Probing the Trump

The scene at a U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska last year is barely remembered today, but it remains illustrative of one of the confounding mysteries of Donald Trump’s presidency: How to explain his coziness with Vladimir Putin? Trump had invited Putin to Alaska last summer after briefly threatening to impose punitive new sanctions on Russia— including a 100 percent tariff on countries that buy Russian oil-—if he didn’t agree to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine within “ten or twelve days.” But as journalist David Corn* reconstructs their encounter in his new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight For America, Trump’s tough-guy bluster melted the moment Putin got off the plane. After Putin strolled down the red carpet that had been laid for him by American soldiers, “the American president extended his hand first. A grinning Putin grasped it. The men shook hands, and Trump patted Putin’s upper arm,” Corn writes. The two authoritarian-minded pals, chatty and smiling, then strolled off together toward a stage bearing a large sign: “Alaska 2025.” Video of the warm encounter went viral. To state the obvious, the “Alaska 2025” summit was hardly a turning point in the savage war in Ukraine caused by Putin’s unprovoked 2022 invasion. After nearly three hours of talks that day at the Alaska air base, Putin emerged to tell the world the meeting had been “constructive.” Trump, for his part, claimed “great progress.” “I’ve always had a great relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir,” Trump told reporters. In fact, the “constructive” Alaska summit was a bust, quickly vanishing down a memory hole filled with failed attempts to stop a war that, barely a year later, only seems to be escalating—and getting more deadly—by the day. One more of these fruitless fool’s errands came just this month when Trump dispatched his two personal negotiators, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to Moscow to revive peace talks in what turned into a mini-replay of Alaska. Putin warmly greeted the pair, asking them “to convey my best wishes and words of gratitude to the president of the United States.” Witkoff gushed to Putin about the “incredible stories and incredible memories” that they will all someday share together, “and yours will be right at the top of it all.” Then, after a stop-over in Kiev to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky (where progress was once again proclaimed) Witkoff and Kushner left the region evidently empty-handed, after which Putin gave his grisly response to the whole charade: a nighttime bombardment of drones and missiles on the Ukrainian capital in what the country’s foreign minister called a “massive and horrific attack.” “His ballistic missiles speak louder than his words on diplomacy,” the minister posted on X. These Groundhog Day performances of getting played by Putin again and again only deepen the riddle of the Trump-Putin bromance, a maddening mystery that poses an endless challenge for diplomats, journalists and historians trying to understand why an American president would be forever accommodating to the brutal dictator of a hostile foreign power. “I’ve always had a great relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir,” Trump said. It should be stated from the outset that, eight years after questions along these lines first arose during the 2016 presidential election—when Putin’s agents stole Democratic Party emails and then dumped them via Wikileaks to embarrass Hillary Clinton and boost Trump—no credible evidence has emerged that Trump, as some in the counterintelligence and media worlds initially suspected, was some sort of Manchurian candidate who must have been blackmailed or compromised by FSB kompromat. Nor has an allegation that Trump was a recruited KGB asset passed the smell test. Yet suspicions persist about financial entanglements between Russians and Trump and his family – questions that are only likely to intensify in light of the stunning revelation by Propublica this week that an oligarch close to Putin (and who accompanied the Russian president on his recent trip to China) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party in the Bahamas last May. While nothing involving the dark arts of espionage can ever be completely ruled out, there are just as plausible, if less conspiratorial explanations. Trump, the real estate mogul, was always motivated (beyond simply enriching himself) by his insatiable narcissistic desire to build giant monuments to himself. And, as a businessman with a mob boss mentality, he years ago saw forging an alliance with Putin as the most direct route to getting the green light for his decades long dream of erecting a glittering Trump Tower in Moscow. “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow— if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump famously tweeted in June, 2013 after announcing he was bringing his beauty pageant to Russia where he was angling to cut a deal with a pro-Putin oligarch to advance his Trump Tower project. After that odd sentiment, we’re in the realm of psychology: Trump, the putative tough guy, is enamored of Putin, the real life tough guy who rules Russia the way he would like to rule America. (The same goes for his seeming affection for Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping.) A CIA behavioral profiler might also point out that Putin— with his take-no-prisoners, always attack, never back down persona—is the modern global master of the dark arts Trump learned from his most influential mentor, Roy Cohn (with whom Putin, in stature and visage, bears a more than passing resemblance). Does Trump, deep down in the recesses of his muddled mind, see Putin as the reincarnated Roy Cohn who, in times of stress, he has always yearned for? But as Corn’s book makes clear, none of this ultimately matters. What does matter is that, time and again, at virtually every key juncture, Trump has coddled and appeased Putin while turning a