LONDON: For many, the allegation that Trump is effectively the Kremlin’s man will appear absurd, but during Trump’s period as President there were many unexplained incidences which lend support to the theory.
Somewhere in the vaults of Moscow’s Lubyanka, the long-time home of Russia’s security services, is a prized possession. Dating back to November 2013, it consists of some extraordinary images of a tall (6’3”) blond overweight man in a hotel room participating throughout the night with two prostitutes in a “golden rain” activity, on a bed supposedly slept in by the Obamas in 2009. Earlier that day the same blond Manhattan mogul watched 86 contestants don shimmering evening gowns and skimpy swimsuits for what he would call “the world’s biggest and most iconic beauty contest”. Beauty pageants had long appealed to him on both aesthetic and commercial grounds. “Honestly, when I bought Miss Universe the bathing suits got smaller, the heels got higher and the ratings shot up”, Donald Trump said in an interview with Vanity Fair in January 2016.
OK, there’s no direct evidence of what later became known throughout Washington as Trump’s “pee tape”, but many influential people are confident that it exists. After all, if the Kremlin allows the images to appear, any leverage it has over Trump would vanish. Donald Trump vehemently denies the incident, claiming no such event took place, and in any case he is “very much of a germaphobe”. But hotel rooms were always bugged during Soviet times and this continues today in Putin’s Russia, especially during the stay of foreign visitors or even those threatening Putin’s presidency, on whom the Kremlin would like to have some “kompromat” or leverage. Former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov discovered this to his cost when videos of him having sex with a prostitute appeared across the media in 2016, putting an end to any thoughts of challenging Vladimir Putin at the next presidential elections. Kasyanov’s career was over and Putin’s grin grew wider.
Back in 2013, it’s extremely unlikely that the Kremlin would have missed the opportunity to set up an alpha-male such as Donald Trump, who two years earlier had considered running for President. He changed his mind on that occasion, but to have kompromat on someone who might in the future become US President would be pure gold for the Kremlin. The prospects were good as Trump had frequently boasted about his sexual prowess, even bragging that he could “grab any girl by the pussy”. Also, as no less than 26 women had publicly accused him of rape, kissing and groping them without their consent, he was clearly easy prey to temptation. So when Trump stayed overnight in Moscow’s Ritz Carlton hotel after the Miss World contest, the stage was set. Trump fell for the bait and became “the Kremlin’s man”.
Putin’s next objective was to get his man into the White House at the earliest opportunity. There were hints of Russian interference during the year-long campaign leading up to the election in 2016. The “Steele dossier”, also known as the “Trump-Russia dossier”, which came to light in January 2017 just before Trump’s inauguration, confirmed both the probability of the Ritz Carlton sting operation and the strong likelihood that the Kremlin had engaged in an elaborate operation to swing the election in Trump’s favour. But it wasn’t until 2020 that the US Senate Intelligence Committee published irrefutable evidence of the Kremlin’s involvement. With over 200 witness interviews and roughly 1 million documents reviewed, the nearly 1,000-page report documents in detail just how comprehensive was Putin’s campaign, orchestrated through his proxies, to influence the presidential campaign to help Trump become president. Far from a hoax, as Trump so often claimed, the report revealed how Trump’s campaign team even willingly engaged with Russian operatives to help their “influence operations” succeed.
For many, the allegation that Trump is effectively the Kremlin’s man will appear absurd, but during Trump’s period as President there were many unexplained incidences which lend support to the theory. For example, in a two-hour one-on-one meeting with Putin in July 2018, many ask why Trump insisted that nobody else was present except for the interpreters, and even these had to hand over their notes afterwards. This broke all the rules, both diplomatic and security. It was obvious that Trump wanted no one else to know what was discussed, something which his many critics used as further evidence that he really is a Kremlin surrogate. During the following press conference when Trump was asked about the supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election, he replied “my intelligence people came to me and said it was Russia who interfered. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be”. So there we have it from his own mouth; Trump believes Putin rather than the CIA.
Over the years, experts were puzzled by how easy Putin found it to exploit Trump’s ego to exert an almost mesmeric hold over the former US president, a man who refused to entertain any negative evaluation from his own staff of the autocratic Russian leader. Then in 2021 a top-secret Kremlin document, coded “32-04\vd”, was obtained by western intelligence which helped explain why. We now know that during a closed session of Russia’s National Security Council with President Putin on 22 January 2016, the main topic on the agenda was the November US presidential election. The document reveals that Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support Donald Trump, as a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, the most important of which was “social turmoil” in the US. Describing Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex,” the report confirms that the Kremlin possessed “kompromat” on the future president, which the document claims was collected during “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trip to Moscow in November 2013.
The remainder of the report lays out a number of American weaknesses, in particular a deepening political gulf between left and right and the need to support Trump. “It is acutely necessary to use all possible means to ensure Donald Trump’s election”, the report says, which would help bring about Russia’s favoured “theoretical political scenario”. A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s socio-political system” and “see hidden discontent burst into the open”, the report predicts. As a result, Putin would be able in a clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russian bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf.
The White House predictably described “32-04\vd” as “fake”, and an embarrassed Kremlin described it as “a great pulp fiction”. But professionals who have examined the document in detail have concluded that it is genuine. Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies told the Guardian that he believes the document is true as “it reflects reality. It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the Security Council. Decisions are always made like that”, he said.
The document helps explain why Trump has never criticised Putin, instead regularly pumping lavish praise on the Russian president. In early 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine Trump described Putin a “genius” and the operation “pretty savvy”. Recently Trump has boasted that he will end the war in a “day”, sparking critics’ fears that if he is elected again, Trump will ensure that Russia will achieve a “very favourable outcome”, which Putin will say achieves all his objectives. Never a fan of NATO, Trump also greenlit Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members who don’t pay enough to the alliance. Putin has repeatedly said he wants to destroy NATO.
Reading the report, it’s remarkable how successful the Kremlin has been in achieving all its objectives since Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016. Even though he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he has caused immense harm to American democracy by refusing to accept the result of the election. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump declared before a single ballot had been cast that the only way he could lose was through fraud, and we are hearing the same words again as the November election approaches. Donald Trump, the Divider-in-Chief and multiple felon, has polarised America in the past 8 years, in and out of office, with the result that his supporters are already refusing to accept anyone than him as the winner in November. Many are already taking up arms to ensure that he does.
A country can only be described as a democracy if the losing parties accept the result of an election. The alternative is anarchy which America tasted on 6 January 2021 when some 2,500 Trump supporters, goaded by him, stormed the US Capitol Building in Washington in an attempted coup d’état. The mob falsely claimed that the election had been “stolen by the radical-left Democrats”. If the count goes against Trump in November, this will happen again, but this time countrywide on steroids. The words “civil war” are not uncommon nowadays in the media.
Back in 2016, few realised how pivotal it was for the Kremlin to get its man, Donald Trump, into the White House. For Vladimir Putin it was an outstanding success as he was now in a position to destabilise a country long considered Russia’s enemy. Now, Putin is in a “win-win” position. If Trump emerges the winner on 5th November, champagne corks will be heard in the Kremlin, as its man will once again be in power. If the vote concludes that Trump has lost, the Kremlin will still be extremely happy as a Trump-polarised America will descend into chaos. Or even worse.
* John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.