Trump Is What Happens When Treachery Becomes a Way of Life
- john raymond
- 1 minute ago
- 6 min read
Trump did not invent the treachery that now defines American politics. He is what you get when twenty years of elite lying, impunity, and quiet collusion finally mature into open alignment with a hostile power. The Bush administration’s deliberate manipulation of Iraq WMD intelligence normalized strategic deceit at the highest levels of government.
President Trump then finished the job—with Russian help—by turning treachery from an episodic scandal into a permanent operating system.
Once you see the continuum—Bush’s Iraq lies, the failure to clean them up, Manafort’s Kremlin pipeline into Trump, and now Witkoff and Kushner workshopping Russia’s Ukraine terms with Putin—the pattern is not mysterious. It is the Raymond Method in sequence: Pillar One (regime security) weaponized under Bush; Pillar Two (asymmetric warfare) perfected by Russian active measures; Pillar Three (traitor-general) embodied by Trump and his inner circle.
Trump is not the accident. He is a culmination.
I. Bush: When the State Learns Lying Works
The ecosystem began in earnest with the run-up to the Iraq War.
By 2002–2003, senior Bush officials were publicly insisting that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and was actively pursuing an arsenal of terror, despite significant internal dissent about the quality of the intelligence
Post-war investigations concluded that U.S. intelligence on Iraqi WMD was “dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments,” and that the administration exaggerated weak claims, sidelined caveats, and built a case for war that the underlying evidence did not support.
The point is not that intelligence can be mistaken; that happens. The point is that the political leadership learned something catastrophic:
You can massively distort reality for political gain.
You can get hundreds of thousands of people killed on false pretenses.
You can survive domestically with minimal accountability.
In Raymond-Method terms:
Pillar One – Regime Security: Bush and Cheney made regime-security calculations—about personal prestige and domestic standing—and let those override fidelity to the facts.
Pillar Two – Asymmetric Warfare: They waged a narrative war on their own public, using cherry-picked intel and fear rhetoric as asymmetric tools against democratic oversight.
The result was not just a disastrous war. It was a proof of concept: if you control the narrative and your coalition is loyal enough, you can lie on a civilization-scale and pay no real price.
That is the treachery ecosystem Trump would later inherit.
II. The Russian Bridge: Manafort Builds the Pipeline
Between Bush and Trump, a different process was underway on the Eurasian front. Paul Manafort—future Trump campaign chairman—spent years building a business model on the seam between Russian power and corrupt, Russia-leaning elites in Ukraine.
He worked for Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin-aligned president of Ukraine, and for oligarchs with deep ties to Moscow, earning tens of millions in the process.
He partnered closely with Konstantin Kilimnik, identified by U.S. investigators as linked to Russian intelligence.
During the 2016 campaign, Manafort didn’t cut those ties; he operationalized them. The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded that Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik represented a “grave counterintelligence threat” and found that Manafort shared internal Trump campaign polling data with this Russian-linked operative.
In parallel, the Mueller investigation documented at least 140 contacts between Trump associates and Russian actors, established that Russian election interference was “sweeping and systematic,” and that the Trump campaign welcomed that help—even if prosecutors did not charge a criminal conspiracy.
This is the connective tissue:
Bush normalized lying at home.
Manafort and others normalized Russian-aligned treachery abroad.
By 2016, that external treachery had a direct line into a major U.S. presidential campaign.
The treachery ecosystem now had a transnational nervous system—with Manafort and his network as key synapses between Kremlin interests and Trump’s rise.
III. Trump: When the Traitor-General Takes the Throne
Enter President Trump, whose life pattern already fit the regime-security template: loyalty as a one-way street, permanent war on oversight, and truth as a negotiable commodity.
What changed with Trump was the fusion of that personality with the Russian bridge Manafort and others, including himself, had built:
A leader instinctively willing to betray institutions to save himself.
A foreign power eager to exploit that willingness.
An already degraded truth-environment, courtesy of Iraq and the failure to reckon with it.