blind eye to, if not cooperating with, the Russian tsar’s relentless campaign to stir discord in the American body politic and weaken the United States on the global stage. Starting with the 2016 election, Trump brazenly and quite openly sought Russian assistance (“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails [of Hillary Clinton] that are missing,” he said) — while bringing surrogates into his campaign with their own curious connections to Moscow. True enough, special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find the evidence needed to bring criminal charges of conspiracy between the Russians and Trump or his acolytes. And there was unquestionable overreach by Democrats—playing up, for example, the deeply flawed dossier by ex-British spy Christopher Steele (paid for by the Clinton campaign)— giving Trump all he needed to denounce the whole business as “the Russia hoax.” The Helsinki Moment But political theatrics aside, the most important point is that Trump’s soft spot for the Russian strongman never wavered. Whatever historians ultimately write about Trump’s first term, there will surely be a prominent chapter on the jaw-dropping moment at the 2018 Helsinki conference when, after his pow wow with Putin, Trump told reporters he accepted the Russian dictator’s denial of interfering in the 2016 election over the unanimous conclusion of Kremlin culpability reached by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “He just said it’s not Russia,” the American president said, credulously taking the word of a slippery ex-KGB agent over his own intelligence briefers. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” As Corn notes, Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, was so “gobsmacked” that she “thought about faking a seizure to end this humiliating moment.” What was most significant about that episode however, is that it essentially gave Putin a permission slip to continue his meddling with American democracy. After all the public commotion over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, there was virtually no Trump administration pushback when Putin’s agents continued their cyber attacks and information warfare campaigns right through the 2020 election and beyond. “President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies” to spread claims about criminal wrongdoing by then Democratic candidate Joe Biden and circulate “narratives about voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting,” while “conspiring to intensify their efforts” in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the National Intelligence Council wrote in an Aug. 2020 report entitled “Foreign Threats to 2020 U.S. Federal Elections.” That report, along with a tranche of other documents, was declassified and placed on the White House website just two months ago to back up Trump’s nationally televised speech from the East Room in which he warned about the dangers posed to “election integrity.” He called out the threats from China, Venezuela and voting by non-citizen migrants—and conspicuously said not a word about the far more serious and aggressive efforts by Putin and his minions spelled out in the White House’s own documents. Go Betweens Corn offers up a rogues gallery of the Kremlin cut-outs who have been doing Putin’s bidding inside the United States, groups like “Storm-15016,” an army of cyber warriors affiliated with the Russian Presidential Administration which planted phony stories and videos on YouTube about nefarious Ukrainian plots, and the clandestine operations of two employees of the state-funded RT (formerly Russia Today) who funneled nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based media company that paid MAGA influencers to post content in sync with what the Biden administration’s Justice Department called “the publicly stated goals of the Government of Russia and RT.” Yet in his second term, Trump has pretended that none of this actually happened—thus taking the whole question of Kremlin disinformation off the table. Then, last year, more than a dozen officials of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency office which tracked foreign influence operations that threatened U.S. elections, were fired. Likewise, the State Department office set up to counter “foreign information manipulation” was shut down. The Foreign Malign Influence Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was also targeted for extinction. “If Trump were purposely doing Russia’s bidding, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently,” Corn quotes Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) as saying at the end of his book. It’s a good question, one of many imponderables that will be stumping scholars for decades to come. * I was the co-author with David Corn of the 2018 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. Do you really think Trump and his cronies are smart enough to engineer a petrified House of Reps. afraid of getting primaried, having McConnell rig him a 6-3 Supreme Court, packing the lower courts with conservative judges, all the redistricting, creating so many vanity fiascos that the press is totally distracted? What do you think all those secret phone calls with just him, Putin, and Putin's two-way translator were about? Putin is his brains. Putin is from the KGB, and for the last half century they have studied the Constitution and the US government until they knew all the weak spots and how to use them. All they needed was to get a subservient nitwit in the White House. According to Google, "The Spy that Came in from the Cold" was about protecting an asset in Moscow. Perhaps the dossier about Trump was also designed to protect him or used to that purpose. (Google): "The Real Goal: Leamas realizes that Mundt actually was a British double agent all along. The real purpose of the mission was not to destroy Mundt, but to protect him by using Leamas to frame the suspicious Fiedler as the true traitor. Fiedler is arrested and executed, while Mundt's position is safely preserved."