ART OF THE STEAL

Trump May Not Be a Russian ‘Asset,’ But He’s Definitely Putin’s Stooge

The cost of his Kremlin crush will impact Ukraine, Europe, the midterms and the world.

Opinion

Is our president a Russian asset? He sure acts like one as he waives Lindsey Graham’s sanctions on Russia while greenlighting a diesel deal that delivers billions of American dollars to the Kremlin’s war machine.

Maybe Putin has “kompromat” on Trump. Or maybe not. Perhaps all he needs to have is the level of power Trump can’t seem to wield here in the U.S., despite his best (worst) efforts. It’s also possible all this to Russia with love posturing is just Trump acting out of frustration. He and his party are on a path to suffer a midterm debacle, and he’s trying to change the equation by shifting the blame and the focus from his ill-chosen war with Iran.

However the geopolitical cookie crumbles, we can’t say we weren’t warned. In 2016, Hillary Clinton called Trump “Putin’s puppet” for, among other things, his disparagement of NATO. Clinton renewed the charge in the wake of Trump’s recent actions, circulating the decade-old video clips and declaring, “We’ll see if Putin’s puppet continues to dance on his strings.”

At the Warsaw Security Conference earlier this month, after Trump announced the diesel deal, Ukrainians were “openly talking about Trump as a Russian asset,” Damian Murphy, vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, told the Daily Beast. “He says his goal is to end the war, but he’s not willing to put any pressure on the aggressor. Going back to 2016, he’s had a deep affection for Putin and anybody who stays in power for twenty years.”

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Before that, his business dealings in the 1980s and 1990s reflected his appreciation for strongmen and oligarchs—to the point that it was a feature of Trump’s public life and persona. We shouldn’t have been surprised when during his first term, he said he “fell in love” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, who wrote him “beautiful letters.”

(Trump’s “Special Envoy for Peace Missions” Steve Witkoff, meanwhile, went as far as to call Putin a “humanitarian” during a meeting in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, adding “and I salute that.”)

This is no way to manage a war he promised to end, and a half dozen Republican senators joined an equal number of Democrats in a letter of protest to the diesel deal, calling it “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies.”

The backlash extends to the late Senator Graham’s sister Darline, who’s been running on her brother’s signature legislation and is among several candidates Trump is trying to rescue with rallies in red states. “Personally, I would choose to put the pressure on Russia to end the war and get gas prices down,” Graham told reporters at a campaign stop. “Because I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia.” She said she would raise the issue with Trump when he returns to South Carolina, while noting her brother often disagreed with Trump—so, you know, no big deal.

Trump has claimed on Truth Social he’s just trying to forge peace between Russia and Ukraine and that imposing more sanctions on Russia would just drive Putin from the negotiation table. He framed Zelensky as the obstacle to peace, rather, because he’s bombing Russian oil refineries—while conveniently ignoring Russian bombing of Ukraine’s power grid while Starlink’s early warning system lapses yet again. The lapses were widely viewed as a deliberate ‘punishment’ from the White House, or from Elon Musk specifically, as The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday.

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If there’s a quid pro quo in here somewhere, look for Russian interference in the upcoming election. How many Russian bots are on social media? We don’t know, but it’s a lot.

More worrisome is what Putin is doing out in the open, like proposing he and China’s President Xi Jinping meet with Trump to discuss the world’s problems. Trump warmed to the idea, seemingly cheered by the invite to this special club.

In the face of much criticism over the proposed tête-à-tête-à-tête, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “people need to grow up when it comes to foreign policy,” insisting there’s nothing wrong with the way Trump is interacting with foreign adversaries.

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But there is, if you know your history. “It would be a stunning, stunning rebuke to democracies around the world to have the U.S. teaming up with two autocracies to determine the fate of a democracy in Eastern Europe,” CAP’s Damian Murphy argued, drawing a comparison with the World War 2-era summits between the then-”Big Three” powers, the U.S., the Soviet Union and United Kingdom. Of course, these conferences were between allies who came together to preside over a war-torn world, whereas Putin is proposing an alliance with Russia-China on one side and the U.S. the odd man out. (“If President Donald Trump wants a full-on riot within the Republican Party, going along with Vladimir Putin’s idea for a ‘Yalta 2’ is the way to do it,” the Journal warned.)

Trump is infatuated with the idea of sitting with his fellow grandees to divvy up spheres of influence the way a dying FDR did with Churchill and Stalin in 1945. To him, it’s likely little more than a real estate deal.

FDR gave away too much, deeding much of Europe to Soviet control. There isn’t much more left for Trump to give away when it comes to Ukraine, but there’s the rest of the world; he would leave much of Europe to Putin—and why stop at Taiwan, let Xi have his pick of Asia while the U.S. dominates North and South America plus Greenland. The fact that he’s gotten this far with this fantasy and met so little resistance adds to the fierce urgency of now as Americans go to the polls and register their discontent.

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Eleanor Clift

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