The jaw drops: Russian state media declare Donald Trump to be "our agent."
Russian state television today stated in precisely these words that President Donald Trump is "our agent."
Let that sink in.
It wasn't just an isolated observation, either. It was the theme of an entire segment on the same news program on which influential foreign policy expert Semyon Bagdasarov stated a while back that “The United States is the enemy. It is our enemy. It is a hostile state that aims to destroy our country... We are at war!”
And its head of government is "our agent."
If that doesn't scare the living crap out of any American, Trump supporter or not, he has either been lobotomized, has completely surrendered the power of reason to a slavish following of the Republican party line, or else is an FSB agent herself.
The broadcast was, of course, in Russian, but lest there be the slightest suspicion that this is just anti-Trump "spin," here's the very segment in which that statement (and a great deal else suggesting that Mr. Trump is in Vladimir Putin's hip pocket) is said quite plainly and openly. That segment was given its title by a photograph it displayed- "Puppet and Master-" taken of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov standing behind Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
What was Mr. Trump thinking?
The power behind the throne? Well, that's going too far. But especially in light of Mr. Trump's consistent and often bizarre statements and actions, his ongoing financial entanglements with Russia, and now the content on Russian State TV whose title is based upon this picture, it's a disturbing image.
Now. Do I take that to mean that Mr. Trump is a conscious FSB asset? Not at all. I believe that his huge Russian holdings and close ties to the most unsavory elements of the Russian underworld are troubling, especially since he declined upon taking office to divest himself of those holdings. Instead, he put them into a farcical "blind trust," administered by- his own children!
Ok. The bit about having to provide Mr. Trump with an apartment in Rostov once his term is over and the Democrats return to power was undoubtedly meant to be humorous. But the whole point of the segment was that Mr. Trump is in Vladimir Putin's hip pocket and can be depended on to back Russia over and against Ukraine. The segment even included an (inaccurate) boast that his constant repeating of the discredited FSB disinformation that Ukraine rather than Russia was responsible for the hacking of the DNC's computers and other foreign interference in the 2016 election.
The purpose of the segment clearly is to demoralize Ukraine with the (accurate) information that as long as Mr. Trump is in office, the United States is a broken reed upon which to lean in the face of ongoing Russian aggression which has already resulted in the annexation of party of the eastern Crimea, which was Ukrainian soil though a majority of whose population is ethnically Russian.
Didn't Putin's lackeys worry about the segment falling into the hands of Mr. Trump's critics in the United States? Apparently not. After all, as is stated in the segment itself, the Russians seem to think that the president has successfully convinced that American people that Ukraine was the bad actor in the election interference and dismiss criticism of his outrageous behavior as politically being politically motivated, just as the president and his supporters claim.
All along, the most frustrating thing about Donald Trump has been that his corruption, his dishonesty, his lack of principles, his erratic personality and temperament, his authoritarian philosophy, his contempt for constitutional norms and the law, his bizarre statements and behavior, and his conduct of a foreign policy consistently in direct violation of the national interests of the United States has been open, obvious, and blatant, but that he gets away with it anyway because his base refuses to believe anything bad about him, no matter how clear, open and undeniable. When Lindsey Graham and other Republican senators say that they don't need to hear the evidence but will vote to acquit him in his upcoming impeachment trial no matter what the evidence might say (in direct violation of an oath they will take at the beginning of the trial, by the way), they're really not telling us anything we don't already know. Mr. Trump was right: even if he committed murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York, he wouldn't lose any votes.
But when an unfriendly country in which an influential foreign policy expert, Semyon Bagdasarov, has claimed that “The United States is the enemy. It is our enemy. It is a hostile state that aims to destroy our country... We are at war!” states on the very same program that the President of the United States is its agent, whether that agency is conscious or not is hardly the most pressing question.
The question is how blatant this stuff has to be before Trumpworld wakes up and smells the borscht.
Image by FolsumNatural used under Creative Commons Generic 2.0 Licence
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