From Russia With Love?
President Donald J. Trump has had a long and occasionally eyebrow-raising relationship with Russia. As a real-estate developer trying to build his brand, he has long dreamed of building or owning a Trump Tower in Moscow. From the fall of the Iron Curtain at least until after he began running for President, he maintained an active interest in such projects. In fact, one of the things Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, was convicted for was lying to Congress that his boss no longer sought Russian interests after declaring his candidacy.
Yet despite all this, and the Russians seeming to be equally eager for a match, a big deal was never consummated. But they kept him dangling for years and years. One can only wonder why.
His counterpart, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of the Russian Federation since 2012 (and dictator for life), is Tsar in all but name. His beginnings, however, were in the shadows. Putin rose to become a lieutenant colonel in the KGB in East Germany under the bad old Soviet Union.
Vladimir Putin is trained and practiced in the arts of espionage and subversion and particularly recruitment, having worked undercover with the East German secret police and possibly even with terrorists. During the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin earned praise for saving KGB records in Dresden, keeping them safe from German anti-communists.
As Trump is the golden epitome of the corruption of the capitalist system, so too Putin is the shining red star of Soviet rottenness. In all his dealings with his opponents, the former spy tends to resort to the old KGB playbook and tricks of the trade. Hence, the lurid assassinations, particularly by poison, and all those unfortunate accidents with windows that happen with such alarming frequency.
So how might an ex-Soviet spymaster regard an up-and-coming Big Apple promoter who wants a piece of Russian action as anything other than a potential “useful idiot”? And how could he make such a person beholden to him?
One of the things the KGB was most infamous for was “kompromat” – acquiring and employing compromising materials and damaging information about people. This could be wielded as blackmail for money or influence, released to blacken reputations, sold, traded, stored, and even faked.
If Putin wanted the goods on Trump, the golden opportunity to get it came in 2013, when Donald Trump brought the Miss Universe pageant (which he owned) to Moscow. The show took place November 9, 2013 at the Crocus City Hall, the same venue that was attacked by terrorists in 2024.
The damaging but highly controversial “Steele Dossier”, a report compiled by a former British intelligence agent on the alleged conspiracy between Trump and the Russians, contained a number of damning claims. It was finally largely publicly discounted because those alarming allegations were so horrible yet so believable that the possibility of it being disinformation could not be ignored. However, that may have just been wishful thinking on a colossal scale.
Here is the juiciest bit that caught everyone’s attention, confirmed, the report says, by at least two hotel employees, about what happened in 2013:
According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed during one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
What is most notable about this is not so much Trump’s personal depravity, but the deep, unsuspected hatred and racism embodied in such an episode. One is inevitably drawn to wonder what else might that sort of person be capable of doing, which may be the point. For even if false, the fact that the story can be so easily believed is because of Trump’s demonstrated sympathy for white supremacists. If true, however, the Russians might not have had to totally rely on blackmail to ensure his cooperation.
In any case, it would be a long and depressing task to recount all of Donald Trump’s many efforts to curry favor with the Russian overlord ever since then. His open fawning over Putin in public at the 2018 Helsinki Summit, saying he preferred Putin’s denial of interference in the 2016 election over his own intelligence services’ conclusions, was probably the most embarrassingly blatant occasion but there have been plenty of other instances.
That Russian interference in the 2016 election to help Trump defeat Hilary Clinton is a matter of fact. The Mueller Report documented it but could not prove an actual conspiracy. For there are some things that dare not be said without absolutely irrefutable proof. Yet Trump continues blithely on undeterred, admitting that he has secret conversations with Putin, breaking the international pariah’s isolation by now offering to summit with him.
There is still so much we simply don’t know. However, the ancient Romans, who had some slight experience with conspiracies, had a simple yet very reliable way to cut through all the confusion and identify who the culprits behind a crime really were. They asked the question, “Cui bono?”
“To whom is it a benefit?” Who stands to gain by what has happened? What party profits most?
- Who benefits from the sudden stoppage of American foreign aid?
- Who profits from tariffs strangling American trade with the rest of the world?
- Who could possibly gain anything from Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and Canada?
- Whose interest is truly served by the brutal gutting of the US federal government, including the mass firing of essential workers?
- Who is the only power the Palestinians and Arabs can turn to if Trump really tries to rebuild Gaza as his own private gated community?
- Who is helped in any way by America’s open abandonment of Ukraine and Europe?
Who else could it be but the Russians?
By all appearances, then, the awful truth is that Donald Trump is acting as a willing Russian asset, wittingly or not. There. The unspeakable has been said. We are so screwed.
It should be noted in this regard that the officially-debunked Gerasimov Doctrine called for setting up an opposition party in the enemy country and even changing its leadership. No wonder the Kremlin is so happy. It looks like the fix is in. America won the Cold War, but lost the world as well as its soul.
But does this make Armageddon any less likely or somehow more so?
Public accusations might be just as dangerous as admitting the global shadow war. The Kremlin is quietly rejoicing now as Putin beholds the United States becoming a kleptocratic oligarchy just like his own. While it’s tempting to think that lessens the odds of destruction, it may not be necessarily so.
Bullies will bully, while appeasement encourages and imitation delights them. Painful American embarrassment on the world stage is just beginning. But at some point, however, that tiresome game will end and the wolves will move in for the kill.
Before that happens, however, Putin may well have reasons to regret what he helped bring about. For nothing that Trump has said or done since his second inaugural suggests that he does not now truly believe he was divinely saved from assassination to fulfill a special destiny.
Even if the Russians do have the “pee-pee tape” (as Stephen Colbert mockingly called it), it might not do them much good. Who cares at this point? Donald Trump has gotten away with everything; why would this matter at this late date when it made no difference before? Besides, by now, he can easily laugh off a video or almost any other image as AI-generated deepfakes made to discredit him.
If the President of the United States is under a foreign power’s malign influence, that is a terribly dangerous situation. But if he imagines he is chosen by God, the world’s peril is incalculably greater.
And if both those things are true, I fear in my heart that we are simply doomed.
May God have mercy on us all.
— jeremiah
Former Intelligence Officer Claims KGB Recruited Trump
UPDATE — Things are happening extraordinarily fast. Just two days after the publication of this article, a former KGB agent confirmed that he personally recruited Donald Trump. Alnur Mussayev, a former head of Kazakhstan Intelligence and one-time KGB agent in Moscow, said he recruited Trump in 1987 and gave him the codename “Krasnov”. He also said that nowadays Trump’s dossier was in the hands (and the asset being run) by a person close to Putin.
So it’s out now. However, I don’t think that this simplifies matters or makes the present time less dangerous.