Donald Trump is threatening NATO countries. Donald Trump is demanding that GOP members of Congress shut down funding for Ukraine. Donald Trump is undermining the U.S. electoral and legal systems.
All of these things that Donald Trump has been doing make Vladimir Putin verrrry happy.
Of course they do.
See, Donald Trump’s 100% support of Vladimir Putin’s agenda — and the fact that all of Trump’s political actions, without exception, align with Moscow’s interests — is not a recent phenomenon; in fact, it’s decades old.
Donald Trump first visited Russia (at that time still the Soviet Union) in 1987, undoubtedly with the knowledge and assistance of Soviet intelligence services.
It wasn’t an accident, some lucky opportunity that came about, as I’m sure Trump would much rather you believe, as a result of his natural charisma and business acumen. No, the Soviets let Trump to come to Moscow because they had plans for him. As Luke Harding put it in his 2017 Politico piece, The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow, “The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism.”
The Soviets had been cultivating Trump for a while before his Moscow trip. For instance, the way Trump tells the story in his magnum opus, The Art of the Deal, he happened to be seated next to the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., Yuri Dubinin, at a luncheon event in autumn 1986.
Dubinin (according to Trump) told Trump that Dubinin’s daughter “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it.” Trump says the idea for his Moscow trip — ostensibly to discuss the possibility of construction of a Trump hotel in Moscow, in concert with the Soviet government — sprang from that meeting.
Dubinin’s daughter, Natalia Dubinina, tells the story quite a bit differently. When Dubinin first arrived in New York six months before the September luncheon event cited by Trump, in March 1986, Dubinin’s assignment was as Soviet ambassador to the UN, where his daughter already was working (Dubinin would not assume his U.S. ambassadorship until May). Natalia says she picked her father up from the airport and gave him a tour of New York.
The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the [luncheon event at which Trump says he first met Dubinin]. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings.
Dubinin, in other words, played Trump like a fiddle.
Russian intelligence gains influence in foreign countries by operating subtly and patiently. It exerts different gradations of leverage over different kinds of people, and uses a basic tool kit of blackmail that involves the exploitation of greed, stupidity, ego, and sexual appetite. All of which are traits Trump has in abundance.
So Dubinin arranged for Trump to go to Moscow. Trump landed in Moscow on July 4, 1987. Overseen by his Intourist (read: KGB) guides, he stayed at the (undoubtedly bugged) Lenin Suite at the National Hotel.
Viktor Suvorov, a former spy for Russian military intelligence agency known as GRU, described how such visits typically unfolded:
Once in Moscow, they would receive lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.” . . .
Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”
A few weeks after that trip, Trump, suddenly interested in U.S. national politics, spent around $100,000 — “where did he get the money?” would not be an unwarranted question — to place full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe slamming NATO.
Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in NATO. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.
The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later [then-KGB Major Yuri] Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early ‘70s and ‘80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”
Yes — “finally, this guy became the president” — a president that Vladimir Putin loooooves — so much so that he helped put him in office, as the Republican Senate Intelligence Committee reported.
In December, Putin was asked for his views on Trump. The Russian leader replied that Trump is “really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt. It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race. ... He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia, how can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that.”
For most American politicians, an endorsement by a foreign leader, especially one who is hostile to the United States, is something that could spell political disaster. So when Trump appeared on “Morning Joe” the next day, the news media were expecting him to try to limit the damage, perhaps with a stark denunciation of Putin. Instead the exchange on “Morning Joe” went as follows:
Trump: When people call you “brilliant” it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.
Joe Scarborough: Well, I mean, also is a person who kills journalists, political opponents and ...
Willie Geist: Invades countries.
Scarborough: ... and invades countries, obviously that would be a concern, would it not?
Trump: He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.
Scarborough: But, again: He kills journalists that don’t agree with him.
Trump: Well, I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.
And of course, that feeling is mutual:
So Trump’s licking of Russian boots is hardly a new phenomenon — in fact, it started at least as far back as when Reagan was in office, back when Oliver North was testifying before Congress.
And given how so much of Trump’s sordid boot-licking history can be explained by his visit to Moscow on July 4, 1987, one might reasonably wonder how much Russian boot-licking might be explained by a similar visit precisely 31 years later by a contingent of Republican members of Congress.
I mean, really — it would be irresponsible not to speculate, right?
