All Roads Lead to Putin, and They’re Getting Bumpy

 

Back in the days when there was still a filter, sort of, on Trump’s brain, Nancy Pelosi tried to explain his inexplicable behavior on the world stage, famously concluding that “All roads lead to Putin.”

Nothing has changed. The same questions about Trump and Putin that we’ve had since 2015 remain unresolved, which doesn’t mean they haven’t been answered. They have indeed been answered, and in painstaking detail. It’s just that they’ve been neither acknowledged in the legacy media, nor pursued by law enforcement.

Trump is, has been, and always will be doing Putin’s bidding. It’s hard to think of any move made by Trump and his toadies that hasn’t in some way been helpful to Putin and harmful to us. Almost as if Putin planned it that way.

The list of these betrayals is endless, and most of us know the obvious ones, though it will take decades to unravel the less obvious ones. Still, everything Trump has done fits the basic pattern: bad for us, good for Putin.

It’s hard to believe, but most Americans still don’t understand that Trump’s murky dealings with Russia go back at least 40 years, back to Soviet times, over a decade before Putin’s rise. I have myself written about this, relying on a wide range of excellent sources, but just to review:

Trump was almost certainly recruited by Russian intelligence in 1987, having been on their radar since he married his first wife Ivana, whose father was an official in Czech intelligence. This brought him to the attention of what was then called the KGB, and the rest is history. From that point on, Trump was a useful idiot for the Russians, and he got more and more useful, and idiotic, as time went on.

Was there kompromat involved? Probably. What we now know about Trump’s sex life would be just the sort of thing the Russians would have videoed and tucked away for future use. But really, I don’t think Trump has ever needed much convincing to enter into any sort of shady deal, which in his case usually involved money-laundering through his real estate holdings.

High-end real estate has for years been an excellent place to park dirty money, and a bunch of Russian oligarchs and mafia bosses — it can be hard to tell them apart —bought apartments in Trump Tower, in Florida, and other Trump properties. They probably paid several times market value, just to get as many dollars out of Russia as they could.

In return, Russian money has either directly or indirectly bailed Trump out of any number of financial jams over the years. And yes, it stole him the election of 2016.

None of this is new. It’s all lavishly documented, with court filings and FBI reports going back four decades. What’s amazing is that the mainstream press has mostly failed to report it, or indeed investigate the evidence that was staring them in the face. The story has been there all along, but they very rarely go there.

They didn’t go there when the Mueller Report screamed, loud and clear, that there was lots of there there. Or when Trump stole state secrets on his way out the door in 2021.

There were plenty of dots the media could have connected, and plenty of journalists who did indeed connect them. Countless articles and entire books have been written about this, but their authors lacked the media clout to get the story out there without mainstream help. Which still hasn’t come.

This is shocking, because now with the Iran debacle, the whole thing is being laid out in front of us again. The whole hall of mirrors between Trump and Putin just keeps getting more confusing and less predictable, but it all points in one direction: Putin’s.

It’s hard to imagine any other American president shrugging off the fact that Russia is actively providing Iran with tactical information about American targets, but shrug he did. Meanwhile, Putin is getting windfall after windfall in the energy markets. He’s getting temporary sanctions relief that gets less temporary all the time. He’s getting a near-doubling of the price of oil, which puts mega-billions into his depleted treasury.

He also gets Trump and his stooges engaging in all sorts of Russia-friendly behaviors, both short- and long-term. Like burning up missile stockpiles to leave us more vulnerable. Like betraying our allies to where they no longer trust us. Like propping up fossil fuels, while ceding any clean energy advantage we might have once had to China. Like strangling the U.S. economy with tariffs, while starving it of immigrant labor. I could go on.

But while this recent stuff is getting headlines, it’s all fairly trivial next to the the real story, happening largely here at home, which is the scorched-earth dismantling of critical institutions — from the State Department to DOJ to the military to the intelligence community to the public health community— all of it working in Putin’s favor.

In Putin’s paranoid mind, Russia’s ultimate security has always lay in weakening the underpinnings of Western liberal democracy. Seen through that lens, Trump was the right tool for the job. Puppet or not, it’s hard to see what more Trump could do for Putin than what he’s already done. And continues to do, seemingly every day.

That said, all is not rosy in Putin’s world. He is still coming from a place of deep and growing weakness. While Russia has reaped real benefits from the Iran war, those benefits are largely short-term. Its finances remain grim. After four years, the war on Ukraine has the whole Russian economy running on fumes. Trump was supposed to end that war, with Putin getting most of what he wanted, but that hasn’t exactly worked out. Trump often disappoints.

There’s now a persistent rumor that Putin is appealing to his oligarch vassals for their help in funding his war. If true, it would be a stunning admission of weakness, happening inside his own camp. It’s not clear how the oligarchs would respond to repeated surcharges of this kind.

As far as Trump goes, I don’t think Putin has the same control we’ve assumed he’s had. Trump has become, after all, blackmail-proof. Unless Putin has video of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein naked in a room full of ten-year-old girls, there’s no leverage there. Nothing about Trump can shock anyone anymore.

On top of that, Trump’s deteriorating mental condition has got to make Putin queasy. This is one of the very few ways Putin is like the rest of us, in that absolutely nobody likes the idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of a senile sociopath with anger issues.

So yes, all roads lead to Putin. And yes, there are a growing number of potholes in those roads. But at least we know that, no matter what, they’ll keep leading us in the wrong direction.