As someone who wrote A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight back in November of 2017, there is some (extremely) grim satisfaction in seeing the Washington Post (gift article) finally, finally, finally report things as they actually are. The honors go to reporter Francesca Ebel.
MOSCOW — The Trump administration’s rewrite of decades of U.S. foreign policy on Russia, laid bare in the Oval Office confrontation between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is bringing Washington into alignment with Moscow, the Kremlin said Sunday — a shift that could upend the geopolitics that have governed international relations since World War II.
.“The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, state television reported Sunday. “This largely aligns with our vision.”
Moscow’s vision, which has focused on a push to reclaim influence over much or all of the former Soviet Union and defeat liberal democracy, has made Russia a pariah to the West. The United States has given over a hundred billion dollars in arms and aid to Ukraine since Russia’s unprovoked invasion in 2022. Washington led allies in imposing new sanctions on Moscow; the International Criminal Court issued a warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin on charges of war crimes.
But on Sunday, as European leaders rallied behind Zelensky in London, Peskov said the administration’s new approach could herald a new thaw between Washington and Moscow.
“There is a long way to go because a lot of damage has been done to the whole complex of bilateral relations,” he said. “But if the political will of the two leaders, President Putin and President Trump, is maintained, this path can be quite quick and successful.”
As we discuss with guest Bill Hangley Jr. in our most recent podcast, the partition of Poland in 1939 was only made possible after the Nazis convinced Stalin that, despite their enormous ideological differences, they both sought to “defeat liberal democracy” and therefore should make an alliance. The roles are flipped but this is precisely what we’re seeing now between America’s new fascist regime and the Kremlin, as they partition Ukraine right in front of our eyes.
When I have written these things, I always felt like half a crazy person. It’s just hard to accept this level of betrayal, and Ebel reports that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s treatment on Friday of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office “even stunned Russian leaders.”
If they had been reading this blog, they wouldn’t be stunned. In January 2024, I wrote, “It’s been obvious forever that Trump is in the pocket of Putin and will do anything he can to help Russia subjugate Ukraine.” Truthfully, I don’t think Putin was surprised at all by the rupture with Zelensky. He and Trump have been in communication so much that, as Rachel Maddox ably reported last week, Trump refuses to discuss their contacts. Their plan may be secret in its details, but it’s public that Trump demanded 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral rights in return for nothing more than Ukraine continuing to exist in its current Russian-occupied truncated form. In gratitude, Russia has offered to allow the United States to reopen its embassy in Moscow and let American oil and gas companies back into Russia.
Meanwhile, the American fascist regime crushed liberal democracy at home and now supports far-right Kremlin-aligned Neo-Nazi parties in Europe, and Europe races to replace, so far as possible, a suddenly defunct NATO.
This is exactly what I described in that A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight piece back in 2017. The confession came four days after Trump was elected in 2016 from Kremlin mouthpiece Konstantin Rykov. Rykov described in a pair of Facebook posts how Russia hatched a plan with Trump after Mitt Romney was defeated in 2012 using Cambridge Analytica as a key weapon.
What was our idea with Donald Trump?
For four years and two days .. it was necessary to get to everyone in the brain and grab all possible means of mass perception of reality. Ensure the victory of Donald in the election of the US President. Then create a political alliance between the United States, France, Russia (and a number of other states) and establish a new world order.
Our idea was insane, but realizable.
In order to understand everything for the beginning, it was necessary to “digitize” all possible types of modern man.
Donald decided to invite for this task — the special scientific department of the “Cambridge University.”
British scientists from Cambridge Analytica suggested making 5,000 existing human psychotypes — the “ideal image” of a possible Trump supporter. Then .. put this image back on all psychotypes and thus pick up a universal key to anyone and everyone.
Then it was only necessary to upload this data to information flows and social networks. And we began to look for those who would have coped with this task better than others.
At the very beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev.
The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.
The effort to win France for the fascist Le Pen family has come dangerously close to succeeding but so far has fallen just short. The effort has turned to Germany and their even more loathsome Kremlin-aligned Alternative for Germany (AfD) Neo-Nazi party which was openly promoted by both J.D. Vance and Elon Musk in last weekend’s election. That effort also fell just short, with the AfD coming in second place.
What made Rykov’s confession credible was the timing. It came before anyone raised questions about Cambridge Analytica role in the campaign or understood how they had used algorithms on Facebook to maximize the effectiveness of Trump’s online advertising in the 2016 election. It wasn’t until April 2018 that the New York Times reported on the full details.
In March, The New York Times, working with The Observer of London and The Guardian, obtained a cache of documents from inside Cambridge Analytica, the data firm principally owned by the right-wing donor Robert Mercer. The documents proved that the firm, where the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon was a board member, used data improperly obtained from Facebook to build voter profiles. The news put Cambridge under investigation and thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever.
As far back as 2014, Cambridge Analytica had pitched their psychological profiles of American voters to political campaigns, as well as to the Kremlin-linked oil giant Lukoil. It was also in 2014, that “Cambridge provided [John] Bolton’s ‘super PAC’ with early versions of its Facebook-derived profiles — the technology’s first large-scale use in an American election.” Bolton went on to serve as Trump’s national security advisor.
People have wondered since at least mid-2015 why Trump has such an affinity for Putin. There are many theories but they no longer have importance. The reason we wanted to know was primarily to understand the threat of something happening like what is happening right now. Just as Hitler and Stalin divided Poland at the start of World War Two, Trump and Putin are dividing Ukraine. Back then, the goal was to unite to defeat liberal democracies. That is the shared goal now, too.
These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.
