Shouldn't Be Any Doubt About It: Comrade Trump is Putin's Puppet

Amid the shocking news that the FBI actually conducted an internal investigation as to whether Trump was actively furthering Russian interests on behalf of Putin, let's stop to consider the issue for ourselves. 

Actually, Max Boot at the Washington Post has done just that-- and it's a testament to the power of the bully pulpit (and Twitter) that anyone should have any doubt that Trump and administration are actually colluding with Russia to further Russia's interests.  Consider the following:

1. Comrade Trump has a long history of financial ties to Russia.  From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.” According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide.

2.  The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president-- widely believe to have occurred with the consent and cooperation of Trump campaign aides.  Trump himself publicly urged Russian to hack Hillary Clinton's emails.

3.  There were over 100 proven contacts between Trump campaign operatives and Russia, with Trump's campaign team and administration attempting to cover up every single one of them.

4.  The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

5.  Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

6.  Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks,  knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.

7.  Once in office, Comrade Trump fired Comey to stop the Russia investigation— and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information.

8.  Comrade Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. According to legal experts,, “the obstruction was the collusion” — Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the U.S.

9.  Comrade Trump has refused to mobilize a government effort to stop future interference in our elections. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

10.  Like no president before him, Comrade Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

11.  Comrade Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO (even saying that France should leave the E.U. and that the U.S. should leave NATO). The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

12.  Comrade Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders across the world and in Europe-- such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

13.  Comrade Trump has consistently praised Putin as “a strong leader”--   going so far as to praise him for expelling U.S. diplomats and, despite clear-cut instruction from his own aides NOT to do so, he congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

14.  Comrade Trump has been shockingly conciliatory in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspiciously, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Putin-- on at least one occasion taking possession of his interpreter's notes and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials.  Several officials have said they have never been able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.

15.  Comrade Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and continually repast pro-Russian talking points.

16.  Over the objections of his generals and advisers, Comrade Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

17.  Comrade Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

18.  Comrade Trump continues to sow chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking government shutdown and failing to quickly make permanent appointments in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.