In Raymond-Method terms, Trump is the first U.S. president to fully occupy Pillar Three – the Traitor-General paradigm: an internal leader whose practical alignment repeatedly converges with the interests of a hostile regime.
You see it structurally:
He treats U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement as enemies whenever they investigate Russian interference.
He seeks to weaken NATO cohesion while flattering Putin and undermining Ukraine.
He staffs his orbit with figures like Manafort, Flynn, Giuliani, and now Witkoff—men already embedded in Russian or pro-Russian networks.
None of this is an accident. It is what happens when the treachery ecosystem built under Bush (elite impunity for catastrophic lying) meets the Russian ecosystem built through Manafort (Kremlin leverage through corrupt intermediaries) and finds a host—Trump—who is temperamentally optimized for betrayal.
Once in power, the ecosystem stopped being subclinical. It became the regime.
IV. Witkoff, Kushner, and the Moscow Coda
The Witkoff–Kushner episode is not a weird detour; it is the endgame of the same pattern.
Reuters has now reported that Trump’s 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine drew heavily from a Russian-authored paper submitted to his administration.
Bloomberg then revealed that Steve Witkoff—Trump’s designated “envoy”—held a call with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov in which he advised Moscow on how to pitch that plan to President Trump, explicitly suggesting they work together and that Putin should raise it with him directly.
Witkoff and Jared Kushner then flew to Moscow, where they spent over four hours with Putin discussing a revised version of that plan. The Kremlin emerged saying there would be “no compromise” on territory; Putin reiterated his demand that Ukraine be kept out of NATO and that Russia retain its conquests.
Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is simple:
A U.S. president whose campaign rode into office on Russian help.
An inner circle that has long-standing business and political entanglements with Russia and pro-Russian actors.
A “peace plan” drafted in Russian, laundered through U.S. intermediaries, and taken back to Moscow for refinement.
That is not conventional diplomacy. That is the traitor-general structure fully expressed at the level of grand strategy.
V. The Through-Line: From WMD Lies to Open Collusion
Put in sequence, the story looks like this:
Bush proves large-scale deceit can be politically survivable. The Iraq WMD fabrication teaches American elites that you can sell a war on manufactured premises and avoid serious consequences.
The system refuses to fully reckon with that treachery. There is no political Nuremberg for the Iraq lie. No structural reform that makes future elite deceit existentially dangerous.
Russian power learns to weaponize Western venality. Through Manafort and others, Moscow discovers that Western consultants and politicians will work for Kremlin-aligned oligarchs and strongmen for cash and influence.
Trump arrives as the perfect host. A man already disposed to betray institutions, surrounded by Russia-tied operators, steps into a system that has never truly punished elite deception, just managed it.
Treachery globalizes. What began as lying to the American public about Iraq evolves into a presidency structurally aligned with a hostile state, culminating in joint drafting sessions with the Kremlin over the fate of Ukraine.
This is not a series of disconnected scandals. It is a single arc: treachery first tolerated, then monetized, then externalized, then enthroned.
VI. Trump Was the Inevitable Endpoint
Trump is what happens when treachery becomes a way of life—not just for one man, but for a political class that learned, starting in the Bush years, that lying about matters of war and peace carried little cost.
The Iraq WMD deception broke the guardrails. The Manafort–Russia pipeline built the bridge. Russian interference in 2016 stress-tested the architecture. Trump stepped into the space that architecture had created, and now Witkoff and Kushner in Moscow are closing the circle.
In Raymond-Method terms:
Pillar One explains why Bush lied and why Trump will betray anyone to survive.
Pillar Two explains how Russia weaponized information, corruption, and narrative to amplify that treachery.
Pillar Three explains how Trump, Manafort, Witkoff, and Kushner function as traitor-generals—internal actors serving external power.
Trump is not the deviation from American politics; he is its diagnosis. He is what the system produces when treachery stops being the scandal and becomes the norm.