Vlad Vexler Is Too Good of a Person – Can’t Imagine Someone Worse Than the Bog-Standard Narcissist
- john raymond
- Aug 22
- 3 min read
Vlad Vexler’s analysis of President Trump is incisive in its psychology but fatally limited in its refusal to contemplate the darker, more likely structural truth.
Vexler interprets Trump’s worship of Vladimir Putin as the impulsivity of a narcissist, blind to geopolitical reality.
What he cannot bring himself to imagine is that the narcissism is itself a mask—that beneath it lies something worse: Trump as an active participant in a blackmail and kompromat architecture, an FSB/KGB operation designed to entrap both himself and others.
The Strength and Weakness of Vexler’s Frame
Vexler excels at capturing the theater of Trump’s dependency. He identifies Trump’s craving for Putin’s approval as a pathological pursuit of narcissistic supply, reducing global strategy to personal obsession. He is correct that Trump cannot process Russia as a regime but only as a “friendship.”
Yet his diagnosis stops there, as if the compulsive display explains itself. Vexler insists there is no Epstein-style leverage, because Trump’s praise of Putin is too impulsive, too voluntary.
Here, Vexler’s virtue is his limit. A decent man, he cannot stomach the possibility that Trump’s “voluntary” loyalty is not the absence of coercion but the perfection of it—where compulsion and self-indulgence fuse into a single state of moral and political capture.
The Raymond Method: Why Worse Must Be Considered
The Raymond Method forces us where gentler minds will not go.
Pillar One: Regime Security. Trump’s fate is tied to Putin’s survival. If Moscow’s grip falters, Trump’s kompromat exposure detonates with it. Trump flailing about and trying to help Russia all but proves he knows he is tied to Putin’s fate.
Pillar Two: Asymmetric Warfare. What appears as buffoonish impulsivity is in fact the ideal cover for Russian strategy: a man who destabilizes the West by accident, while in truth he is following the grooves long dug by his handlers.
Pillar Three: The Byzantine Traitor-General. A man who sells out his nation under the guise of friendship. To understand this Pillar, one must grasp Pillar Two—why asymmetric strategy thrives in men who hide their betrayal beneath the performance of incompetence or “mere” narcissism.
Good men like Vexler resist this final step because it requires conceding that Trump is not a useful idiot but a willing traitor, perhaps even the head of the very blackmail machine that the Kremlin designed for him and Epstein.
The Darker Possibility
The evidence of Trump’s entanglement in trafficking, abuse, and compromise networks is not speculative fantasy but an extension of what is already public: his decades of sexual predation, his proximity to Epstein, the lawsuits, the corroborated testimonies, the pattern of exploitation.
To imagine Trump as merely an egotist who stumbled into Putin’s glow is comforting. To confront the possibility that he was the operator of a child-sex blackmail architecture aligned with Russian intelligence is to see the full horror of our age.
Implications for Honest Analysis
The tragedy of our moment is that decent analysts—Vexler foremost among them—hesitate to descend into this abyss.
But asymmetric war requires us to imagine the worst-case not as a paranoid stretch but as the most likely baseline.
The true analyst must go where conscience resists: into the darker possibility that explains not only Trump’s behavior but his continued political survival.
Vexler’s humanity keeps him from this conclusion. But the Raymond Method demands it.
For only when we admit that the mask of “bog-standard narcissism” conceals something far worse can we diagnose the true nature of the threat Trump and Putin pose.
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