Is Donald Trump a Russian Asset?
Several media sources have asked if the United States is a nation without a president. The United States has been a nation without a president since January 20, 2017. But that is too bland a statement. Trump has not just failed to be the nation’s president. He has succeeded in being the nation’s enemy, not by accident, in my estimation, but by design.
There have been various theories bandied about as to why Trump sought to become president, most containing some truth, but I believe there are two reasons primarily.
(1) He sought to become president in order to destroy everything Obama had achieved, as president, in revenge for Obama insulting him at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHckZCxdRkA&feature=youtu.be
(2) He sought to become president in order to get himself out of a jam he had gotten into as a result of becoming heavily indebted to Russian oligarchs in his business ventures. (Perhaps he became heavily indebted, not by accident, on Russia’s part, but by design.)
There is a contingent aspect to this theory which resonates with Trump’s profound malignant narcissism: Perhaps he was willing to betray his country as far back as 1987, in exchange for the heady promise of ruling over the most powerful nation in the world.
What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?
During the Soviet era, Russian intelligence cast a wide net to gain leverage over influential figures abroad. (The practice continues to this day.) The Russians would lure or entrap not only prominent politicians and cultural leaders, but also people whom they saw as having the potential for gaining prominence in the future. In 1986, Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin met Trump in New York, flattered him with praise for his building exploits, and invited him to discuss a building in Moscow. Trump visited Moscow in July 1987. He stayed at the National Hotel, in the Lenin Suite, which certainly would have been bugged. There is not much else in the public record to describe his visit, except Trump’s own recollection in The Art of the Deal that Soviet officials were eager for him to build a hotel there. (It never happened.)
Trump returned from Moscow fired up with political ambition. He began the first of a long series of presidential flirtations, which included a flashy trip to New Hampshire. Two months after his Moscow visit, Trump spent almost $100,000 on a series of full-page newspaper ads that published a political manifesto. “An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” as Trump labeled it, launched angry populist charges against the allies that benefited from the umbrella of American military protection. “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”
Trump’s letter avoided the question of whom the U.S. was protecting those countries from. The primary answer, of course, was the Soviet Union. After World War II, the U.S. had created a liberal international order and underwritten its safety by maintaining the world’s strongest military. A central goal of Soviet, and later Russian, foreign policy was to split the U.S. from its allies.
The safest assumption is that it’s entirely coincidental that Trump launched a national campaign, with himself as spokesman, built around themes that dovetailed closely with Soviet foreign-policy goals shortly after his Moscow stay. Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely. How do you even think about the small but real chance — 10 percent? 20 percent? — that the president of the United States has been covertly influenced or personally compromised by a hostile foreign power for decades?
If you look at what Trump has done as president, and what he has not done, it is indisputable that the United States has been almost irreversibly damaged by his presidency. He has alienated our allies while re-fashioning the United States as a fascist regime. He looked the other way as Russia interfered in our elections. He betrayed our Kurd allies by withdrawing troops from Northern Syria, a move which gifted intelligence to Russia.
https://www.insider.com/trump-betrayal-of-kurds-gave-intelligence-to-russia-2019-11
He ignored the news that Russia paid Afghan militants to kill our soldiers.
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
And now he denies and minimizes Russia’s hacking of our government agencies.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” Trump said on Twitter on Saturday. “Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”
(Am I the only one who finds the timing of this hack suspicious? Trump will not be around much longer to assist Russia on his end.)
He has followed the authoritarian playbook, undermining democracy and the Constitution, degrading trust in our institutions, calling the media “the enemy of the people,” fanning the flames of racial and political divisions, strengthening the White Supremacy, and anti-government militia, movements, undermining faith in our elections, degrading the mental health of the nation by lying, gaslighting, brainwashing his supporters (whose grounding in reality had already been comprised by years of consumption of alt right and conspiracy media), and tweeting conspiracy theories dangerous to the United States.
Indeed, the United States would have fared better for the past four years with no president rather than with a president who is not for the United States, but is its enemy.
What has blown my mind, for the past 4 years, is the bland response by government officials, the complicity of almost the entire Republican party, and the downplaying of glaring treason and sedition by the president of the United States by almost everyone. By the media:
Is the president depressed? Is the presdient suffering a narcissistic injury? Is the president suffering a breakdown?
Who gives a rat’s a$$? He’s taking down the country. For godsakes, somebody do something!
A secret hidden in plain sight: President Donald Trump’s role as a Russian asset
In the wake of the recently revealed Russian cyberattack on the U.S. — apparently unprecedented in its danger to national security — it’s time for Congress, the media andthe incoming Biden administration to move beyond the question of “if” Trump was helping his overt ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The relevant questions are why and how.
With the nation preoccupied with removing Trump from the White House without force, the timing might not seem ideal. But the results of Putin’s engagements with Trump are too many and too obvious: Someone needs to connect the dots.
