"Russia, if you're listening . . . ": My Big Fat Holiday Conspiracy Theory

How Putin and a cabal of far-right billionaires put Trump in power, conspire to do it again, and plan to install a fascist regime in 2025.

c/o NBC

With the holidays upon us and in the spirit of the times, I herewith spread my own conspiracy cheer with my take on how a major foreign adversary successfully installed in the highest office of the land one of its long-recruited American traitors, boosted by a torrent of dark money provided by far-right, rich-as-Croesus plutocrats hell-bent on turning back the clock of social progress and making themselves even richer in the process. And how they plan to do it again. The ultimate goal of this sprawling plot is to overthrow democracy and turn the United States into a fascist state headed by an American quisling. My premise is based on some hard facts, lots of circumstantial evidence and an unfettered imagination. Regard this admittedly fevered polemic in the category of “just sayin’,” put out there to get folks thinking. After all, the writing is on the wall in bright neon letters. If even half of what I posit here is true, you can start practicing your stiff-arm salute now, buy your loved ones armbands for Christmas and anticipate enlisting your kids in the Trump Youth. We begin with a literary twist. . .

A Christmas Carol

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Trump! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years, but it had begun to wear the signs of orange and avarice. There was an eager, greedy motion in the eye.

Trump, lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist, along the ground, towards him.

 “I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?” said Trump.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed downward with his hand.

“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,” Trump pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”

The Phantom slowly nodded.

“You are fettered,” said Trump, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied Putin. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it and imposed it upon millions. Being complicit with me, these chains pass on to you.”

Trump recoiled and shuddered. “Tell me Phantom. What is my fate then?”

The Phantom Putin spread his dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a single thumb, pointing down.

The Recruitment

“Trump was compromised, but we’re not sure exactly how,” wrote former CIA clandestine service officer specializing in Russia John Sipher in the Washington Post.

Ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele asserts that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for “at least five years” before his 2016 electoral win.

“Russian intelligence gained an interest in Trump as far back as 1977, viewing Trump as an exploitable target,” according to former KGB major Yuri Shvets, who had served in Washington. He claims that Trump became the target of a joint Czech and Russian spying operation after he married his Czech-born first wife, Ivana, in 1977 and has been an asset of Russian intelligence ever since. “The guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter,” he added.

“This past weekend is a great demonstration to me of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he’s doing with the president,” said former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a 52-year veteran of U.S. intelligence, just after Trump’s embarrassing 2018 summit with Putin in Helsinki.

Former CIA director John Brennan, who has accused Trump of “treason,” tweeted: “He is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

“At some point, he was co-opted by Vladimir Putin. And that means he bought into and embraced the dictatorial ideology that was done by a spymaster of the KGB,” Malcolm Nance, a 20-year veteran of naval intelligence and frequent commentator on intelligence matters, said in an interview.

“In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” wrote ex-acting CIA director Mike Morell in the New York Times.

Putin’s Plot

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released an intelligence community assessment in 2017 outlining Russian interference in the 2016 election. It stated that Putin personally ordered an “influence campaign” to damage Hillary Clinton’s electoral chances and “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” Key to this effort was a massive cyber campaign and recruiting assets inside the Trump camp.

According to the New York Times’ research, “Donald J. Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition.”

A 2018 grand jury indictment of 16 Russian actors involved in the plot validated the intelligence community’s findings, namely, operations by Russia “to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Ex-CIA ops officer John Sipher backs all of this up:

His campaign team — with its own unusual shady ties to Russia — was willing to work with a hostile foreign power and eager to accept material stolen from Americans. None went to the authorities to report the illicit contacts, and many of them were subsequently arrested. When the issue of Russian involvement surfaced publicly, every single one of them lied and covered up their actions. Trump then attacked the very institutions that could hold him to account and sought to obstruct investigations, eventually pardoning anyone who could provide evidence of wrongdoing. Even Trump’s most fervent supporters have been unable to provide an innocent explanation for why a domestic political campaign would need such deep engagement with a hostile foreign power.

In his book, The Folly and the Glory, author Tim Weiner concludes that “Putin had pulled off the most audacious political warfare operation since the Greeks pushed a gigantic wooden horse up to the gates of Troy.” And once in the White House, by constantly denying that Putin’s political warfare against the United States had occurred, “Trump would prove to be a priceless asset for the Russians’ war on democracy and the rule of law.”

The Damage

If I were Trump’s SVR or GRU case officer, I would instruct him to 1) destroy NATO and insult our allies, 2) attack and undercut the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, State Department, 3) revoke Russia sanctions and end aid to Ukraine, 4) take no actions to counter Russian cyber-attacks, 5) wreck liberal democracy. I agree that Trump is a dream asset. He followed these points in full when president and, rest assured, will amp up his efforts once back in the Oval Office.

