_{Donald Trump’s unshakeable admiration for Vladimir Putin continues to raise eyebrows. Does Putin have a hold over Trump?}

https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/world/is-donald-trump-a-russian-agent/

_{Putin and Trump in Helsinki, 16 July 2018 image by www.kremlin.ru. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0}

Images of an adrenaline-pumped, red-faced Donald Trump, egged on by Vice President JD Vance, bellowing at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during an acrimonious White House press conference last week, have shocked friends and allies of the United States around the world.

The question that triggered the outburst is front and centre of the Ukraine peace process and is one that has dogged Trump for decades. Why does he display such high regard and respect for a bloodied tyrant in the Kremlin; why is he best buddies with Russia?

No world leader uses social media like Trump. He casually baits, attacks and belittles fellow world leaders almost daily. Dozens of his closest allies have been criticised and their heads of state rebuked sharply. Apart from those too insignificant to even appear on Trump’s radar. Vladimir Putin is the indisputable exception. But why?

The 64-trillion-dollar question

Towards the end of the press conference, a Polish journalist said that, as a child, he saw the USA as not only the richest and most powerful country in the world, but also as a force for good. But now, he ended, “My friends in Poland are worried you align yourself too much with Putin. What’s your message for them?” It was the 64-trillion-dollar question.

The president struggled to provide a plausible answer for the journalist’s puzzled friends in Warsaw or, indeed, for anybody. His straw man response only revealed more bias.

“If I didn’t align myself with both of them, you’d never have a deal. You want me to say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir how are we doing on the deal?’ It doesn’t work that way. I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anybody, I’m aligned with the United States of America. And for the good of the world. I’m aligned with the world.”

He ignored the fact that he had already said plenty of ‘terrible things’ about Zelenskyy on multiple occasions, even accusing him of being a dictator, yet he still expected the Ukrainian president to sign a deal. The glaring inconsistency seemed to escape him. It was a typical Trump word salad, devoid of meaning. In a split second, he had gone from not being aligned with “anybody” to apparently being aligned with everybody, even with Europe.

Trump finished by saying: “You want me to be tough? I can be tougher than any human being you’ve ever seen. I’d be so tough, but you’re never going to get a deal that way.”

Five minutes later he was verbally battering Zelenskyy into submission.

JD Vance’s role in the controversy

On occasions such as this, when two presidents are in the room together, vice presidents are usually just window dressing. They remain silent unless called upon to speak. Both Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had sat impassively up to that point. Perhaps sensing that Trump’s response to an extremely valid point was weak, Vance intervened – disastrously, as it turned out – by needlessly injecting domestic partisan politics into an international situation:

“For four years in the United States of America, we had a president who stood up at press conferences and talked tough about Vladimir Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country. The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.

“We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the President of the United States’ words meant more than the President of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.”

He sat back with a self-satisfied smile, as if he had justified the leader of the free world’s love-fest with a murderous, indicted war criminal. Clearly, he had not.

The suggestion that Ukraine hadn’t previously engaged in diplomacy – a demonstrable falsehood – seemed to get under Zelenskyy’s skin, and he attempted, perhaps a little clumsily in his third language, to explain to Vance how Putin had already broken 25 ceasefire agreements, including a ‘full and comprehensive’ one signed in 2019with President Macron and Chancellor Merkel.

It all went downhill from there, quickly descending into a shouting match to see which of the two most powerful men in America was better at berating Zelenskyy. Vance has now told Fox Newsthat he had been trying to “defuse the situation a little bit”.

So much for the US ‘engaging in diplomacy’.

Why does Trump favour Russia?

Governments around the world are struggling to understand how Trump hopes to benefit from a rapprochement with Russia. Political commentators are as baffled as members of his party. Even appointees in his first administration don’t know the answer. Trump himself never gives a coherent explanation for his strategy.

Professor Timothy Snyder, an American historian, says in a Substack post that the main way Russia engages the USA is through constant attempts to destabilise American society, through “unceasing cyberwar”, while Russian state-controlled TV is “full of fantasies of the destruction of the United States”.

He asks: “Why would one turn friends into rivals and pretend that a rival is a friend?”

Nor is it about trade: “The economies of American’s present allies are at least 20 times larger than the Russian economy,” says Snyder. And he adds: “Russian trade was never very important to the United States. Why would one fight trade wars with the prosperous friends in exchange for access to an essentially irrelevant market? The answer might be that the alliance with Russia is preferred for reasons that have nothing to do with American interests.”

Beyond that obvious truth, Snyder can’t help us.

Michael Wolff, Trump’s unofficial biographer, recently told BBC viewers that this US foreign policy pivot is “to keep Vladimir Putin happy”. When asked why, he said: “Why is the question.”

Wolff sat with long-time Trump adviser Steve Bannon watching Trump in Helsinki in 2018 as the president told an incredulous gathering of the world’s media that when it came to the allegations of meddling in the elections, he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies. Bannon turned to Wolff: “[Putin] has something on Trump, what is it?”

Bannon didn’t know and neither did Wolff.

What could Putin have on Trump?

To answer that question, we need to go back nearly 40 years. We know from a book by Guardian foreign correspondent Luke Harding: Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, that Trump was possibly identified as a “confidential contact” by the KGB in the spring of 1986.

