Yesterday in the UN General Assembly, the United States voted with Russia and North Korea AGAINST a resolution, three years after the Ukraine war began, condemning Russia’s brutal and unprovoked assault on its neighbour. Even China abstained. The resolution was passed eventually by a majority of 93, although it won’t mean very much since the Security Council with its five permanent members (including Russia and the USA) will definitely veto it. What it does reveal is just how closely aligned the Trump White House is with the Kremlin. Europe is alone. The sooner we get real about that fact the better.
The post war status of Europe and America standing together in NATO as a bulwark against Russian aggression is at an end. We are now squeezed between the two as Donald Trump - close to being a certifiable idiot - has upended 80 years of this post war settlement, in a month.
During this whole period, nobody was more opposed to Russia than the Republican Party. Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and brought the whole rotten edifice crashing down by spending big on his ‘star wars’ plan for America’s defence. The creaking, corruption-ridden bloc simply couldn’t match the huge sums that Reagan was prepared to commit, and all with Republican backing.
I don't believe for one second this pro-Kremlin position is the majority view of the GOP, but they are utterly terrified of Trump. It is further evidence that he is a nothing less than a Russian stooge.
However, I am not sure the moron realises it. I am not convinced the KGB has ever actually paid him anything although it is suspected Trump's company was bailed out with Russia money in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those 'loans' were repaid however so they may have even profited from the deals.
All the recent coverage about the US president having been recruited by the KGB in 1987, doesn’t appear to have found its way across the Atlantic. If you Google something like ‘Trump recruited by KGB in 1987’ you get quite a few recent hits, including in The Daily Mirror, The Economist and the Times of India but you’ll search in vain to find anything in ANY American publications. It’s as if the free speech we have in Europe isn’t quite matched by the good old US of A’s First Amendment (I wonder what JD Vance would say about that?).
To add to my previous post about Trump being a KGB agent, I stumbled across an article in Politico by Luke Harding, a foreign correspondent at the Guardian wh has spent time in Moscow. He has a book out: Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
You can see how things were in the KGB in the mid 1980s and how the Russians recruited people they thought might be useful to them in the future. Trump was probably identified in autumn 1986 as a "confidential contact." We know this from Trump's own book, The Art of the Deal, where he says he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin at a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. But he was identified six months before this point, as Harding explains.
Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his book. .
As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986 at a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Then:
"Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the U.N.; his daughter Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet U.N. delegation.
Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.
Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.
Nobody will convince me any of this was accidental or spur of the moment. The Russians I believe would have planned all of it with meticulous care.
It is entirely credible to believe Trump was co-opted into helping them, not with bribery but with flattery and promises of future lucrative construction projects. Even the lurid stories of Kompromat being held in KGB archives somewhere may not be true. The centre only needed to pump up his already over-inflated ego and stroke his self esteem to get him onside.
Donald Trump may well be the only agent out of the thousands that the KGB recruited over the years who was too stupid to realise he is an agent. If my speculation is true, and unfortunately I have zero proof that it is, Trump may well be the biggest bargain of all time. He could deliver Europe into Putin's hands without a single rouble being handed over. It would also explain why Trump is so open about his support of and admiration for Putin, without any apparent subtlety or attempt to conceal it. He is so dumb that he doesn't know he's doing Putin's bidding.
I for one wouldn't be at all surprised.
Anthony Scaramucci, his one-time press secretary, has said that in Trump’s first term, nobody in the White House could figure out why he took such a soft line with Putin. But perhaps that is now becoming clear?
