Why is it so hard to believe that Trump is a Russian asset?
Kompromat and the betrayal of the West
On 8 November, 2024, the day after he won his second term, Putin’s propagandists treated the re-elected US president with a contempt that serious American journalists had declared impossible.
The Russians acted as if Trump were Putin’s plaything.
I am sure Christopher Steele wasn’t surprised. The notion that Moscow had kompromat on Trump dates back to an investigation the former British intelligence officer ran for a U.S. firm that had been close to Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 campaign.
Steele’s dossier was leaked the next year. The weird sex scenes it described grabbed the media’s attention, as weird sex invariably does. Steele’s sources told how Russian intelligence had film of Trump getting his kicks by watching two prostitutes piss on a bed in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
In a killer detail Steele added that the bed they defiled was the very bed where Trump’s enemies Michelle and Barack Obama had slept.
According to the sources, “a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” two staff at the hotel, and “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” the sex games took place in 2013, when Trump was in Moscow to attend the Miss Universe pageant his organisation ran.
The American journalistic establishment didn’t believe a word of it. Reporters turned on Steele and denounced the 35-page dossier of raw intelligence he had collected.
To be fair, Steele could not prove conclusively what his sources had told him. Even so the virulence with which American journalists attacked Steele seemed excessive at the time.
Did they think that the FSB did not try to entrap prominent foreign visitors to Moscow? Did they find it ludicrous to suggest that a man of Trump’s character would hire prostitutes? Did they believe it a grotesque slander to imply that Trump had an obsessive hatred for Michelle and Barack Obama?
Apparently so.
Steele had produced “a notorious dossier of unproven assertions and rumors,” scolded the New York Times in 2021. A “ series of investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources” CNN opined. It was a “garbage document” said no less an authority than Bob Woodward.
If their denunciations of Steele seemed excessive then, they seem ridiculously over-confident now.
Russia behaves exactly as you would expect a blackmailer to behave – which brings us back to 8 November.
Consider Putin’s position. He has not only let loose grotesque violence on Ukraine, he has brought disaster upon his own country. Russian losses on the Ukrainian battlefield stand at 874,000, according to Kyiv. The Ukrainians may be overstating, but every Western agency agrees that the suffering of abused Russian soldiers is horrific.
In comes Trump. He can save Russia. And yet rather than treat Trump politely, the state-controlled media taunted him (see above).
A lumbering pair of presenters with smutty smirks took the viewers through a nude photoshoot Melania Trump did for GQ in 2000 when she was Melanija Knavs and working for the Trump Agency in New York.
Then, in January, Trump took power, and it is not hyperbolic to say that it was as if a Russian agent had moved into the White House
Making Stalin’s dreams come true
On her first day at work, Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general ordered the closure of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which combatted illicit Russian influence in American politics.
Bondi also disbanded Task Force Kleptocapture which seized the assets of Russian oligarchs. Meanwhile Trump’s appointees purged the CIA and exposed the identities of CIA agents to public view.
Russia must also have been delighted by Trump’s cuts to the US aid programme because they took money away from projects that protected Ukraine’s energy infrastructure from Russian attack. While I was researching this piece, Pete Hegseth Trump’s useful idiot of a defence secretary, ordered a halt to U.S. cyberoperations against Russia. A few hours later Trump stopped the arms supply to Ukraine.
So relentless are the concessions to Putin that you risk missing the big picture.
Trump is giving Moscow everything it has wanted since Truman and Attlee founded Nato in 1949 to contain Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The first aim of the Russian empire in its Soviet and Putinist guises has been to break the alliance between Europe and the United States. Donald Trump has now given Putin what no Russian leader thought possible – and without asking for a single concession in return.
On Monday Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov, declared that “the collective West has partially ceased to be collective, and the fragmentation of the collective West has begun.” He could not believe his luck.
In these circumstances why are supposedly serious people shocked by the notion that Donald Trump may be a Russian asset?
Pinning down the kompromat
Arthur Snell, an ex-diplomat, who works with Christopher Steele, has done a great piece setting out Trump’s dealings with Moscow. Let us give Trump the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that we cannot say categorically that the scene in the hotel happened.
Steele did not just talk about sex, however, but made four claims no one can dispute
That Donald Trump had longstanding business relationships with Russian interests
That Russia chose to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election on Trump’s side
That Vladimir Putin authorised the operation
And that Trump knew about it and was happy for it to happen
You can find evidence to substantiate all Steele’s claims from reputable independent sources.
Let’s take if from the top.
Luke Harding of the Guardian showed that Trump had visited Moscow as early as 1987 on a trip monitored by the KGB. It was hardly as if the Russians knew nothing about him.
