So it’s now clear that Trump was lying when he said the phone call with Taiwan was just a friendly “congrats!” call from one president to another. It was carefully arranged, and one of the arrangers was a paid lobbyist and former Senator.

Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a foreign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox telephone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president.

Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordinated with Mr. Trump’s campaign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings between Mr. Trump’s advisers and officials in Taiwan, according to disclosure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful efforts by Taiwan to include language favorable to it in the Republican Party platform, according to the documents.

Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said.

The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orchestrated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Washington.

I wonder when they were planning to tell us that – the rabble who make up the citizenry of this country. I do wish someone would explain to Trump that he’s not a dictator and does not have the powers of a dictator.

The phone call between Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai was a striking break from nearly four decades of diplomatic practice and threatened to precipitate a major rift with China, which admonished Mr. Trump in a front-page editorial in the overseas edition of People’s Daily.

The disclosure documents were submitted before the call took place and made no mention of it. But Mr. Dole, 93, a former Senate majority leader from Kansas, said he had worked with transition officials to facilitate the conversation.

“It’s fair to say that we had some influence,” he said. “When you represent a client and they make requests, you’re supposed to respond.”

Yeah we understand about the client-lobbyist relationship, but that’s not the point. When a drug lord tells an enforcer to kill an enemy, the enforcer is “supposed to respond” according to the drug lord, but that “supposed to” has no force anywhere else. We get that Dole’s clients expect him to do what they ask, but that’s not our concern and it’s not the issue.