Trump the “Putin Puppet” Just Dramatically Escalated the Undeclared War Against Russia
The national security state has claimed a dangerous new victory: receiving authorization from Trump to conduct cyberattacks against enemies around the world with greater leeway — especially Russia. It’s the latest success for a years-long pressure campaign by the national security bureaucracy centered on Orwellian claims that Trump’s foreign policy is somehow pro-Russian.
US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin during a joint press conference, on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images)
For the past three years, there have been two realities in US politics: there’s the world of pundits and cable news, and then there’s the real world.
In the first, Donald Trump is an inveterate traitor kowtowing to Putin, his malevolent lord and master in Kremlin whose control of Trump is just one of a series of diabolical schemes of global mischief and mayhem. In the second, Trump is the most aggressively anti-Russia president since at least the time Bill Clinton annihilated the country’s economy, and presides over a global national security apparatus that itself engages in every kind of behavior that’s supposed to make Putin the world’s premier supervillain.
Case in point: this recent Yahoo! News report, which comes after weeks of renewed Trump-Putin conspiracizing over highly dubious intelligence that the Kremlin may have been paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill Americans in Afghanistan. For many commentators, Trump’s seeming refusal to retaliate over this unconfirmed news was part of a long-standing, some would say suspicious, pattern of Trump being soft on Putin, one that, as in this most recent case, puts him at odds with the brave men and women of the CIA.
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.