Monday, January 14, 2019.
“Right behind you, boss!” Donald Trump following Vladimir Putin to the podium for their joint press conference after their meeting in Helsinki back in July of 2018. AP Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais, via the MaddowBlog at MSNBC.
“Donald Trump is such a Russian toy that I'm starting to wonder if inside of him is a series of progressively smaller white nationalists.”---Comedian Kate Willett on Twitter, December 16, 2016.
As folks like to say on Twitter, “This held up well.” Except those folks are usually being ironic. Willett’s tweet and my post from December---December 2016!---have actually held up pretty well, it’s just that things are worse than was generally known at the time. Back then it looked liked Putin meddled in the election on Trump’s behalf because he knew Trump would be a whole lot easier to deal with than Clinton. Now we know he did it because Trump was already on the string and the next step was to start pulling…
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Remember when George W. Bush looked into Putin's eyes and got a sense of his soul, as if he had one? Putin's looked Donald Trump in the eye and has seen that Donald Trump doesn't have a soul either. It's all one giant, fragile, immature ego in there.
Trump is greedy, careless, irresponsible, needy, vain, insecure, and dumb in the way only people who think they're smarter than everybody else can be dumb.
And he has no interest but self-interest which he clearly has mixed up with the interests of the country. If he thinks it's good for Donald Trump, then that's all the good it needs to be.
Trump has been this way his whole life, caring only about making money and aggrandizing himself.
All of which makes him easy to manipulate and easy to outfox.
This is why Putin wanted Trump to win.
He’s the perfect mark.
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In case you haven’t read it yet, at the New York Times: “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia”.
Also, again if you haven't already, it's a good time to start reading Greg Miller's "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy".
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Updated to account for it being worse than I thought: Like I said up top, the post has held up pretty well, but not as well as I was congratulating myself for. At the time, I thought Trump was just a stooge and a tool and that Putin was manipulating him without his being aware of it. I still think he’s dumb enough not to know when he’s being conned and even arrogant and vain enough to think he’s the one pulling the wool over Putin’s eyes. But it’s beginning to look as though Trump has had his eyes wide-open. I don’t know if he’s been bought, bribed, blackmailed, or has simply been seduced, or if he's delusional enough to think this is a good thing. Whatever's at the bottom of it, and it may be all of the above, he’s Putin’s inside man by choice and a knowing participant in his own treason. At any rate, that’s the way my thinking’s trending after reading these columns by Tom Nichols and Max Boot:
See Nichols’ “All signs point the same way: Vladimir Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump” at USAToday and Boot’s “Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset” at the Washington Post.
Updated again to take into account, Columbo like, one more thing: This doesn't mean Trump is a Russian agent or a conscious participant in a conspiracy. The Kremlin's saying "it's 'stupid' to think that Trump could be a Russian agent" (Follow the link to Politico), but the implication may be the Russians think he's too stupid for them to trust with the job and stupid enough that don't need to have turned him. They just need to let him be him and sit back and enjoy the show. From "The Apprentice":
It’s hard to imagine that even a master manipulator like Putin would have anticipated the full success of his operation. Not only had he sabotaged HIllary Clinton, but he had also helped install in the Oval Office someone who---by virtue of his fragile ego, disdain for democratic norms, and volatile leadership---compounded the impact of the Russian campaign. In the months that followed Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters, his administration would be tarred by scandals political and personal, a rate of White House dismissals unparalleled in history, and investigations into possibly illegal actions by the President, his family, and his team. Trump’s decisions sometimes seemed as if they were designed to erode American effectiveness or standing, be it in government or on the world stage. Again and again he would belittle America’s closest allies---Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, all the while praising Russia’s strongman.
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