Trump is Putin's Ultimate Weapon—Literally
The former guy is not just a Kremlin puppet. He's also a Doomsday device. And he's killed 610,000 Americans, with no end in sight.
DONALD JOHN TRUMP is the fully-owned property of the mafia state we’re pleased to call the Russian Federation. It has been this way since the heyday of the USSR. The KGB cultivated him when I was still in grade school. He has been laundering money for the Russian mob for decades. It’s no great mystery why Vladimir Putin preferred him to Hillary Clinton in 2016—Trump was already compromised, already in Moscow’s back pocket. He was a Manchurian candidate, but more dangerous, because there was no solitaire-induced hypnosis involved. He just did what he was told, no questions asked.
As president, Trump was able to do enormous damage to the country on behalf of his Russian whoremasters, punctuated by his willful sabotage of the pandemic response. As a former guy, he continues to wreak havoc for those same overlords—our mortal enemies for the last 75 years. His prime directive, as I tweeted in November of 2018, is to sow chaos and weaken the U.S. and our allies. EVERY SINGLE THING HE’S DONE since taking office is to achieve those purposes—that and to enrich himself personally.
This is not some pie-in-the-sky, Q-of-the-left conspiracy theory. Trump’s ties to organized crime are well documented. A search of the archives of the Village Voice or the New York Times will turn up plenty of good reporting. Craig Unger wrote two books about this, and countless articles before that. Luke Harding’s Collusion spells it all out nicely. Lincoln’s Bible provides the deep-dive history in her “World Beneath” podcast. And we’ve covered it extensively at PREVAIL.
Too, plenty of people in government have confirmed all of this. In the debates in 2016, Hillary Clinton told us point blank that Trump was Putin’s puppet. The Mueller Report contains numerous instances of his associates working in concert with high-placed Russians. Volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report states unequivocally that “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” Paul Manafort, THE CHAIR OF TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN, was working with a Russian intelligence officer WHO SPECIALIZED IN ELECTION FUCKERY. Even Kevin McCarthy said—back in June of 2016, before he was himself owned—that Trump was on Putin’s payroll.
Okay, you say, great. He’s Putin’s puppet. Yes, we know. We get it. What does that mean in practice?
What it means is that Trump is the ultimate weapon used by the Russians to attack America. He is their Enola Gay. He is become death, destroyer of worlds. Trump was Putin’s Doomsday device while he was president, and he hasn’t stopped serving that function, even after we kicked his diapered ass to the curb.
Understand: Putin and his oligarchs want nothing less than to destroy American democracy. They rightly see our republic as a threat to their corrupt, despotic regime, and they want it gone. Too inept and puny to fight us by conventional means, they use psychological operations, or psyops, primarily delivered by acts of cyberwarfare. The Russians are expert at this tactic. They want us isolated, divided, sick, violent toward each other, broke, and demoralized. They want our institutions eroded. They want our alliances broken.
And if we look at recent history from the lens of The Former Guy as Trojan Horse, as polonium in our collective tea, we see that that’s what exactly Trump did, and what he continues to do:
They want us isolated.
The pathetic Russian state is no match for a unified NATO. It ain’t even close. Putin wants no part of the United States as the world’s policeman. Because the twerp is a criminal—the greatest thief who ever lived. So he wants the U.S. isolated from Europe, and the U.K. isolated from the Continent, and the “special relationship” bollixed. With Trump and BREXIT—two fronts of the same Russian op—he did major damage to NATO. And there was Trump, pissing on our allies, pulling out of treaties and accords, grousing about the cost of NATO, shoving other world leaders out of the way at summit meetings—just like his puppetmaster commanded.
The long period of relative peace and prosperity in the West since 1945 is an historical anomaly. Trump put the Pax Americana in peril. Critically wounded, there is no guarantee it will survive.
They want our institutions undermined.
A strong State Department uses diplomacy to curb Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere. A strong Defense Department develops new weapons and systems of defense. A strong Treasury Department keeps the economy stable, raises revenue effectively via taxation, and goes after organized crime. A strong Education Department ensures that our kids are taught critical thinking skills, developing the ability to see through disinformation and propaganda. A strong Attorney General fights the crooks and keeps the playing field level. A strong Postmaster General gets the mail out on time. And so on.
Trump installed individuals at the heads of those departments whose primary job was to undermine them, to put sugar in the gas tank of those venerable institutions. Remember when Trump’s USPS appointee, that smirking gorilla Louis DeJoy, dismantled the mail sorting machines for no logical reason? And we still can’t get rid of him because of the rules and regulations? That’s a perfect metaphor for the entire Trump Administration’s attitude toward our institutions. Did Betsy DeVos make anything better at Education? Did Bill Barr at DOJ? This was unadulterated cronyism. It made some Americans wealthier, yes, but it ultimately worked to serve Russian interests.
They want us divided.