Reuters reported in 2017 that the “Russian elite invested nearly $100 million in Trump buildings”. Funding came via Bayrock, which was established to funnel Russian money into New York real estate, and was deeply intertwined with the Trump Organisation. As Trump’s son Eric boasted in 2014: “we have all the funding we need coming out of Russia”.
As for Russian political support, the US Senate inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election backed Steele’s claims to the letter.
It confirmed that Russian intelligence had helped Trump by hacking into the emails of the Clinton campaign – kompromat that our friends in the US media, so fastidious when it comes to Trump, were happy to use against his opponent.
The Senate inquiry found that Putin himself “ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party with the purpose of harming the Clinton campaign” – just as Steele had said.
Incidentally, if you want a picture of political cowardice, Marco Rubio – a senator before he became Trump’s Secretary of State – endorsed the inquiry’s findings. Now he looks on, a silent and broken man, as Trump and Vance abuse Ukraine and promote Russia.
It’s as if he can already read history’s judgment on his cowardice.
As for sex, Arthur Snell points out that the Senate report found that
“A former executive at Marriott International said that shortly after the 2013 Miss Universe contest he overheard two other Marriott executives at a small corporate gathering discussing a recording from one of the elevator security cameras at the Ritz Carlton Moscow. One of the Marriot executives…had clearly seen the video, which allegedly showed Trump in an elevator involved with several women who the discussant implied to be hostesses.”
Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, testified that he became aware of allegations “about a tape of compromising information in late 2013 or early 2014, shortly after the Miss Universe 2013 pageant and significantly prior to the 2016 election cycle.”
No one produced a tape. But here is what we know for sure.
Trump had a relationship with the Russians going back to the 1980s. Russian money sustained his business interests. Russian spies helped him win the 2016 presidential election. Whatever benefit of the doubt you want to give him about what did or did not happen in a Moscow hotel room, we know that he boasted about the Miss Universe contest that
"I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant.”
We know he bought the silence of Stormy Daniels about a one-night stand.
Why are Christopher Steele’s allegations treated with such horror, even though everything that can be verified checks out?
One reason may be the cynical belief that Trump would do what Putin wanted regardless of any hold the Russians have on him. Trump despises liberalism and human rights, just as Putin does. Trump wants the world divided into spheres of influence where obscenely wealthy strongmen can decide the fates of lesser nations and peoples, and so does Putin.
But their ideological affinity does not mean that Russian influence cannot play a part in Trump’s calculations too. There is not a binary either/or choice here.
I guess that American journalists do not like the idea of a British ex-spy doing their job for them. And to be fair, one should always be wary of spies.
I think an underrated explanation for the kid-gloves the US media used on Trump when Steele first reported is that in his first term Trump was constrained by the old Republican party establishment, and did not seem such a bad president.
Now he’s back and the gloves are off. The old Republican party is dead and Trump can do as he pleases. And what pleases him most is pleasing Vladimir Putin.
Allow me to finish with a thought experiment. Suppose the Trump files in the Kremlin leaked. Suppose they showed conclusively that Moscow regarded Trump as an agent of influence. Suppose they showed that it had collected kompromat on him, pumped money to him, and helped his political career.
Would the New York Times, CNN and Bob Woodward faint with surprise? Would you?
Come now. Proof that Trump was Putin’s man wouldn’t shock anyone who has eyes to see what is in front of their nose. It would be more shocking if he wasn’t.
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If he behaves exactly as a Russian asset would, it surely renders as moot the question of whether he is or not.
I think your comment near the end hits the nail on the head. Trump’s contempt for liberal democracy, hatred for Ukraine (going back to Hunter Biden) and open admiration of autocrats means that there doesn’t need to be Russian coercion. As you say, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t - you might push on an open door to open it further.
However I think more broadly Trump’s behaviour, and the reaction of his supporters and the Republican Party more widely, mean that I am genuinely doubtful that the leaking of the sex video (if it exists) would have any significant impact. Consider January 6th. There is loads of live footage showing Trump inciting a crowd to violence, involving forcing their way into the Capital and deaths as a direct result. And yet has that detracted from Trump’s popularity with his base in any way? On the contrary - January 6th has been variously explained never to have happened, to have been completely benign, to be driven by Antifa, and all the rioters have been pardoned. Not to mention that Trump was re-elected President since then, with a much higher share of the vote than in the two previous elections.
So if there was a sex tape released I am confident that the right and far-right would swiftly flood the zone, deny it, explain it was fake, assert that it was forged by the liberal far-left Democrats etc etc. Meanwhile Trump sues all the institutions who show the footage and settles for millions of dollars - while all the while probably being quietly rather proud of his sexual exploits.
And that is why I don’t think the possible existence of this sex tape has any meaningful explanatory power as to Trump’s actions. He’s just a ****.