The Weaponization of Lies: Trump is Putin's Asymmetric Actor
- john raymond
- Jun 1
- 4 min read
Unless you accept that Trump is in fact a Russian asset, his asymmetric attacks on you are working.
I know we all want to believe we have the answers, but the simple fact is most people don't have the time to unravel all the lies, or to fully understand what they point to when it comes to Trump. Know it is not a moral failing that you haven't been able to unravel them all, or to peer behind the curtain. The media has not helped you. The talking heads haven't helped either. Now, we have all fallen prey to the lies. And there is no doubt that we have been harmed by Trump's attacks on truth and consensus.
So for now, please set aside your own ego and simply listen to what I am saying. Simply follow the contours as I explain the asymmetric nature of the attacks Trump has perpetrated on you and the wider populace.
Firstly, he has co-opted the GOP base and radicalized them. Secondly, those that he can't co-opt he confuses with a host of lies and half-truths.
This is not to say that Trump isn’t a fascist, or a narcissist, or supremely ignorant and idiotic. He is all those things. And yet he is good at what he does more broadly...
So thirdly, please ask yourself if can you see just how badly you want to distrust my narrative? That is by asymmetric design. It is the collapse of truth that Trump and Putin want. Once you can accept that, you can begin to see through the way of the asymmetric warrior that is Trump, and that is Putin.
Fourthly, it takes little intelligence to attack people in the way that Trump does. It takes a base cunning, an abuser mentality, and a ruthlessness which men like Trump and Putin possess.
What they have done is weaponized lies. Where a conventional war involves bombs, bullets, and invasions, asymmetric warfare leverages doubt, division, and disinformation.
Trump doesn’t deploy missiles like Putin. He launches narratives—thousands of them, often contradictory, always corrosive. This technique, the Gish gallop, floods the information space with so many falsehoods that no single person can keep up with the debunking. The purpose is not to win arguments. The purpose is to break consensus.
And fifthly, consensus is the lifeblood of a democratic society. A functioning Congress runs on it. Real policy is made by it. And all cultural coherence depends on it.
Once you strip consensus from a people, you fracture them. You replace shared reality with fragmented suspicion. This is why I can all but guess that you still think you are right and I am wrong.
But I am here to tell you, that unless you have studied asymmetric war like I have, you most likely aren't prepared for Trump and his attacks on you and the wider populace. This is not me boasting. This is me explaining why you probably still hold false beliefs with respect to Trump and Putin.
Now sixthly, you have to understand that Trump’s estimated 30,000 lies during his first term—20 to 30 a day—were not simply the result of ego. They were an operational pattern. Even when the lies repeated familiar shapes—“Russia hoax,” “witch hunt,” “perfect phone call,” “not a puppet”—they were retold with subtle variations, each version spawning new sub-arguments, new defensive positions, new confusions.
To keep up with Trump’s falsehoods is to try to defuse 30 small bombs every day. And the average person, working a job, raising a family, navigating life, simply doesn’t have the time or energy to dismantle that many devices. But that is part of the asymmetry we face, it takes little effort to lie. And lies take way more effort to refute than they take to tell. A lie can be spoken in seconds; the truth may take paragraphs, citations, time.
Seventhly, what’s more: Trump spreads his and Putin's lies like an asymmetric general fields a disordered army. Trump doesn’t need discipline or precision. He simply seeds his base with a myriad of false talking points. By the time someone in the thinking public encounters one of these lies—through a coworker, a family member, or a political ad—they often have no prepared refutation. That is the Byzantine Generals’ Problem: without a way to confirm shared reality, each node in the network operates on different, often contradictory information. It becomes impossible to coordinate.
This breakdown is not accidental. It is the point. And you MUST to see it as such if you can have any hope of understanding what is actually happening.
Because in that vacuum of no shared truth, Trump thrives. He can be anything to anyone. He can be victim or victor, savior or martyr, clown or conqueror—depending on the audience, the narrative, the need. And while his opponents scramble to respond to the latest absurdity, he moves on to the next one.
You need to know that it is exhausting by design. It is why every day you run into new foolish lies related to Trump.
So yes, Trump is part narcissist. But a narcissist does not like to appear foolish. And yet Trump is content to look ridiculous, to say things that no intelligent person would accept, because the chaos it causes helps him and Putin. Their lies are not a random flailing—they are strategic fog.
So eightly, I am asking you to really step back and do something which really shouldn't be all that hard given everything you know about Trump: imagine he is worse than you assume. Imagine his lies are not excess, but architecture. Imagine the nonsense is not confusion, but cover. Then you will see exactly what we’ve been fighting all along. And why truth is losing.
Finally, Trump is not just an American problem. He is the spearpoint of a larger asymmetric campaign. And until we name the tactic, we cannot defeat the tactic.
The real truth is this: we are not just contending with Trump. We are contending with the war he is part of. And what is that war? It is the one being waged by the Russians against, not just Ukraine, but the wider Western world.
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