Russia Made Trump President — And It’s the Worst Scandal in American History

 Russia Made Trump President — And It’s the Worst Scandal in American History

Now We Know the Truth About Trump and Russia. And It’s Even Worse Than We Thought.

umair haque

Jul 16 · 8 min read

Image Credit: Kevin Lamarque

Now we know. And the truth, my friends, is even more sinister, perhaps, than the theory.

Over the last couple of years, something strange and remarkable’s been happening. On the one side have been those who argue, seeing the grim reality of a coup, destabilization, authoritarianism, that Trump was Russia’s man — a puppet President, installed by Putin. And on the other have been those who argued back — often abusively and derisively — that such a thing was absurd, that Russia had nothing to do with the Trump, and believing that was just a fantastical, foolish conspiracy theory. Who was right?

Recently, a Kremlin insider did something unprecedented — he or she leaked the documents which appear to prove that Trump was indeed Putin’s man, a Russian plant and puppet. The documents lay out not just the Kremlin’s plan to install Trump, but its reasoning, goals, ambitions, and even methods. Yes, really.

Let me put that in an even more striking way.

Trump appears to really be and have been America’s first Manchurian Candidate — a President put in the White House by a foreign, hostile nation, for the explicit purpose of collapsing America from within.

I know that sounds mind-bending, the stuff of a Hollywood movie. Yet it’s even more fantastical that American papers didn’t break and aren’t really covering this story — London’s Guardian is. So don’t take my word for it — I hesitate writing in this tone, but I have to. Just read the facts for yourself, because they’re not just damning, they’re utterly surreal.

The documents say the following — take a deep breath, because…well…

“All possible force” was to be used to propel a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump to the American Presidency. Trump was an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”. One on whom, by the way, the leaked papers confirm that Russia had an entire “appendix” of kompromat, compromising material, gained on earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”

The benefits of putting this lunatic in the White House for Russia? It would reap “social turmoil” in America, which would would bring about Russia’s desired “theoretical political scenario.” Putting Trump in the White House would “definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” — and a “social explosion.”

Hence, the conclusion: “it is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate [Trump’s] election to the post of US president.”

Then it spells out a “multilayered plan” across all of Russia’s spy agencies for doing it. “The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016,” writes the Guardian.

A few weeks after this exact security council meeting, the DNC’s servers were hacked by Russian intelligence, and thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails were released.

Whew. I told you you’d need to take a deep breath.

Did you get all that? Masters of spy fiction like Robert Ludlum barely attempted writing a plot this audacious — or ridiculous. The story of Jason Bourne has nothing on Russia literally putting a madman in the White House — successfully. This leak is staggering in its implications. The President of the United States wasn’t just a fascist, an authoritarian, or a sexual predator. He was also a puppet and a spy.

Now let’s go back to the context. Over the last couple of years, the “debate” has raged, between the deniers and the affirmers, and it’s been a fake debate, like so much of America’s public discourse, designed to camouflage obvious truths.

The deniers were the ones who’d attack, with vitriolic rage, the suggestion that Trump was a Russian plant. They’d get really, really angry about it. The deniers were a really, really strange bunch of people. There was the Fox News host. The disgraced former liberal journalist who appeared on his show and loves to insult people on Twitter while defending Russia and Trump. A ragtag bunch of fanatical generals and “advisors.” Senior members of the GOP, who all dismissed the Russia-Trump connection regularly.

And among this coterie, any suggestion that Russia had an interested in installing Trump, and in fact did, was met with a kind of absolute, total fury, shouted down, mocked, insulted. The idea couldn’t even be raised, mentioned, brooked.

The affirmers were different. They saw the obvious evidence. Why did Trump soft-pedal relations with Russia? Why did he appear to be Putin’s lapdog, and that’s an insult to dogs? Why did he appear to give Russia everything it wanted? And why did he appear to be attacking America, over and over again, from letting hundreds of thousands just die of Covid to dismantling basic democratic institutions to literally inciting a violent, bloody coup?

The debate is now over.

Now we know.

Trump really was Russia’s puppet. He wasn’t acting in America’s best interests because he never shared or had them to begin with.

But the story only really begins there, sadly.

What’s really alarming about all this is that, well, Russia played a brilliant game. And America’s institutions failed. They failed incredibly badly.

To explain what I mean, let’s go back to Russia’s analysis of America’s plight. It was deep and sophisticated and subtle.

It began with psychology: “Trump was an ‘impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.’”

It led through culture and media: America’s “media-information” space and “deepening gulfs” were a key weakness. Read: American culture is idiotic, and Americans are idiots because nobody educates or informs them of basic facts about the world. Hence, it talked about inserting “media viruses” into America, since ill-informed, angry, unhappy Americans, their lives commodities, preyed on by indifferent elites, were easy to manipulate and take advantage of, with, say, Facebook propaganda campaigns.

And that led to the political level of the analysis — a lunatic like Trump could easily lead a nation with “key weaknesses” like America to “social turmoil,” “social explosion,” and collapse.

