For many years, we’ve watched as Donald Trump has both consumed and regurgitated Moscow’s political propaganda, parroting the Kremlin’s narratives, and recycling its lies to American voters, alongside ideological fellow travelers like Tucker Carlson, and, incredibly, our newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. While much of the Republican Party has followed Trump’s lead into this maze of Russian disinformation, the United States itself has generally preserved its democratic identity at home and in the world at large, until now.
For the first time since the end of World War II and the creation of the United Nations, the White House has begun to aggressively and unapologetically align itself with Moscow and the rest of the world’s autocratic states, in what is likely the beginning of a monumental geopolitical shift with no precedent in the modern era, and which presages a new era of rising strength and security for right-wing strongmen everywhere, and a black hole at the very heart of global democracy.
Indeed, yesterday the United States voted with North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Syria, Sudan, and Russia to reject a U.N. resolution condemning Russia for starting the war in Ukraine, voting in opposition to America’s oldest friends in democratic capitals like London, Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Berlin, and the rest of the free world. It was a stark departure from America’s traditional role in the world, an illustration that we’ve entered a treacherous new era in American foreign policy, as the leader of the free world openly embraces the world’s most brutal dictators on issues of war and peace.
Meanwhile, there was Vice President J.D. Vance’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference hectoring European politicians for rejecting far-right populist parties, and condemning the so-called “firewall” in Germany preventing mainstream political parties from working with the ascendant pro-Kremlin anti-immigrant far-right party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which just came in second in Germany’s election.
It’s almost as if America didn’t fight two world wars to prevent exactly these kinds of political movements from flourishing in Berlin. For those of us who know even a little history, it’s inexplicable and unthinkable that you’d see an American leader encouraging far-right politics in Germany, until you realize you’re dealing with a regime that feels it has more in common with the Third Reich than the liberal democracies we ourselves cultivated.
Absurdly, Vance claimed that a revanchist and expansionary wartime Russia and an aggressive China weren’t to be feared. Instead, Europeans should fear their own resistance to neofascist politics in their own societies, a stunning statement from an American vice president. Similarly, Elon Musk is also loudly stumping for the AfD, which is considered an extremist party by Germany’s own intelligence agencies. He referred to the party as Germany’s only salvation, much to the dismay and disgust of mainstream European politicians. After his Sieg Heil salute at Trump’s inauguration, it seems quite clear that the man operating as the president’s de facto Prime Minister is in all likelihood himself a neo-Nazi, operating in plain sight at the apex of American power.
That’s something to think about. However, at least we seem to know who and what Musk is, and what he apparently stands for. It’s a bit more complicated to understand Donald Trump. That’s a task that would require untangling his long, sordid web of connections, all leading back to Moscow. Unfortunately, Americans seem to lack the imagination necessary to comprehend the fact that we now seem to have a real-life Manchurian candidate in the White House, a story that once seemed fit only for fiction.
Frankly, it’s hard to digest the idea that the American president is apparently working for Russia. But that doesn’t change a thing about the trail of evidence leading from Donald Trump directly back to the Lubyanka, the KGB’s headquarters in Moscow. It certainly doesn’t change the fact that, as I write, Trump is doing the Kremlin’s bidding on the world stage. It’s simply undeniable.
War and Peace
Last week, Donald Trump once again turned reality on its head, and accused Ukraine of starting the three-year-old conflict that has ravaged the country and shaken the world, while accusing Volodomyr Zelensky of being a “dictator without elections.” Ukraine suspended elections at the outset of what is an existential conflict for the state’s survival, not unreasonably, when the only real political choice facing the Ukrainian people was to fight a genocidal invader, or meekly submit and become a Russian vassal once again.
Of course, Trump said exactly nothing about Vladimir Putin, the war criminal who invaded Ukraine and threatened the world with nuclear armageddon, and who’s been in power for a quarter century in Moscow, running what is perhaps the world’s most blood-soaked dictatorship.
