Why Getting It Right Is Important: See the Asymmetric War for What It Is
- john raymond
- Jun 11
- 3 min read
It is no longer enough to say that we are in a political crisis. We are in a state of war—an asymmetric war, designed not with battle lines but with corrupted narratives, media echo chambers, and power redirected from the many to the few. This war has rules—doctrines—and America has spent the last decade breaking every one of them by refusing to name its enemies plainly. At the center of this cowardice is one enduring failure: the refusal to acknowledge, factually and epistemically, that Donald Trump is a witting Russian asset.
This isn’t theory. It isn’t exaggeration. It is not a claim in need of a hedge. It is a matter of documented, public fact. For decades—starting as far back as the 1980s—Trump has cultivated relationships with Russian state actors, banks, oligarchs, and agents. His businesses were propped up with Russian money when no American bank would touch him. His rhetoric aligned with the Kremlin’s long before he ever entered politics. And since 2015, he has operated openly and unapologetically in ways that serve Vladimir Putin’s interests, often at the direct expense of American national security.
To misunderstand Trump as merely foolish or chaotic is not a lesser kind of error. It is a strategic failure in an ongoing psychological war. Trump is not improvising. He is executing. Every delay of sanctions, every attack on NATO, every lie about Ukraine, every moment of confusion sown into American political discourse—these are not missteps. They are victories for his benefactors in Moscow.
This is asymmetric warfare: not about winning arguments, but about breaking systems. Not about consensus, but the destruction of consensus. Putin’s strategy, followed to the letter by Trump, is not to win through force but to make force unnecessary by rotting out the institutions that might resist it. And yet the American media, and many of its voters, keep treating Trump like a conventional actor. They ask if he "really believes" what he says, if he's truly this ignorant or just theatrical. These are the wrong questions. They presume a framework—democratic good faith—that does not exist.
What does exist is a pattern. And patterns matter more than press releases. Trump’s pattern is one of obedience—to power, to chaos, and to Putin. Every time he attacks American intelligence agencies, he strengthens Russia. Every time he undermines the press, he clears space for disinformation. Every time he questions democratic elections, he weakens deterrence against further foreign interference. And in 2025, his second term is already taking the same shape—this time with fewer checks and more loyalists.
We cannot counter this with “civility.” We cannot meet this war with polite disagreement or bipartisan nostalgia. You do not defuse a Russian intelligence operation with wishful thinking. You do it by identifying the operation and seeing through its vectors with clarity and truth. This war is being fought through perception, through narrative, through systems of trust—and Trump is a vector of foreign control. He is not a bystander. He is the weapon.
And so, the stakes become clear. If you get this wrong, you lose. You don’t just lose elections. You lose epistemic coherence. You lose the public’s ability to understand what’s real. You lose the very concept of truth as a shared framework for resistance.
Too many institutions still operate as if time will sort this out. They imagine history will settle accounts, that reality will eventually assert itself. But asymmetric war doesn’t wait for history. It consumes its target before the facts are even written. And the longer we pretend this is just politics-as-usual, the more damage we do to the very ground truth stands on.
So let us be unequivocal. Let us stop entertaining alternate explanations that exist only to comfort the complicit. Donald Trump is a Russian asset. He acts as one, speaks as one, and governs as one. There is no benefit of the doubt. There is only the reality we live in, and the clarity we choose to have. If we are to survive this moment, we must get it right. Because getting it wrong is no longer ignorance.
It is surrender.
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