Again President Trump has ignored the advice of literally all of his appointed military and foreign policy advisors in order to choose a course of action--immediately withdrawing US troops from Syria--that chiefly benefits Russian policy goals. And President Putin has pointedly praised the action, knowing that the praise itself would be seen as a provocation.
Notice that Putin refers to the US president as "Donald." Similarly, Trump likes to refer to other world leaders by their first names, but he always calls him "Putin." (Of course, if he said "Vladimir," his domestic critics would freak out.) And Trump never, never criticizes Putin directly, though he sometimes finds himself forced to call out specific Russian actions.
Yesterday the Trump administration lifted sanctions on a noxious criminal Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, for no good reason. What's going on here?
Mr. Trump's commitment to making pro-Russian policy decisions has been obvious since the early stages of his 2016 campaign. It's not only obvious, it is intended, on Russia's part, to be obvious.
The Russian FSB, like the rest of us, wasn't expecting Trump's remarkable surge in the 2016 Republican primaries. But once it began, they folded his cause into their mission to undermine Hillary Clinton and sow distrust in the democratic process. They made sure that the Trump campaign was staffed with people who were pro-Russian or directly in communication with the FSB--Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn et. al.
Trump has been in Russia's pocket since the 1990's, when, after a series of catastrophic bankruptcies made him toxic in the spreadsheets of legitimate bankers, he began financing real estate developments with the only capital he could secure, money laundered by Russian gangsters (see Seth Hettena's 2018 book Trump/Russia, A Definitive History).
In order to ensure Trump's continued acquiescence in this criminal scheme, I presume that they made sure that he was implicated in financial crimes that could send him to jail--otherwise, it would not be a safe investment for the Russians. And because oligarchs, mafiya and the Putin government are essentially connected branches of the same enterprise, this would have brought Donald Trump under the wing of Russian state intelligence.
The game plan that emerged when Trump's candidacy became unexpectedly viable--I infer this from the crude and obvious way in which each separate betrayal of US interests by the Trump team has unfolded--is to play out the string of Trump's pro-Russian leanings until it is no longer tenable. When the Trump presidency at last implodes because it is so undeniably compromised by foreign interests, the ensuing chaos will in itself be a win for Russian policy. Impeachment is actually written into the strategy. Trump is not only a Russian asset, he is considered a disposable asset, whose exposure is in itself a desired outcome.
Of course I have no access to any non-public intelligence on this subject. I am simply making inferences that conventional wisdom finds uncomfortable. And they are uncomfortable because this stuff is crazy, straight out of conspiracy theory lala-land and far-fetched spy novels. But I look at everything that has happened in the three-plus years since Trump entered the field--all of the deliberate chaos and undermining of US interests and influence--and I find these conclusions unavoidable.
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