In Trump’s own book: The Art of the Deal, he says that in September of that year, he found himself seated next to Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin at a luncheon hosted by Leonard Lauder, Estée Lauder’s businessman son. Trump wrote that Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it”.

Trump admitted: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.” It was at this luncheon that his first trip to Russia was discussed.

The seating arrangement might not have been accidental. Dubinin had arrived six months earlier and, incredibly, his daughter took him directly from the airport – on his very first day in America – to Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. The newly appointed Soviet ambassador to the UN was apparently “so excited” that he decided to go up and meet Trump.

Dubinin, fluent in English and a brilliant negotiator, immediately stroked Trump’s already inflated ego, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city was your tower!”

Natalia said later: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him like nectar to a bee.”

Within weeks of this meeting, Dubinin was rapidly appointed ambassador to the United States. Was this all a coincidence, or a KGB plot to recruit Trump?

Trump’s first Moscow visit in 1987

Early in July 1987, Trump and his then-wife Ivana flew to Moscow for the first time, a visit Trump later described as “an extraordinary experience”. The couple stayed in the Lenin suite at the National Hotel, on Tverskaya Street, across from the Kremlin.

On his return, Trump, who until then had just been a real estate developer in New York City, suddenly discovered a profound interest in foreign affairs. In September, he paid $94,801 to run a full-page advert in The New York Times in which he harshly criticised US foreign policy under both Republican and Democrat presidents.

The article asserted: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure”, followed by an open letter from Trump “To The American People” detailing “why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”. From the Kremlin’s perspective, it was a rather helpful seed that has now grown into Republican Party doctrine.

That same day, The New York Times reported that Trump had given “vague hints” that he might run as a Republican candidate in the 1988 presidential election. In the event, he didn’t.

In a recent Facebook post, a former Soviet intelligence officer, Alnur Mussayev, has also claimed Trump was recruited by the KGB in 1987 and given the codename ‘Krasnov’. The Guardian reported similar claimsin 2021, at that time from Yuri Shvets, another former KGB spy. Shvets compared Trump to Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt who passed secrets to Moscow before and during the Cold War.

The Steele dossier

The infamous dossier produced by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer, contains salacious allegations about events that took place sometime in 2013 in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton hotel, also on Moscow’s Tverskaya Street. You can search online yourself to discover what is alleged to have happened there.

A senior Russian Federal Security (FSB) agent told Steele in June 2016: “Trump’s unorthodox behaviour in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material [kompromat] on the now-Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they wished.”

How much credence can be given to the dossier is hard to say. Some allegations were found to be untrue or there is little evidence to support them. Others, however, have been corroborated.

Wikipediaconfirms that US intelligence agencies and the 2019 Mueller report have backed up some of Steele’s claims, such as “that the Russian government was working to get Mr. Trump elected”; that Russia sought “to cultivate people in Trump’s orbit”, and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secret contacts with Russian officials and agents.

Other corroborated claims were that Putin favoured Trump over Hillary Clinton and that he personally ordered an “influence campaign” to harm Clinton’s election efforts and to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process”.

Again, this begs the question: why did Putin favour Trump?

A Russian analyst who worked on the Steele dossier was found not guilty of lying to the FBI by a jury in New York in 2022. Later, Trump filed a lawsuit against Steele, but the case was thrown out by a British High Court after the judge ruled that the six-year limitation period had expired.

Trump and Russian money

In the early 1990s, Trump was in deep financial trouble. His Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York both declared bankruptcy, and his airline, Trump Shuttle, closed down altogether in 1992.

His reputation as a failure made him persona non grata to most major business lenders, but with the help of foreign lenders, particularly wealthy Russians, he was apparently able to mount a Lazarus-like comeback.

A New York Times investigation in 2018 found that Trump relied heavily on foreign money, including from “wealthy individuals from Russia and elsewhere with questionable, and even criminal, backgrounds” that flowed through offshore shell companies and various entities often used to disguise beneficial ownership. Other news organisations uncovered similar findings.

In one example, Trump-branded condominiums in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, were sold to 60 individuals with Russian passports or addresses who bought nearly $100mn worth of units in an area known as Little Moscow. Among them were Russian government officials and a Ukrainian owner of two units who later pleaded guilty to receipt of stolen property as part of a money-laundering scheme involving a former Ukrainian prime minister.

Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest son, appeared to confirm that the family business relied heavily on Russian money when he said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets”. However, it remains unproven whether there is direct political influence from Russia, and in 2018 Trump expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the US.

The Ukraine war

The Ukraine war has served to reignite speculation about Trump’s ties to Putin and his apparent subservience to him. These links pre-date the Russian dictator’s rise to power, but have nonetheless grown stronger and more inexplicable over time.

Does the Kremlin have kompromat on Trump? We may never know.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee recently questioned Trump’s nominees as Nato representatives and asked outright if President Trump was a Russian asset. If not, Senator Jeff Merkley (Democrat, Oregon) wanted to know what a Russian asset embedded as POTUS would do, other than what Trump is already doing. They struggled to answer, as this YouTube video shows:

Newsweek also reported that Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot Grok concludes that Trump is “85% likely to be a Russian asset” based on publicly available information.

Nobody seems to believe he’s a Russian agent, but he is certainly an asset, although Trump has always denied it. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the famously incurious and narcissistic 47th president of the USA is too stupid to realise he is being used by the Kremlin.

Now that really would be a story.