I can’t say for certain that Vladimir Putin has kompromat on Donald Trump. It seems just as likely that Putin feeds him McRibs and Filet-O-Fishes like a SeaWorld dolphin whenever they visit, and along with repeatedly telling Trump how beautiful Melania’s husband is, that’s enough to make the big ocher arschloch a de facto Russian agent.
For a while we all fixated on the alleged pee tape, as if that was the smoking gun that would finally reveal Trump’s perfidy to the world. Well, we have something worse than the pee tape—it’s the record of everything that happened at the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, where Trump micturated upon the post-World War II security apparatus like the reincarnation of Hitler’s beloved German shepherd, Stephen Miller. (Hitler was way into the occult. He knew what was coming.)
We knew all about Trump’s serial attempts to undermine NATO, of course. In 2016, while he was campaigning to purple-nurple the tender areola of our eternal, numinous souls, he set off waves of alarm in Europe and some of the less benighted regions of the U.S. when he suggested he might not come to the defense of other NATO countries if they were attacked by—oh, I don’t know, let’s just pull an example out of thin air—Russia or something. He couched his criticism in bullshit, claiming other NATO countries weren’t making their “payments” (NATO countries don’t make payments, of course), but even if he was sending a message to other NATO members, he was sending a much stronger message to Vladimir Putin, who somehow got the idea over the past several years that the West was divided and lacked the resolve to fight creeping authoritarianism.
Of course, Trump’s comments in 2016 should have been immediately disqualifying. You can’t have the leader of the free world wavering on one of the United States’ most sacred and vital commitments. That kind of loose talk makes (and made) Russian aggression far more likely—and now here we are. Yet as we all know, Trump’s incandescent stink lines blanched the Oval Office wallpaper for four woeful years before someone with a firmer grasp of history thankfully replaced him. But not before Trump spent those four years undermining our alliances and—most alarmingly—our most important military alliance.
And now, as if we hadn’t already made this mole, Trump has blurted out what we’d all pretty much assumed. He threw acid on the foundations of our post-World War II Pax Americana while implausibly claiming he was trying to make the alliance stronger:
Appearing at an event held by the Heritage Foundation in Florida, Trump claimed that he told fellow NATO leaders that he might not abide by NATO’s Article 5 collective-defense clause if those countries didn’t pay more for the alliance.
A fellow leader “said, ‘Does that mean that you won’t protect us in case — if we don’t pay, you won’t protect us from Russia’ — was the Soviet Union, but now Russia,” Trump said. “I said, ‘That’s exactly what it means.’”
Now, the idea that NATO countries somehow have “dues”—and that several of them were in arrears—has been repeatedly debunked. But once an idea has settled into Trump’s head, it’s almost impossible to dislodge it without a heavy crowbar and an Adderall suppository the size of a Learjet battery. And so Russia’s Hero of Helsinki plowed full steam ahead.
Of course, this was hardly the only time Trump played coy when it came to fulfilling our NATO commitments.
Trump has previously danced around whether he would commit to Article 5, including conspicuously declining to endorse it in May 2017. The following month, he did endorse it. But by the summer of 2018, he was again calling that into question, suggesting it might not be worthwhile for NATO countries to commit to defending “tiny” Montenegro, which was at the time a new member.
Again, it’s super shocking that Putin thought the West couldn’t mount a unified response to his invasion of Ukraine. Where did he ever get that idea, I wonder?
Pretty much everything Trump did as president—from pulling out of Syria (while betraying our Kurdish allies in the process) to (oh, this seems significant!) seriously mulling a complete U.S. withdrawal from NATO—seemed specially designed to palpate Putin’s pud.
So how is this guy still in the 2024 conversation? Is it just because the media love a horse race? Well, what if one of the horses carries a horseman of the apocalypse? Here come War, Famine, Death, and—bringing up the rear on the syphilitic pinto—Lunch Meat Sweats!
Do your job, media. Do the job you were supposed to do in 2016 before the unthinkable happened. Donald Trump is a Russian asset and a clear and present danger to liberal democracy. The evidence is everywhere. Stop tiptoeing around it and do your jobs!
You can’t have the leader of the free world wavering on one of the United States’ most sacred and vital commitments. That kind of loose talk by Donald Trump made Russian aggression far more likely—and now here we are.
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