Meanwhile, it seems the White House has finally closed an extortionate deal to suck hundreds of billion of dollars of oil and rare earth minerals from Ukraine, in exchange for nothing, apparently, in what Trump termed “payback.” The White House said this about the arrangement: “This economic agreement with Ukraine will not be a guarantee of future aid for war, nor will it include any commitment of U.S. personnel in the region.”
So, Trump’s extorting Ukraine and delegitimizing its democratic leader, even as he pushes for a peace deal that would effectively assure Russia a victory it couldn’t obtain on the battlefield. It was reported that Zelensky may soon visit the White House, along with a string of anxious European leaders, desperate to keep Washington from destroying the global security architecture it built.
At this point, it’s clear Trump is attempting to force a titanic geopolitical reorientation, alongside Elon Musk’s domestic evisceration of America’s government institutions and bureaucracy. He’s dismantling the transatlantic alliance built in the aftermath of World War II, and which has prevented World War III for nearly eighty years, while offering the Kremlin a singular gift: the suicidal self-destruction of American power in Europe, at least as it exists in the present. Already, Trump is threatening to remove American troops from Europe, an idea that must leave Vladimir Putin salivating. He’s shunning America’s oldest friends, and embracing America’s bitterest enemies.
For his part, Putin’s surely observing Napolean Bonaparte’s famous maxim, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”
Trump and the KGB
As Trump works on fulfilling the Kremlin’s long-sought goal of tearing apart American influence in Europe, and assisting Putin in recovering the power, territory, and prestige that was obliterated when the Soviet Union collapsed, the question on everyone’s mind is why? Why is an American president working to advance Russia’s strategic goals?
The answer, it seems, is staring us in the face: Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since the late 1980s. Of course, Trump’s many tangled connections to Moscow have long been an enduring source of speculation, but recently, far more damning and specific accusations have been leveled against the sitting American president. On X, a former high-ranking Soviet-era KGB officer, one Alnur Mussayev posted this:
In 1987, I worked in the 6th Department of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of work of the 6th Department was the acquisition of spies and sources of information from among businessmen of capitalist countries. It was in that year that our Department recruited the 40-year-old businessman from the USA, Donald Trump, nicknamed “Krasnov”.
Incredibly, Mussayev is only one of the several high-ranking former and current Russian intelligence officers who have come out to accuse Trump of being a pawn in the KGB/FSB’s service. Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man, and master of the Russian dark arts, Nikolai Patrushev, had this to say recently: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” It’s not terribly hard to understand what he’s saying.
Former UN Ambassador Susan E. Rice’s recent statement in Peter Baker’s story in the New York Times today wasn’t particularly subtle either: “Trump is transparently and unabashedly doing Russia’s bidding in this and many other ways, aligning the U.S. with our adversaries and against our treaty allies. We all have to ask ourselves why?”
She went on to say this: “When I was U.N. ambassador, had I received instructions from the State Department and White House to hang our European allies out to dry and vote with the axis of autocrats, including Russia, North Korea and Belarus, I would have concluded that the Russians had hacked and corrupted our communications systems.”
Indeed, it seems the Kremlin has hacked and corrupted our most sensitive system, installing a Trojan horse into the Oval Office, and is now merely sitting back and enjoying the show. Trump is managing to achieve what the Soviet Union never could during the Cold War: the decline of American hegemony, and the extinction of American influence in Europe, something no sane American president could possibly contemplate. For Americans, Europeans, and the rest of the free world, it’s a horrifying reality we’re finally forced to confront: the American president is compromised.
If we acknowledge this damning reality, that Trump was somehow burned and recruited by Russian intelligence officers in 1987, this all begins to make far more sense. For those of us who refuse to live in the wilderness of mirrors that is Russian disinformation, it’s now impossible to deny: Donald Trump is a Russian asset, and our republic is in grave danger. With “Krasnov” at the top of the American government, all bets are off.
