When Ukrainian civilians were being blown apart by intensified Russian bombardment at the weekend, after Washington had ‘blinded’ Kyiv by cutting off its access to US signals intelligence, a satisfied-looking President Donald Trump said Moscow was ‘doing what anyone else would do’.
He then emphasised his closeness to the man behind the slaughtering: ‘I’ve always had a good relationship with Putin … I think he’s going to be more generous than he has to be.’
This latest, callous, expression of Trump’s partiality for the aggressor against the victim has caused renewed lurid speculation about the origins of his policies, which overturn more than 75 years of Western collective security.
In particular, it is being said once more that Trump is the Kremlin’s agent, and that this derives from an incident in Moscow in the 1990s when he was secretly filmed in depraved activities with prostitutes. Kompromat, they call it.
However, not only did the original propagator of this lurid story – an ex-MI6 officer named Christopher Steele – fail to provide a shred of evidence for it, let alone the film itself, there are two other straightforward reasons for rejecting the claim that Trump is a Russian intelligence asset.
First, the whole point about a secret agent is that he is not obvious about his allegiance: at all times, he must seek to disguise it.
Yet President Trump is completely open about his affection for the Kremlin’s spymaster-in-chief, and spectacularly so during that grotesque baiting of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, when he yelled: ‘Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phoney witch-hunt where they used him – and Russia, Russia, Russia.’
Second, kompromat, or blackmail, in plain English, only works by exploiting the target’s fear of shame – and Trump is a man incapable of shame.
Trump divides the world into winners and losers – Putin, in his view, is an epic winner, writes DOMINIC LAWSON
This attribute is his greatest asset. It enables him to lie effortlessly (one might say that lying is his first language), and to declare today the opposite of what he said yesterday.
No, the truth is far less murky, but speaks much worse of Trump than if he were a victim of blackmail: he just thinks Vladimir Putin, the mass murderer, is altogether admirable.
Trump divides the world into winners and losers. Putin, in his view, is an epic winner. And the fact that the Russian president uses the most brutal of methods to win, is a further reason for Donald Trump’s infatuation: it means he is a ‘strong guy’.
This is also the basis of his admiration for China’s Communist President Xi Jinping. As Trump simpered during the 2024 election campaign: ‘He’s a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.’
But there is something else that makes Trump seek to be best chums with Putin. The occupant of the Kremlin is the richest man in Russia – maybe in the whole world. And Trump the businessman craves the company of the mega-billionaires (a status he has always aspired to).
You could see that in the way the richest men in the US – not just Elon Musk, but also Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon – were given pride of place at Trump’s inauguration in the Capitol.
It was Sir William Browder who first identified Putin as the richest man in Russia. Browder had himself been the biggest individual Western investor in post-communist Russia, until Putin’s goons targeted his company.
Browder claims that after Putin jailed and expropriated the wealth of the previously richest Russian (Mikhail Khodorkovsky), the other, alarmed, oligarchs were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: ‘The deal was, you give me 50 per cent of your wealth and I’ll let you keep the other 50 per cent. If you don’t, he’ll take 100 per cent of your wealth and throw you in jail.’
During his baiting of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Trump said: ‘Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phoney witch-hunt where they used him – and Russia, Russia, Russia.’
One reason the Kremlin poisoner repeatedly commissioned the elimination of Alexei Navalny (he got him in the end) was that the former Russian opposition leader had concentrated on exposing Putin’s colossal wealth, notably with his 2021 film, Putin’s Palace – The Story of the World’s Biggest Bribe.
Incidentally, the man conventionally measured as the richest in the world, Elon Musk, defers to President Putin in this matter. In a 2022 interview, Musk said: ‘I do think that Putin is significantly richer than me.’
The most revealing account of Trump’s own admiration for Putin’s extreme wealth extraction (at the expense, obviously, of millions of Russian ‘losers’), came from the US President’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
Admittedly, Cohen was convicted of violating campaign laws on Trump’s behalf (buying the silence of a porn star called Stormy Daniels), but his account is still compelling. Cohen wrote that Trump identified Putin as ‘the richest man in the world by a multiple’.
Further: that above all, what Trump admired was how Putin had the ability ‘to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company – like the Trump Organisation, in fact’.
His former boss’s conception – of treating the United States of America as if it were a branch of the Trump Organisation – was made laughably manifest at the weekend, when Trump, speaking from the Oval Office, told the media how: ‘Our country, from an economic standpoint, from a financial standpoint, from a trade standpoint, has been absolutely ripped off by almost every country in the world.’
Except the US President began the tirade with the words ‘Our company …’ – and had to correct himself, having remembered that America is actually a country, rather than a subsidiary of the Trump Organisation.
The thing about US companies is that the person at the top gets financial rewards vastly greater than applies to their equivalents in other nations.
So no surprise, then, that (according to the US magazine Wired) those businessmen who would like to have a solo dinner with the President at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida are now being given the opportunity – for a personal fee of up to $5 million.
And no surprise that Donald Trump’s initial ‘deal’ to take a 50 per cent stake in Ukraine’s rare minerals was drafted not by government lawyers in Washington but by those working for private law firms in New York, home of the Trump Organisation.
Trump is looking beyond his Presidency (not surprisingly, as the US Constitution prevents him running again when his second term ends in 2028). And he has for decades sought to establish his company in Russia – even to the bizarre extent, in 2007, of marketing Trump Super Premium Vodka in Moscow.
A year later, his son Donald Jr said that: ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’
And in 2015 – a year after Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine – Trump boasted of his attempts to launch businesses in Russia, saying that he had contacts with ‘the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals, and top of the government people … I will tell you that I met the top people and the relationship was extraordinary’.
President Trump’s relationship with the very top person in Russia is, indeed, extraordinary.
And it is abysmally obvious that the Commander in Chief of the US Army and Navy – as the President is – hopes to monetise, for his own colossal gain, his special relationship with Vladimir Putin.