You might read all that, in hindsight and say: “Well, what’s so brilliant about that?” After all, many of us were warning of exactly all that, remember? Here’s what is. America’s intelligence agencies, media, or institutions didn’t grasp any of the above.

There was no effort, and I mean none, by America’s institutions to stop Donald Trump. The analysis that Russia made was simply completely missing. Most of America’s institutions backed Trump. Pundits made careers out of attacking those of us who warned of the dangers of Trump ascending to the Presidency — and those of us in public life who did warn of it paid a steep professional price, losing our columns, book deals, and so on.

America’s chief institutions all failed spectacularly. The CIA, FBI, New York Times, Pentagon — just go down the list. There was no analysis whatsoever with the sophistication and rigour and urgency of Russia’s. CIA analysts weren’t sitting down and saying, “Hey, this guy is a madman, and he can be used to destabilise the whole system, bring it down to its knees” — they didn’t think in their wildest dreams fascism could come and destabilise the country. The FBI made a bigger deal out of Hillary’s emails, which is one of the crucial events which swung the election. The New York Times followed both their lead — and instead of doing a proper analysis, and warning of the dangers from a fascist lunatic being used as an instrument of social destabilisation winning the Presidency, mainstream media attacked those of us who issued the warnings.

America’s institutions failed massively, like never before in history. Where Russia’s succeeded. Russia had the better analysis of America’s weaknesses as a society. It had the better plan for exploiting and attacking them — while America, having no analysis, its elites smugly, glibly dismissing the very idea that any of this could be real, had no consequent plan to defend itself against them. Russia understood a lunatic like Trump could be a weapon of mass sociopolitical destruction — but American institutions and elites, asleep at the wheel, cosseted in cushy little bubbles of privilege, pooh-poohed the idea, and went on denying it could happen, while it was happening right before their eyes. America was exception, wasn’t it? Exceptionally stupid, blind, and defenseless, it turned out.

Russia pulled off one of history’s great conquests without firing a single bullet. It succeeded at installing America’s first puppet President because America failed in an incredible, almost unbelievable way — to stop it from happening. Even when it was obvious — “hidden”, like Sarah Kendzior says, “in plain sight.” It should have been totally straightforward to see that Trump was Russia’s puppet, from the very beginning, long before the election. And while people like you and me and Sarah did, America’s elites and institutions — CIA, FBI, New York Times, Pentagon, just go down the list, didn’t.

They all failed in a way so historic it’s going to take decades just to begin to reckon with it. This grave failure makes every other scandal in American history look small. Watergate, next to putting Russia’s man in the White House, looks like a minor burglary. Let me put that another way.

Russia installing its own man — a lunatic, at that — in the White House is the most successful intelligence operation of all time. By a very long way. It makes everything else in the history of intelligence campaigns and spycraft look like small beans. It is a feat that should have been flatly impossible.

But it became possible because America also committed the greatest intelligence failure of all time. I mean “intelligence” in the broad social sense, not just the military one. America’s mind failed, its thinking organs. Everyone — from pundits to agencies to media to academic — failed abjectly at seeing the obvious, and preventing it from happening.

The only one who saw it and said it openly was Hillary Clinton. And guess what? Elites and institutions attacked her like crazy for it. Think what you like about Hillary — but she was dead right, and she was the only one, more or less, in a position of power, to say so openly. The only one — that’s how massive, epic, incredible, spectacular, America’s failure was and is.

And as the Guardian rightly notes, her email being hacked was part of the plan to install Trump. “As the report correctly envisaged, these stolen and dumped emails became a “media virus” — infecting and weakening the Democratic campaign, and reaching millions of American voters via Facebook and Twitter.” See how much better Russia’s analysis and attack on America’s weaknesses was than America’s nonexistent defense?

I doubt even this leak will convince the deniers. It’ll just be grist for their mill. They’ll call it a fabrication or a fake and so on. But at some point, not believing what’s in front of your eyes becomes stupidity.

Maybe, on some naive level, some abstract one, it was OK to be “skeptical” about whether Trump really was Putin’s man, which is why he let hundreds of thousands die, and led a hard coup at the Capitol. Now it’s not.

Let me end with one final note, then. This leak doesn’t just confirm the worst suspicions about Trump. It also lends credence to the idea that the deniers are Russia’s men, too. Who else, at this point, would really defend any of this? When it’s obvious? When there’s now literal hard documentary evidence? Only someone, really, being paid to. Being paid well to.

That makes the deniers — I don’t know, hypocrites? Liars? Propagandists?

But it’s different for you. They’re probably being paid to deny it. You? You’re not being paid handsomely to deny the fact that Trump was Russia’s man, America’s first Manchurian Candidate of a President, one installed as a puppet to rip America apart and make it implode.

What does that make you, if you don’t believe the obvious, overwhelming, damning evidence by now?

Somewhere between a fool, a mark, and a sucker, my friend. Maybe all three.

Umair

July 2021