Trump is Moscow’s Marionette

America Slides from Superpower to Super-Puppet, As JD Vance Channels Neville Chamberlain in Munich

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was wise to wise guy Donald Trump in 2020. She outright questioned his loyalty to America after the New York Times revealed Russia secretly offered bounties to Taliban assassins to murder U.S. troops in Afghanistan. While the intelligence was inconclusive, Trump’s genuflecting before Putin was an incomprehensible response that raised eyebrows.

“Just as I have said to the president: With him, all roads lead to Putin,” Pelosi said. “I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially. This is as bad as it gets, and yet the president will not confront the Russians on this score.”

Trump is back and he is already backing down. Each day, he humiliates the United States by projecting weakness and kowtowing to the Kremlin. If this were the Cold War, I’d be concerned the Reds had infiltrated the White House.

It’s an ineluctable fact that Trump, once again, has surrounded himself with Russophiles whose sympathies seem more aligned with Moscow than Washington. The elevation of Russia-loving apparatchiks, such as Vice President JD Vance and Putin Puppet Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (DNI), jeopardizes our national security.

How is shaking pom poms for Putin making America great? It’s as if Russia planted nesting dolls in our most important defense agencies. And now we are defenseless against Putin’s plot to destabilize democracies and install friendly dictatorships.

The latest indignity was Vance’s provocative speech in Munich chastising our European allies. Working with these nations is a force multiplier militarily and greatly enhances our power of deterrence. In a public address that was as tragic as it was bizarre, Vance said our friends are more nettlesome than our foes.

“The threat that I worry most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance told the mortified audience. “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” he said.

Or, maybe, they can’t survive it. Vance, Musk and Trump could wreck the transatlantic alliance that kept the world safe and Europe from plunging into war since 1945. In a particularly troubling twist, Vance advocated lifting bans on hate speech in Europe and endorsed a fascist German political party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The sorry affair generated ghastly newspaper headlines, such as, “German Chancellor Rebukes Vance for Supporting Party That Downplays Nazis” and “Trump Officials Attack a German Consensus on Nazis and Speech”.

The Germans kind of invented the Hitler thing. When they warn your country that it is going down a dangerous path, it’s best to humbly listen. And Vance knows full-well what it looks like when a Hitler rises, having previously compared Trump to the Fuhrer. That, of course, was before the oleaginous Vance figured out that he could worm his way onto the Trump Train through fawning and flattery.

In his historically hideous speech, Vance took issue with Europe’s efforts to stop online lies from infecting politics. “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with,” he smarmily intoned.

What the Vice President didn’t realize is that he, Musk and Trump are shining monuments to the superiority of Europe’s safeguards. In America, we allowed a tsunami of disinformation to overwhelm us, and the result was we elected Trump, an autocrat who is arguably the biggest liar in American history—albeit serial dissembler Elon Musk is giving him a serious run for his money.

Vance’s Munich fiasco was as embarrassing as it was shameful. Trump and Vance talk tough but are subservient to Putin at every turn. The last time we saw such naked appeasement in Munich, Neville Chamberlain was bowing down to Hitler. But at least the former British Prime Minister had good intentions, while our malevolent American miscreants seem hellbent on gutting our alliances and returning the world to the apocalyptic 1930s.

A toxic side effect of Trump’s foreign follies is that our allies realize that we are an unstable democracy and an unreliable partner. With America poised to screw his country with myriad capitulations disguised as negotiations with Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for the creation of a European army. While Trump is correct to push our allies to spend more on defense, we don’t want them to rebuild to the point where they are military rivals.

However, that is exactly what we are doing. We are knee-deep in self-sabotage, demanding the European powers—that previously wrecked the world-- fully rearm, while simultaneously advocating on behalf of European hyper-nationalist parties that are laced with violent Nazi elements. Who’s to say, in a paroxysm of nationalist fervor, they don’t eventually train their newly minted guns on America?

If Europe can rearm to the point of defeating Russia without American help, they would also be strong enough to potentially defeat the United States. Remind me again how this is making America great?

Ditto for Trump’s suicidal policies in Asia. Is it really in our national interest to counterbalance China’s strength by having Japan fully rearm? What happens if this scheme results in an anti-American two-headed tiger in Asia?

