Didn’t Trump meet with Putin and have several closed doors meetings? and remove our troops from our NATO allies? And met with the Taliban to setoff a ‘timebomb’ of our withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan? And try to overthrow a US election to remain in power?
It’s pretty clear that Trump does not like our freedom and wants to rule us as a dictator would in allegiance with Putin. Didn’t Trump praise Putin for this invasion? It appears Trump has set thing up that if he was not to remain in power ‘problems will happen’ and ‘prices would rise’.
I suspect that Putin and Trump spoke about this, and Trump weakened our position in europe, withdrawing many of our troops, and if and when Trump was not to get in for a second time,3rd, etc. time, the US would have agreed to leave Afghanstan 3rd, Putin would invade Ukraine and allow Trump to politically capitalize on it and regain control of the US, and create this allegiance under Russia.
I also would not put it past Trump, if he regains the whitehouse to end any sanctions against Russia and come up with an excuse to leave NATO and join Russia.
Yes, that sounds like a plan tanTrump and Putin would come up with. Because it is a very bad plan for tanTrump and a good one for Putin.
Doesn’t mean it is true, but plausible.
You’re describing an 11-dimensional chessboard here, but Trump rarely operates in more than one dimension… specifically, “me me me”.
However, I could easily believe that Putin was very willing to horse-trade with an easy mark like Trump, setting up some very favorable quids-pro-quo. Putin tells Trump to badmouth NATO, maybe even withdraw from it, starve Ukraine of military aid, say nice things about Russia. In exchange, Putin dangles some shiny objects that will distract Trump’s childlike mind, such as Hunter Biden dirt, election assistance, Trump Tower Moscow, etc.
I don’t think Putin would share his big-picture strategy with Trump. Trump’s attention span is too short to process it, he’s a shitty strategist, and he’s too stupid to keep his mouth shut when he should. But sure, Putin was probably thrilled to set up some fool’s bargains with an easy mark like Trump.
Of course Putin had only to dangle Trump Tower, re-election help, and the two of them being dictators over half the world, doing away with elections in both countries to appeal to Trump. He omitted the part about him serving as Putin’s puppet, and stressed the part about ruling the U.S. in perpetuity. No big-picture strategy required, nor would it have been understood anyway.
I’ve been saying this all along, Trump and Poutine are bum buds and no question in my mind, there will be a stench of Trump in this to a greater or lesser extent. Trump is also involved in the alt right “truckers rally” that blockaded borders in Canada for several weeks.
You’ve got this ass backwards. Trump was Putin’s worst nightmare. He objected to the Russian pipeline to Germany and insisted the Germans upgrade their sea ports for LNG gas. He was planning on imposing higher tariffs if he didn’t get his way. This was a huge stick up Putin’s ass.
Trump wants U.S. LNG to compete with Russian natural gas exports in Europe. He has accused Germany of being a “captive” to Moscow because of its heavy reliance on Russian gas and has called for Berlin to drop support for the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline plan to pump more gas from Russia to Germany.
And in the wake of what is going in the Ukraine Germany has put a halt to that pipeline.
It was pretty much Putin’s show, pulling the strings on his puppet. Insofar as Trump has any influence at all, it was on the focus on Ukraine as the first target, given the existing Roger Stone connections to the ousted pro-Putin regime to work with.
Trumps defining characteristic is that he’s an amoral, greedy, narcissist. They could have just come to some arrangement where Trump would cut Putin in on some deal if he held off invading Ukraine until after Trump was out of office.
I agree, AND I’m also doubly grateful that the Dumpster is no longer in the White House. Who knows what he would do to restore his position in the news to #1?
This seems a bit illogical. First, Trump had no intention of ever being out of office. (Who knows how really seriously he believed that?)
Second, if Trump was ever going to be out of office (as has actually happened), what further deal could he cut Putin in on? Build the Moscow Trump Tower and make Vlad a partner? Putin would be more interested in the deals he could have had from Trump while Trump was still in office.
Third, Trump never keeps his word on deals, and Putin would probably have known that. If Putin had made a deal requiring something from himself (staying out of Ukraine for the duration) in return for something from Trump afterward, I think Putin would have been savvy enough never to make such a deal.
