Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.
The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.
Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.
The idea that Trump is a Russian agent, or that Putin has kompromat on him and so he’s dancing to Putin’s strings is just ridiculous. It’s not impossible, but it’s so incredibly unlikely.
Having said that, this is exactly how Putin would want Trump to act if he were a Russian agent. It’s also hard to believe that any US president would be this pro-Russia if the Russians didn’t have blackmail material on him.
If Trump pushed any harder for pro-Russian / anti-American policies there’s a chance the GOP might actually grow a spine and stop him. He has a slim majority in the senate, and he’s already doing things that are causing GOP senators to vote against him. If he were a Russian agent his handlers wouldn’t want him to lose control over the GOP, because then he’d no longer be useful to them.
So, here we are in a situation where either the US president is a Russian asset, or he’s not but might as well be.
All the spy thrillers of the cold war prepared me for a world where politicians were brainwashed and blackmailed. What they didn’t prepare me for was a world where these politicians were enthusiastically supported by their parties despite there clearly being something wrong with their decisions.
Why is it unlikely that he’s a Russian agent?
This started in the 90s when Trump lost all of his inherited money, had half a billion dollars in debt and stayed afloat with Russian money.
Russia has, demonstrably, influenced the 2016 elections in his favor. If he wasn’t indebted until 2016, he sure was after.
His „business“ ties to Russia are so numerous, there’s a separate Wikipedia page just on that topic.
It’s possible he would have been recruited. It’s possible that in 2016 he was elected as president as a Russian asset because maybe the agencies didn’t have time to fully investigate him.
While Trump was president, Robert Mueller did a fairly thorough investigation. I’m sure there was a lot of interference by Trump. But, while his investigation found a lot of contact between Russians and Trump, and a lot of money flowing from Russia to Trump, it didn’t find any evidence that he was an asset, or that he was being blackmailed. IMO that’s a key difference. The amount of cooperation you can expect from a bribe is vastly different from what you can expect from blackmail.
Biden had 4 years with the CIA and FBI under him. Surely, finding out for sure whether or not Trump was actually a Russian asset was one of the most important things for him and those agencies. Even ignoring the political advantage it would gain Biden’s party to expose Trump, even the most GOP-friendly conservative people in the CIA and FBI wouldn’t want to have their boss be a Russian asset. Just in pure professional pride, I don’t think they’d have let that slide. How embarrassing would it be if you were a counter-intelligence officer and your boss was the agent of a foreign government?
I have to believe that getting to the bottom of it was a critical thing that the FBI and CIA were working on during Biden’s presidency. It would obviously be kept quiet because they didn’t want it to seem like they were just digging for dirt on a political opponent. But, is it believable that they just completely dropped the investigation?
So, the fact that after 4 years there were no revelations, no leaks, nothing to indicate anything more than was in the Mueller report suggests that the Mueller report was pretty thorough. Sure, he’d broken the law countless times. Sure, they were funnelling relatively small amounts of money to him, but he wasn’t an out-and-out asset being kept in line via blackmail.
I agree. Trump is stupid and easily manipulated. He doesn’t need to be compromised in the way people think. He’s a rich kid with a chip on his shoulder trying to impress Daddy types while stuck in the mindset he’s the most (insert some positive trumpism here) - aka Narcissist.
Very easily manipulated when you know what makes him tick.
There’s a line from the Lioness tv series (S01E06) that rings so true about Trump (but also many modern presidents):
Do you know who’s in this meeting?
Don’t you?
I knew who was in the debrief was at Langley.
Well, it won’t be the President.
Wouldn’t be the President anyway. You don’t plan bus routes with the bus driver. You just tell him where to drive.
Great point about manipulation. Vance triggered him, and while narcissistic and idiotic, Trump was still normal Trump before that. After the whole “thank you” bit, he went off and all he wanted was for Zelenskyy to take his beating and kiss the ring.