Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977, as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified, because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently buried on his golf course in New Jersey.
Czechoslovakia at that time was part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.
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As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found:
“Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”
Last year’s investigative reporting breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Shvets told the story — from his own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
Their trip was coordinated by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.
The KGB’s psychological profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he should run for president in the US.
Much to the astonishment and jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO, both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.
Trump’s ad laid it on the line:
″Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.″
As The Guardian reported in 2021:
“The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.’”
Meanwhile, Putin was making friends.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous journalists and banned political opposition), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdogan gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor. Flynn also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while working in the White House: he was taking about a half-million dollars from Erdogan.
Nobody knows if this was when Trump started stealing Top Secret documents and nuclear secrets from our intelligence agencies, but if Flynn was one of his back-channel paths to Russian intelligence and Putin, even via Erdogan, it would make sense.
Trump’s 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, just last month admitted that during the 2016 election he was handing secret campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, presumably so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook and other social media in swing states.
Trump also sucked up to arguably the wealthiest oligarch in the world, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman. Breaking with the tradition of American presidents first visiting close allies among democratic nations, Trump’s first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia, and the kingdom later gifted his family with $2 billion.
It’s still unknown if or how much money they might’ve transferred directly to Trump himself via one of his offshore accounts. Because Saudi Arabia is a police state, and Trump is really good at hiding his money after a lifetime of working with organized crime, we’ll probably never know.
Democracies, even flawed ones like the United States with our Supreme Court-legalized political bribery, are a perpetual embarrassment to autocrats like Putin, Xi, MBS, and Erdogan.
If they can help America tear herself apart through political conflict, it reduces the pressure on them for democratic reforms.
And Trump is still doing their work.
In 2021, he called in to a pro-January 6th rally held with and for prisoners in a Washington, DC jail to encourage them in their ongoing efforts to destroy democracy in America (and not testify against Trump).
Imprisoning the people who’d beaten hundreds of police officers and murdered one of them was, Trump told the crowd, “a terrible thing that has happened to a lot of people that are being treated very, very unfairly.”
It’s hard to underestimate the damage to our nation done by Donald Trump along with the propaganda and social media efforts of Russia and, perhaps, other autocratic nations.
A handful of right-wing billionaires — themselves no fans of democracy — have also turned their media empires and billions to supporting Republicans who are working to destroy faith in our electoral system, the heart of our democracy.
The result is that America has become so torn apart that family members won’t speak to each other, our political system has turned into gridlock, and almost the entire GOP — under Trump’s influence — seizes on every little chance to trash-talk our nation.
Their efforts, of course, aren’t limited to America. Foreign autocratic governments have long been interfering in the domestic politics of western democracies, a process that’s stepped up radically in the past decade. It was recently revealed, for example, that Russia invested more than $300 million in supporting hard-right politicians in democratic nations.
But America leads the world when it comes to evangelizing for democracy: we were the world’s first modern democracy and have survived over 240 years so far.
Taking us down, particularly through internal division that would “prove” the weakness of democracies, is the ultimate goal of these nations and their president-for-life leaders.
It’s becoming harder and harder for Trump and his acolytes to claim that they harbor any loyalty to or love for America or democracy.
Their hatred of our system of government isn’t just evident rhetorically; they turn out on the streets with AR-15s strapped across their backs and “Free helicopter rides for liberals” displayed on their tee-shirts.
When Trump is finally revealed as not just a con man and hustler but an agent of foreign dictators, a spy, and a traitor, will America finally wake up?