It is hard not to wonder whether Michael Flynn, the National Security Adviser of the United States of America, is the sacrificial lamb for having played the honest broker between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin… much to the consternation of the world. On the face of it, by putting in his papers he has acknowledged his suspected “culpability”, which scarcely condones the incumbent’s calculated flirtation with the Kremlin. Flynn has resigned because of his contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington and his subsequent attempts to cover up the exact nature of those contacts. Tuesday’s development in the wake of the President’s serial debacles in the courts over the immigrants issue does not imply curtains on an embarrassing chapter of Trump’s pre-election machinations. Rather it could deepen suspicions that he had played footsie with Putin to ensure the defeat of Hillary Clinton. It is the Russian intervention in US Elections 2016 that has been enormously damaging for the Trump presidency. The crisis of the President’s legitimacy over its relationship with Moscow is likely to persist. That relationship has already had an impact on Trump’s cabal. On closer reflection, Flynn has resigned after the new administration assumed office.

He is in fact he third Trump acolyte who appears to have been forced out over links to the Russian government on an issue so sensitive as the presidential elections. It bears recall that Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager, and Carter Page, a businessman who doubled up as Trump’s adviser, had resigned last summer in the face of reports that they were in contact with the Kremlin. It is Trump and no other who will have to answer for the post-Cold War trans-Atlantic electoral coordination, and the spate of resignations shall not airbrush the fundamentals though the apple-cart has been rocked fair and square. The equation with Putin had hung over Trump’s campaign and the Republican convention; the presidency per se is now under a cloud.

“Flynn’s resignation validates the suspicions of many in Washington that something is seriously amiss with regard to President Trump’s ties to Russia. This is the third member of Trump’s circle to be pushed out over Russia-linked scandals,” was the immediate summing up by Susan Hennessey, a former NSA lawyer, of yet another jolt that the administration has suffered in less than a month in office. Well might Trump imagine that he has got Flynn out of harm’s way; but the resignation will only ramp up the pressure from both the public and Congress, with both demanding a full account of the nature of Trump’s connections to Russia both now and during the campaign. Much has been revealed to the world; much also alas has not. Which precisely is the inherent puzzle of America’s 45th presidency.