It’s the plot of a cheap political thriller, not a real world scheme. It doesn’t even make any sense.
Putin has been harassing and invading former Soviet republics that drifted out of Moscow’s orbit since at least 2008 and Russia’s brief war with Georgia. In 2014, before Trump was even a serious Presidential candidate, Putin waged covert and then overt military actions in the Donbas region of Ukraine to peel it off as a quasi-independent Russian dependency and buffer state, and simply seized Crimea. The current war is just a continuation of long-established policy. The idea that it’s due to a deal with Donald Trump is completely ludicrous.
What is the supposed deal? If Trump loses, Putin will engage in a major war and invite massive diplomatic and economic retaliation, so that Donald Trump, assuming an obese 78 year old is still alive 3 years later, will run for his party’s nomination, win that (because a full-on Russian invasion of another country will weaken Russia hawks in the Republican party?), run for President, win that election (because a full-on Russian invasion of another country will make a pro-Russian candidate look good in the U.S.?), and then put into place pro-Russian policies? After 3 years of political and diplomatic isolation?
Look, it’s not impossible that Putin held off on taking drastic action in Ukraine while Trump was in office because he thought he could come to an understanding with Trump about Russia’s sphere of influence in its “near abroad”, but decided that once Biden was in office, he had to move to counter Ukraine’s drift towards NATO and the EU. That actually seems quite plausible as an element of his calculus.
But the idea that there was some sort of explicit deal between Putin and Trump, and that Putin invaded Ukraine as part of some convoluted scheme to return Trump to power, is just nuts.
No. For the simple reason that Trump has been out of office for over a year now, and there’s no way he could have kept his fucking mouth shut that long.
Of course, Trump’s time may well have contributed to the perception that US politicians might be less than steadfast in opposing Putin’s machinations. But then, in retrospect, so would the responses over Georgia and Syria.
So when Russia annexed Crimea under Obama’s watch it was in actual anticipation of the future election of Trump? I mean that’s as likely as the OP’s premise.
Almost a description of the Trump presidency itself!
No, it’s not some convoluted scheme to return Trump to power. I think Putin found Trump useful as someone who he could cozy up to and whose divisive nature was damaging to the US and NATO.
It really isn’t, though. Donald Trump was a shady real estate developer governed by a raging ego. He was impulsive, petty, bullying, and narcissistic. What he wasn’t was a scheming, manipulative Machiavellian mastermind. And I think everything he did as President actually did make sense, from that perspective.
Pretty much, yeah. He was an intermittently useful idiot. I think it bears pointing out, though, that although President Trump was personally obsequious to Putin to a truly disturbing degree, his administration’s actual policies weren’t really all that Russia-friendly.
President Trump rhetorically undermined NATO and made some small and easily reversible cutbacks to U.S. troop deployments to Europe, but also successfully pushed other NATO countries to increase their own defense budgets and commitments to NATO. His administration also levied sanctions against Russia and conducted one of the largest mass expulsions of Russian diplomats in U.S. history.
Donald Trump simply doesn’t have the long-term executive capacity (in any sense of the word) to really be a true Russian asset. At best/worst, he’s a chaos agent that disrupts and weakens U.S. and Western institutions. Which Putin might well calculate is better for his interests than having a competent U.S. President, but the idea that Trump is somehow so valuable, and so trustworthy and predictable, to Putin that he’d stage the largest European ground war since 1945 as part of some sort of convoluted scheme to manipulate U.S. politics in Trump’s favor is just nonsense.
(I think it’s also probably worth pointing out that thinking that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is somehow about American electoral politics reflects a breathtakingly myopic and Americentric perspective).
Trump said something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could be friends with Russia?” at some point while he was in office. It sounded fishy or naive to me. Wagner opera line, badly translated, “Are you malicious, or merely insane?”
I believe Putin had some hold on Trump, “Have film of you with duck”, or envy of Putin’s rule, I don’t know. I would think that Trump would continue to suck up to Putin if he were still in office. If there were some plan Putin had, surely he would have invaded while Trump was still in office. Trump would have disrupted NATO, and caused his MAGA constituents to be pro Russian.