democrats are investigating whether Trump allowed Nvidia to ship AI chips to China after the company contributed $26 million toward the president’s personal priorities, including the White House ballroom project. Even the Senate’s top Republican, John Thune, said Huang should be hauled before Congress and questioned.

“It would make sense because of the nature of the association and the governments and the national security interests that we’re talking about,” he told reporters.

Even for Trump’s low standards, his indifference and inaction betray a breathtaking lack of judgment. He says:

• It’s just adultery.
• He kisses my butt.
• He greases my palm.
• The markets like him, too.

Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan called Trump’s ties to Huang a massive White House scandal. “It is potentially Teapot Dome-size, Watergate-size,” she writes in the Wall Street Journal.

It is a story about our national security, and it carries implications in all aspects of U.S. defense and cybersecurity. It is a story about an administration’s failure to take responsibility and stop harm, for reasons that are mysterious. And of course it is about a successful top-level espionage operation carried out against America by its foremost world challenger, China …

Washington shouldn’t be diverted. Democrats newly in power will wish to exploit the weaknesses of their adversaries in the administration, but if they are wise they will also want to do something crucial and important, something that demonstrates a protectiveness toward America—that it is safe in their hands.

They have been given a gift by the scandal gods. There should be public hearings and investigations to drill down to the bottom of this story and get to the truth. Republicans should join them. They should do it together and—sorry—let the chips fall.

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