Donald Trump has been owned by Vladimir Putin since the late '80s, and that’s why things are so terrible everywhere right now.
It all sounds like something out of the TV show The Americans, but it’s actually true.
And Republicans have known it all along, because there was a time (2015) when they spoke truthfully about Trump. In this clip from September 2015, Matt “CPAC Groper” Schlapp tells MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that, “Republicans don’t have a clue” about who their 2016 nominee would be — but he seemed pretty certain it wouldn’t be Trump because he lost badly to both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the polls.
They were also expecting Joe Biden to announce his candidacy, but instead, the then-vice president chose to be with his family while his son, Beau, was battling brain cancer.
If you had told anyone on that panel that Trump would not just be their nominee, but their de facto king for the next decade, they would’ve laughed in your face. Trump was still a joke of a candidate at that time, an entertaining distraction who said terrible things about the media and the country, and yet no one challenged him until it was far too late.
His Daddy Vladdy had trained him fairly well by then.
Trump had first visited Moscow with his wife, Ivana, in July 1987 to look at potential sites for a joint-venture hotel project near the Kremlin. The building deal never happened, which is on brand for Trump’s losing track record. Soviet operatives, including Putin, flattered Trump during his visit and viewed him as a target for “cultivation or influence,” according to a 2017 report from Politico (yes, the same Politico that’s now been banned from the White House Press Pool, which I’m sure is just a weird coincidence).
The savvy Putin immediately recognized all of Trump’s weaknesses during their early encounters, then exploited them all to his advantage. He groomed and breadcrumbed Trump, doling out small pieces of praise for the unloved poor little rich boy who craved attention at all times. The infamous Steele Dossier revealed that the Kremlin had been “cultivating” Trump for “at least five years” before he shocked the world by somehow defeating the far more experienced (and, therefore, a far bigger threat to Russia) Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Remember when Trump asked Russia for help in defeating her in front of the entire world? "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said during a press conference on July 27, 2016.
At the time, the media had no idea what to do. Was he joking? Was he being serious? Beholden to ratings over truth, too many of them let it go. At the same time, Trump used Twitter to flood the masses with Russian Propaganda Rule #1: repeat a lie over and over until it’s accepted as fact. Trump infected his followers first, growing his MAGA cult as he compromised his cronies in the GOP, and he has never stopped using the tactics he was carefully taught.
Trump’s blatant ask occurred right around the time Russian hackers were able to access both the RNC’s and DNC’s email servers, but only released what they had on the Democrats. It’s almost as if Trump knew exactly what they were doing. And that’s how Putin used Trump as a subhuman bridge to compromise his remaining critics in the Republican Party.
Blackmail is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?
I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I would never commit treason against my country for any reason. There’s no amount of money you could offer me to turn, no threat you could make against my loved ones or me. I’d just call a press conference and tell the world that some high-ranking official threatened me unless I turned traitor. But then again, I don’t have any crimes in my past captured on grainy video or anything. Nobody could suggest I’d stepped outside the law and that it would be worth my while to stay quiet.
Whatever Putin has on the GOP, it was bad enough for Rand Paul to hand-deliver a love note from Trump to Daddy Vladdy in 2018.
It’s bad enough that multiple members of the current regime have made countless trips to Moscow while deliberately alienating all of our global allies. It’s why Trump repeatedly threatens other nations while toying with pulling the U.S. out of NATO. It’s allowed Trump to openly join forces with another Putin puppet, Benjamin Netanyahu, to flatten Gaza.
Trump has already vandalized Washington to make us look as weak as possible on the global stage as a 250th birthday present for Daddy Vladdy, and RFK Jr. is helping him thin the American herd.
Maybe someday we’ll find out what the Russians dug up on the Republicans that was awful enough for them to commit treason against the United States of America, because that’s what happened. Aside from their names being in the Epstein Files along with Trump’s, what could be so bad that Mike Johnson just shut down the House until after the midterms?
When Democrats get our full Congressional majority back, I expect them to keep investigating the GOP’s deep ties to Putin.
Russia, are you listening?
Do svidaniya, traitors.