The Russian bear is holding the smoking gun that the whole world would like to know about, and that drama increases incrementally as each day advances. For a while, nobody was on the edge of their seats more than the Russians. But since the inauguration, things have gone downhill quickly for Trump in Russia and Russia is literally turning Trump off. Peter Savodnik at Vanity Fair analyzed the situation:
...coverage began to taper off and then, oddly, turn lackluster and sour. In January, Trump scored 202,000 mentions in the Russian media. Putin landed just 147,000. Then, in early February, less than two weeks into Trump’s presidency, that figure started to slide.
Soon after, the Moscow tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda called Trump’s position on NATO“contradictory,” and Interfax, the AP of Russia, quoted Valery Garbuzov, head of the United States and Canada Institute, a government-backed think tank, saying “mutual trust” between Russia and the United States had been “completely lost.” Then, Kremlin stooge-slash-Duma deputy Alexey Pushkov, reacting to the all the resistance Trump was facing, tweeted: “It looks like Trump didn’t expect such a powerful opposition to his decisions and plans.” Over the last week or two, the state-run news service RIA Novosti has portrayed Trump as besieged by enemies at home. Then, in late February, the news service quoted Sergei Ivanov, the former chief of staff of the presidential administration, saying that the Russian media, which had formerly been “overly optimistic” about Trump, had assumed a more “pragmatic” approach.
None of this happened accidentally. It happened because in Russia, the media, like democracy, is “managed.” There may be some free thought, but it’s only free if it doesn’t really matter. As usual, it’s impossible to know exactly what prompted the change of thinking in the Kremlin. There must be senior officials worried about Trump’s inner circle: Defense Secretary James Mattis is hardly pro-Russia. Rex Tillerson, who Putin personally awarded the Russian Order of Friendship, appears, for now, to have been marginalized. Michael Flynn is gone, and the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, is hawkish on Russia. (As recently as November, McMaster warned an audience at the Virginia Military Institute about “hostile, revisionist powers” like China, North Korea—and Russia.) The new C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, opened up his Senate confirmation hearing, in January, by lambasting the Kremlin for interfering in the 2016 election. And now Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, appears to have lied by omission about meeting the Russian ambassador, and has since recused himself from any investigation into ties between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
If there are “senior officials worried about Trump’s inner circle,” the buck most certainly will stop with Vladimir Putin. Mattis and McMaster are old school. Putin has reason to worry about them. Pompeo is undoubtedly considered problematic at best and totally unreliable at worst, for Putin’s purposes. Flynn left in disgrace, Sessions has been subdued, and Tillerson, arguably once considered the jewel in the crown, a pro-Russian Secretary of State, is purportedly marginalized.
Clearly the profile of Russian involvement with Trump since the election has moved like lightning and not into the plus column for Trump. Trump's Russian involvement has been like Chinese boxes, open one and then you find five more. Open them, etc.
It has been said that the Russians wanted respect more than they wanted anything, and Trump gave that to them, by boasting about Putin’s purported 85% approval rating, and comparing Obama negatively to Putin, last fall. The Russians ate that up with a spoon. But now, apparently, they too have become disillusioned.
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Now, one suspects, the Kremlin is starting to detect what anti-Trump conservatives detected in the fall of 2015. That was when the looming catastrophe came into focus. It was a catastrophe not because of the election, not because of anything political. That was the least of it. It was a catastrophe because it simultaneously illuminated and kindled a darkness, a rot, deep in the American psyche. The Kremlin and its media puppets may not grasp the etiology of this curdling, but they must be aware, by this late date, that something bad is happening in America, and it will spill over, across the oceans and continents, and it will upset, upend, discombobulate everything everywhere. An infant is now the most powerful person on Earth, and he is loved and worshipped by millions, and they think he will save them, that he is He, that the end is near, and so is the beginning. Until a few minutes ago, the Kremlin higher-ups were laughing. Now, like everyone else who hasn’t been swindled, they wait.
Oh, what a web we weave, and Trump has woven a doozy. People are tuning Trump out in Russia. Putin cannot be too far behind. According to writer Savodnik, Putin hates instability and doesn’t want chaos at the Kremlin. People who value stability and calm should not do business with Donald Trump, that much is certain. The time is nigh when Putin decides to pull the plug on the bromance and when Putin dumps Trump it will be epic.