Donald Trump Is Not Being Played by Vladimir Putin: He Is a Willing Asset
- john raymond
- May 30
- 2 min read
Donald Trump is not being played by Vladimir Putin. He is not a victim of Russian manipulation. He is the success of it.
This single sentence breaks the back of every lazy analysis, every media cop-out, and every pundit excuse that has shielded the American public from seeing the truth. Because if you accept that Trump is the success of a long-running Russian operation—not its dupe, not its fool, not its accidental beneficiary, but its achievement—then everything changes. The narrative breaks. The excuses shatter. And the war we are in becomes undeniable.
For nearly a decade, American institutions have contorted themselves to avoid this conclusion. Journalists blamed ego. Senators blamed chaos. Think tanks blamed incompetence. But all of them missed the signal beneath the noise. It wasn’t that Trump blundered into alignment with the Kremlin. It was that his very way of operating served Kremlin objectives: destabilize democracy, polarize the populace, and shatter the credibility of the American-led order.
Look at what has endured: the constant undercutting of NATO, the habitual questioning of U.S. intelligence, the elevation of Putin as a model of "strength," the targeting of Ukraine as corrupt or undeserving. These are not glitches. These are deliverables. And the fact that they have been disguised in bluster, comedy, contradiction, or insult only proves how effective the camouflage has been.
Trump doesn’t need to know every node in the Russian playbook. He only needs to perform his asymmetric role: fracture, deny, deflect, divide. And every time he is described as confused or self-centered or merely emotional, the disinformation succeeds. Because if the public sees him as a clown, they won't name him for what he is: a long-standing vector of foreign strategic gain.
The brilliance of asymmetric warfare is that its actors often appear unserious. Its greatest assets are rarely the best and brightest. They are the most predictable. The ones who can be counted on, time and again, to sow division and doubt with perfect reliability. Trump is the most reliable such actor in modern American history. He is not being played by Putin. He is playing us.
And until we stop pretending otherwise, the operation continues. Unhindered. Unnamed. Unchallenged.
Comments