The evil geniuses at the KGB knew what our weakness was, long before the fall of the Soviet Union: our institutionalized racism. The U.S. went around the world trumpeting liberty and justice for all, while maintaining an egregious double standard at home. Any moral argument about the United States versus the USSR would end with a mustachioed Russian saying, “А у вас негров линчуют”—which means, “Ah, but you lynch Black people.” In short, American racism is good for Soviet, and now Russian, propaganda efforts. It makes us look like a nation of hypocritical bigots. So installing the avatar of hypocritical bigotry in the White House, and building his politics around white grievance, around white victimhood, plays right into Putin’s tiny hands.
The Russians have known for years that race is the ultimate wedge issue in the United States—and that nothing riles up ignorant white people like the seemingly-anodyne declaration that Black lives (also) matter. Every time some mouthbreathing lummox in blue murders an unarmed Black person, Putin smiles. Derek Chauvin may as well be a GRU operative.
They want us broke.
A lot of forecasters thought the stock market would tank as soon as Biden took over. It hasn’t, because investors abhor volatility, and Donald Trump is volatility made flesh. How many times did 45 cite some or other company in a tweet, artificially boosting its value? (Looking at you, Eastman Kodak).
He also squandered federal money just like he squandered his inheritance from Fred, tacking an unfathomable $7.8 trillion on to the national debt. As Pro Publica reports,
The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.
The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration….And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.
I’m hardly a balanced-budget hawk, but at some point, there is a limit on how much we can put on the national credit card. The debt will have to be paid. There is no free lunch. And Trump did this on purpose. Again: it benefits Russia.
They want us shooting each other.
We know that the Russians infiltrated the NRA. Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin did this masterfully, using gun rights as a wedge issue. A Senate Finance report released in 2019 shows that Moscow was allowed to influence NRA policy. We also know that Wayne LaPierre, the disgraced former NRA president, met with Trump and predicated further support for him in 2020 on him “stopping the games” on gun reform. Here we have two amoral individuals strongly influenced by Russia, seeking outcomes that benefit Russia, at the expense of American lives. There is blood on their hands.
Most Americans want better controls on guns—especially on the AR-15s that are the weapons of choice for most mass shootings. Even many NRA members want that. The NRA says no way. Why? Because it behooves Russia for us to shoot and kill each other. Optically, it makes us look like a bunch of violent idiots, and makes Russia, with its strict gun laws, appear sane by comparison. And it traumatizes people, terrorizes people, and kills Americans. All bad for us, but great for Vlad.
It’s not that the NRA is a terrorist organization—it’s that it now exists to do the bidding of a hostile foreign power hellbent on our destruction. The NRA, like Trump, is a weapon being used by Russia against us. Why else would Moscow have bothered infiltrating it?
They want us sick.
Trump knew about the severity of the novel coronavirus in early February, as Bob Woodward (eventually) revealed. Rather than listen to experts, he gave the keys to Jared Kushner, who authorized a Blue State Genocide.
Worse, Trump politicized the pandemic response. First it was masks. Now it is vaccines. When this pandemic finally ends, more Americans will have lost their lives to covid-19 than died in the Civil War. Trump and his nihilistic statehouse acolytes like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Tate Reeves, and Kristi Noem are responsible for the lion’s share of those deaths. Even now, Trump—who was vaccinated, and who himself suffered from the virus—could make a huge difference by pushing his disciples to get vaccinated and wear masks. Why would he not do that? Why is he actively killing his own voters, if not to exacerbate the pandemic and weaken the country, as his owner Putin wants?
I have described Trump as a weapon, as polonium in our tea, as a Doomsday device, but perhaps the better metaphor is epidemiological. He is a virus, infecting the body politic. Indeed, he has literally allied himself with the novel coronavirus, encouraging his disciples to eschew masks and vaccines and to resist the government’s attempts to slow the spread. What right-minded human being would fight for a virus? And yet there they are, the proud antivaxxers, draped in their polyester Trump flags, spewing out bile, disinformation, and spittle enriched with the Delta variant.
MAGA is more than a death cult. It’s a hydrogen bomb. And if we don’t defuse it, it’s going to keep killing us and destroying our country.
Photo credit: Roger Kidd. Reproduction of Soviet nuclear missile control room.
Hi Greg! Right on the money, as usual. Trump continues to be a very dangerous weapon and I wish more Americans would understand this. If something is not done about him soon, I fear there may be another January 6th when his cult followers refuse to accept election results (in 2024) and come out in even greater numbers armed to the teeth.
If my brain is an egg; it’s scrambled.
What do you think it will take for more Americans to believe this story you write about: Trump the Puppet, the Destroyer?
Incitement for a 2nd civil war seems like a long-term investment made by the Russians, who may be imminently hoping to cash in. However, I think what you have described is war being waged against NATO. And, perhaps the organization should be considering how to appropriately crush those Russians, and other criminals.
Which leaves the question open: what’s to be done with Trump, and his cult of followers?