Vitamin R: Vexler Has Spoken — Trump & Putin Still Wish to Defeat Ukraine and Undermine the Wider West
- john raymond
- Aug 7
- 3 min read
In his recent short-form commentary, Vlad Vexler outlines with sharp efficiency the mutual interests of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and how a potential meeting—real or not—symbolizes a persistent and dangerous alignment. Vexler notes their reciprocal need for image management: Putin wants status; Trump wants narcissistic supply. But that is only the visible layer. Beneath the surface lies a darker truth that Vexler alludes to but does not fully excavate: Putin is not merely Trump’s mirror, muse, or narcissistic supplier. Putin is Trump’s not-so-covert patron.
From the earliest days of Trump’s rise to political prominence, Kremlin-linked banks, oligarchs, and propaganda arms helped fund, launder, and manufacture the image of Trump as a viable strongman. Long before he stepped foot in the White House, Trump was financially dependent on Russian capital and politically dependent on Russian narrative warfare. His foreign policy reflected this truth—not as a matter of diplomacy, but of servitude. Trump’s deference to Putin is not just ideological. It is structural. It is a relationship of asset to handler, supplicant to sponsor.
This is what the West too often fails to see: Putin and Trump are co-conspirators in asymmetric warfare, not rivals. Their kabuki theater of friction—be it tariffs, public statements, or performative disagreements—is narrative management, nothing more. Their true objective is coordination: defeating Ukraine, destabilizing NATO, and ushering in a post-truth, post-democratic world where strongmen trade favors and the public remains dazed and divided.
Vexler captures much of this, especially in his breakdown of Putin’s war aims: maintaining leverage over Ukraine, destabilizing the West, weaponizing peace talks, keeping the option to restart war at will, and betting that Ukraine will weaken faster than Russia collapses. These aims are not hidden. They are stated openly in Russian military doctrine and enacted daily in the destruction of Ukrainian cities and sovereignty. But Vexler’s analysis becomes even more powerful when understood in tandem with what he omits: the nuclear kayfabe.
Since July, Trump and Putin have engaged in a theater of escalation over nuclear posturing—a carefully orchestrated drama designed to maintain attention, distract critics, and offer each other off-ramps. When Trump hints at “moving” submarines or alludes to retaliation, it’s not to scare Putin—it’s to arm Putin with talking points. When Putin reciprocates with veiled threats or rumors of new strategic weapons, he isn’t warning Trump—he’s writing the next line in Trump’s script. This is not brinkmanship in the traditional sense. It is collaborative misdirection, asymmetric deception played not against each other but against the democratic world.
And here lies the deeper danger: while the free world still argues over whether Trump is erratic or principled, and whether Putin is desperate or calculating, the two are busy shaping the narrative battlefield. They are not waiting for consensus. They are building momentum.
If a peace deal is brokered behind Ukraine’s back, it will not be because diplomacy prevailed. It will be because two autocrats successfully sidelined the democratic world by exploiting its slowness, its divisions, and its addiction to wishful thinking.
That is what Vexler ultimately warns us about. The war may “end” not through resolution, but through betrayal. A backroom deal. A corrupt handshake. A lie wrapped in peace language and delivered with just enough plausibility to divide the West once again.
And the drift toward this scenario is not theoretical. It is happening now, in real time, in the background of every headline.
So yes, Vexler has spoken—and he has done so clearly. Trump and Putin remain aligned. They are still working to defeat Ukraine. And they still wish to undermine the broader liberal West.
The rest of us should stop pretending otherwise.
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