Donald Trump is a master at fueling his ambition by making the most of his country’s freedom. He excels at skirting the law and making others blame for crime. When local funds dried up after repeated failures, Trump found dark money readily available after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Moneyed oligarchs turned Trump’s attention to Putin as their next target to expand Trump’s tottering empire.
The cautious Putin was elusive, but Trump courted him with a Miss Universe pageant that Putin did not attend. This was followed by a Trump proposal from Moscow that was still in limbo when Trump became President of the United States. By then, Trump’s dealings with oligarchs were so complicated globally that a two-year investigation by special counsel Mueller remained a mess in an archaic US policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
Russia has no such policy. You don’t need one. Prosecutors there are handpicked by Putin and disappear if they come across him.
US intelligence determined that Russia had a hand in Trump’s election and that Putin was not concerned that Trump would do his bidding. far from there With his new position, Trump dismissed US intelligence and invited the Russians into the Oval Office where he boasted of third-country intelligence. The American press was barred from that meeting, but the Russian media were welcome, perhaps to plant listening devices in the process. When the alarm went off over such a breach of the rules, Trump launched a campaign of terror that surely endeared him to Putin.
Taking a page from the despot playbook, Trump branded the legitimate media “fake news,” ignoring fact-checking and sources walking into stores prior to publication. From another page of that same book, Trump tells lies to the susceptible. Now under fire, Trump is calling for retaliation, sending the highest-ranking members of the US government to foreign lands to sully the American justice system.
In the final straw that ultimately sparked the impeachment hearings, Trump withheld money from Ukraine that Congress had appropriated. It was extortion to extract dirt from a political opponent. He came at a time when Russia had already annexed Crimea and was encroaching on more Ukraine. The money Trump withheld was meant to help Ukraine fight the Russians.
The United States has a scrupulous legal system. He is so careful about protecting the rights of defendants that Special Counsel Mueller was unable to indict an American who was clearly involved in misconduct.
Any collusion between Trump and Putin to manipulate Ukraine to their mutual benefit may be difficult to prove. However, it cannot be removed from the table. It hangs in the air and in the very real realm of possibility.
Trump has the shameless nerve to try anything to get ahead of everyone by any means. From the Oval Office, he’s not even using his own money to send his shadow government figures around the world to smear his own government. The goal is revenge, either against current perceived enemies or those who have crossed it in the past. The point is to test the strength of his anger.
Putin apparently approves of Trump’s Oval Office way of running freedom-loving America. He may have provided guidance during closed impromptu meetings to American media and supervisors tasked with maintaining the protocols that keep a complex US government system running smoothly.
With Trump in the Oval Office, the wily Putin has a new use for it. Once he avoided the transparently self-serving Trump, he now has the best American duped.
Trump wants money and he wants to stay in power so that it keeps coming. Putin is rich with his country’s lax laws that allow oligarchs to spread their wings around the world with skills they learned during the Soviet occupation of half of Europe.
Together they can rule the world, they may be saying during their secret chats. Those, however, are only secrets to the United States. Putin has records. Trump has none.
Perhaps the Ukraine impeachment inquiry will inspire some brave Russians to leak the content of those conversations. Then the US will have to protect the Russian hero with its whistleblower laws.
