President/Puppet
Why is Trump working for Putin?
“Power is not a means; it is an end.” - George Orwell, 1984
Today I want to say out loud what my most well-informed friends say in private when we talk about our increasingly rogue federal government and Trumpocalypse2. It feels crucial that U.S. citizens understand what is happening. We need to talk about it. Personally, I think we should be out on the streets protesting in huge numbers before we lose our country—and perhaps the world—beyond hope of salvation. But hey, that’s just me.
The core of the argument is that Trump is deeply enmeshed with Vladimir Putin and the Russian mafia state. A substantial body of investigative work now suggests that Trump has functioned for decades as a kind of Russian “asset,” consistently advancing the Kremlin’s interests. Journalists like Craig Unger, in books such as House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, describe how Soviet and then Russian security services began cultivating Trump as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s, when he first came onto their radar.
After his casino empire and other ventures collapsed, Trump and his companies reportedly owed around $4 billion to dozens of banks. Cut off from mainstream credit, he became increasingly dependent on opaque inflows of capital from Russia and the post-Soviet world. Russian buyers, including figures later identified as mobsters or oligarchs, bought up condos in Trump Tower and other Trump properties, often through shell companies, providing Trump with a financial lifeline when he was otherwise near collapse.
Unger and others report that Trump Tower was, strangely, one of only two buildings in New York permitted to sell apartments to anonymous buyers via shell companies. That practice allowed purchasers to conceal their identities while moving large sums into U.S. real estate. Unger writes about how two forces converged: on one side, a torrent of flight capital and dirty money pouring out of the collapsing Soviet bloc; on the other, Trump’s eagerness to sell high-priced condos “no questions asked” to buyers using shell companies. In his account, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and other white-collar intermediaries helped transform Trump properties into a de facto laundromat for Russian and post-Soviet money, possibly on a scale of billions of dollars. Whether or not every detail can be proven beyond doubt, the broad pattern of Russian-linked buyers using Trump properties to move money into the United States is well documented.
Trump’s 2016 campaign, we now know, was riddled with contacts with Russian officials and intermediaries. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report documented hundreds of contacts and dozens of meetings between Trump campaign figures and people linked to the Russian state, including intelligence-adjacent actors. Michael Flynn, for instance, had been paid by Russian state media and attended an RT gala in Moscow where he sat near Putin; he later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair in 2016, had long-standing ties to pro-Kremlin oligarchs and passed internal campaign polling data to a man the U.S. government later described as a Russian intelligence asset. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin ordered an extensive influence campaign to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton; Mueller did not charge a criminal conspiracy, but he did find that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally” from Russia’s actions and welcomed them.
Now, with Trump’s return to office, we’ve entered a far more brazen phase. The recent rollout of his so-called “peace plan” for Ukraine exposed the power dynamic between Trump and Putin in an unusually crude way. The 28-point plan tracks almost point-by-point with Moscow’s maximalist demands: freezing lines roughly along current frontlines, entrenching Russian control over occupied territories, and placing tight constraints on Ukraine’s future security arrangements—while Russia rebuilds its military to strike again. European diplomats and language experts quickly noted that the draft reads like a direct translation from Russian, with clumsy phrasing and legal constructions characteristic of Russian originals. Critics have suggested it looks as if it were dropped straight into a translation program and barely edited. There is also the surreal image, widely circulated on social media, of Steve Witkoff, our emissary to Russia, placing his hand over his heart while meeting Putin, like he was showing fealty from a knight to a king.
All of this comes at a moment of painful vulnerability for Ukraine. A major corruption scandal in the country’s energy sector, involving figures close to President Volodymyr Zelensky, has shaken public trust and given ammunition to critics at home and abroad. Zelensky has moved to purge some officials and promise reforms, but his standing has been undeniably weakened at exactly the time when he faces enormous pressure from Washington to accept a settlement on terms largely favorable to Moscow. In that context, Trump’s “peace plan” is actually a capitulation plan: a tool to force a battered ally into submission, to Putin’s advantage, radically endangering not just Ukraine but all of Europe.
Across a range of policy arenas, Trump acts like a sad jester-puppet, shilling for Kremlin objectives. Putin seeks vengeance for what the U.S. did to the U.S.S.R. in the past. Russia’s strategic goals include humiliating the United States, weakening its alliances, and degrading its political institutions, economy, and social fabric.
Trump’s trade wars and tariffs have disrupted global supply chains and alienated traditional allies. His efforts to chip away at the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansions undermine the basic health security of millions of Americans. His administration has rolled back environmental and climate regulations, opened more federal land and offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, and sabotaged programs that support renewable energy, all of which prolong dependence on fossil fuels—the foundation of the Russian state’s power. Meanwhile, he has increasingly allied himself with anti-vaccine activists and taken steps that weaken public health institutions, both physically and psychologically. These choices make Americans sicker, poorer, and more divided, which supports Russia’s strategic plan to destroy the United States as a functional entity.
What’s shocking to me is how many Americans I know still support MAGA, after everything we’ve learned, because they believe it meshes with their self-interest, despite the negative impacts on the general population, the Earth’s ecology, our future, and so on. This includes many people I know in crypto, AI, tech, podcast comedy bros, and so on. These people wil have a lot to answer for, if we manage to escape this catastrophe with some freedom intact.