Trump justifies forcing our allies to rebuild their militaries by falsely claiming it will save us money. But this is the quintessential definition of penny wise and pound foolish, with America likely having to spend infinitely more in blood and treasure in the future to fix Trump’s historic blunders.

America’s shortsighted policies could also lead to nuclear proliferation. Conservative New York Times columnist David French explained what’s at stake:

Will our abandoned allies be content with vassal status in the face of aggressive, nuclear-armed powers such as Russia, China and (to a lesser extent) North Korea? Or will they seek their own ultimate security guarantee, the nuclear weapon that would render any invasion of their sovereign territory utter madness?

It is undeniable that every action Trump has taken on foreign policy decisively weakens our country, divides us from our allies and elevates our adversaries. Russia’s primary desire is to dislodge American military dominance in the service of creating a multipolar world of regional powers. (Aka “Spheres of Influence”). Putin often speaks of a New Yalta, where key players carve up the map, swallowing weaker nations as if they are on a party pupu platter.

Sadly, the current regime in Washington appears to be doing everything in its power to make Putin’s dream a reality. It’s as if Trump’s military and diplomatic doctrines were conceived of and executed by the Kremlin. It’s unthinkable that an administration protecting American interests, in good faith, would take any of these destructive steps we’ve already seen, no less all of them.

Instead of America striving to be a beacon of freedom and virtue (as imperfect as our efforts have been), the globe sees Trump’s America as an amoral pawn shop. Our president, and his loyal Mini-Me’s, are seen as rude and crude, and as vulgar as they are venal. To put it in Trump parlance: There is no nation he isn’t willing to fuck to steal a buck.

The most glaring example is Ukraine, where America is audaciously shaking down the desperate country, even as it bravely fights for its survival. Like a predatory mobster, Trump is seeking to loot Ukraine, demanding America receive 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, including graphite, lithium and uranium. This is a bit like bargaining with a sick man in the hospital for an oxygen tank. It is beneath contempt and highlights what a sorry, sordid nation we have become.

Meanwhile, the free world is watching this sociopathic behavior and scratching their collective heads. What sane leader isn’t privately wondering whether Trump is a Russian asset, a full-blown agent, or just the biggest useful idiot in modern history?

Whatever the answer, Trump’s policies are quickly transforming the United States from Superpower to Super-Puppet—all while MAGA suckers aggressively wave their American flags and pretend to be the ultimate patriots.

As a result, we are already suffering a strategic loss in soft power. Canadian airlines have scaled back flights, with a 25-percent decrease of interest in flying to the United States. Our insulted neighbors to the north, who live in a country that is also our largest trading partner, don’t want to spend their money in America. This is going to hurt small business owners, many of whom voted for Trump. I hope those red hats were worth the red ink on their balance sheets.

The divide has worsened to the point where American athletes were booed when the U.S. national anthem played during a hockey game in Montreal. Three fights broke out on the ice in the first nine seconds of the game, which is a lot, even for hockey.

Right now, the world is at the mercy of Trump, because each nation is negotiating separately to secure a good deal. They are essentially like workers in right-to-work states with no leverage over greedy bosses. Instead of each leader acting as a lone cowboy, the EU, Canada, and a few Latin American countries would be wise to effectively unionize.

If they banded together and levied 100-percent tariffs on US products, Trump would have zero leverage. After all, who would America trade with, Russia and Belarus? Even the threat of such united action would create havoc in the U.S. stock market forcing Trump to cave, lest he cause the next Great Depression.

Another stick our allies could wield is to threaten to kick American troops out of Europe. Ordinarily this would be insane, because it would make these countries more vulnerable to Russian attack. However, Russia is militarily depleted from its war with Ukraine and there is no guarantee, under Trump, that America would side with Europe against Russia if fighting broke out. I would never put my money on Trump standing up to Putin.

Until the rest of the world punches the bully in the nose, they will continue to be bullied. For non-MAGA Americans, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that we are now a vulturine nation on the wrong side of history.

Our president has been courted by Russia as an asset for 40-years. Trump can strenuously dismiss these charges as Democrats obsessed with, “Russia, Russia, Russia”, but Trump is always in cahoots with Russians, Russians, Russians. For an American president, that’s one Red Square that is increasingly hard to circle.