The following, moreover, nail Trump as being suborned by Russian kompromat: utter supineness before Vladimir Putin; secrecy surrounding his meetings with the Russian leader, including excluding U.S. officials, confiscating interpreters’ notes, or relying solely on Putin’s interpreter; Jared Kushner’s effort to establish a secret a communications back channel with the Russian embassy; echoing Putin’s revisionist history regarding Montenegro as a threat, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine; secretly pursuing building a Trump tower in Moscow while campaigning for president; and his son’s revelation that “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Follow the Money

In his book, Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, NYT reporter David Enrich follows Trump’s murky money trail. He told an interviewer:

Real estate is one of the preferred vehicles for people who are looking to hide money or launder money or whisk money out of countries where it’s not safe to keep it. And Trump is a real estate guy and has done business over the years with a lot of people who fit those characteristics. Back in the mid-2000s, a role that Deutsche Bank played for Trump was helping him find investors, including a bunch of wealthy Russians and people tied to the Kremlin, to invest in or purchase condos in resorts that he was planning or that his name was going to be on. Look, that is kind of what banks do and it’s kind of what wealthy Russians do, but the way it was being done definitely raised some concerns among some executives. Trump is a guy who has worked with organized crime figures in the past. He’s doing business with a lot of people and institutions and countries that are sources of flight capital, and there are big money laundering risks associated with doing business like that.

A Reuters investigation found that at least 63 Russians bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.

Trump bought a Palm Beach mansion in 2004 for more than $41 million. He tried to flip it but had trouble selling the sprawling 62,000-square foot property. Then in 2008, Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev purchased it for $95 million, nearly double what Trump paid for it, profiting him by more than $50 million. Michael Cohen told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Trump said he believed the deal “had to be with the permission of Vladimir Putin.” Suspecting money laundering, Democrats on the Hill demanded an investigation by the Treasury Department. While there was smoke, no fire was found.

In 2019, the House Financial Services Committee announced it was “examining whether Mr. Trump’s foreign business deals and financial ties were part of the Russian government’s efforts to entangle business and political leaders in corrupt activity or otherwise obtain leverage over them,” citing, for example, Deutsche Bank’s having loaned Trump $2.5 billion and continued lending to him even after he defaulted on a $640 million obligation. Author David Enrich said, the bank was “laundering money for wealthy Russians and people connected to Putin and the Kremlin in a variety of ways for almost the exact time period that they were doing business with Donald Trump.” He added that Deutsche Bank was “laundering money for wealthy Russians and people connected to Putin and the Kremlin in a variety of ways for almost the exact time period that they were doing business with Donald Trump. And all of that money through Deutsche Bank was being channeled through the same exact legal entity in the U.S. that was handling the Donald Trump relationship in the U.S. And so there are a lot of coincidences here.”

In the 2016 presidential campaign, an oligarch close to Putin spent more than $1 million a month on social media campaigns favoring Trump, according to the 2018 indictment of 16 Russian actors who allegedly interfered in the election.

Dark money from undisclosed donors amounted to over $1.4 billion in the 2016 elections, according to Open Secrets. That’s up from the $1 billion these groups — mostly super PACs and 501(c) organizations — spent in 2012, and greatly up from the $338 million spent in 2008. Such murky contributions go to both parties. My multi-hour research into cash flows to the 2016 Trump campaign left me confused and bleary-eyed. Billionaires such as the Mercer family and Koch network dominate this peculiarly American legalized corruption. By all indicators, 2024 will break all records.

2024-2025

So, my Big Fat Holiday Conspiracy Theory prediction for 2024 and beyond is this: The same players who assaulted our democracy in 2016 and 2020-2021 will do so again. Trump’s Russian handler, Vladimir Putin, will launch another all-out cyber campaign to reinstall his favorite marionette in the White House. The vast right-wing conspiracy to rid the country of democratic governance grows bigger by the day, helmed by the likes of retrograde plutocrats like Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel and ilk, armed with oceans of dark money and abetted by a subservient Supreme Court that would make Il Duce proud. Add to this toxic brew corrupt, megalomaniacal members of Congress straight out of an Oliver Stone movie script and, most importantly, a fat, dumb and complacent voting public bamboozled by the culture wars, who take freedom and democracy for granted; many will be shocked by the white Christian-nationalist theocracy that will lord over them. But it will be too late.

Should Trump win, radical “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute, which have been assiduously building a shadow government over many months, on Day 1 will unleash a reign of terror called “Project 2025.” It begins with mass dismissals of career government workers who will then be replaced by fanatical MAGA shock troops hell-bent on implementing Trump’s Campaign of Retribution aimed at hounding his countless enemies, aided by an Orwellian Justice Department. And on the foreign policy front, Putin will call the shots, starting with the U.S. abandoning Ukraine, withdrawal from NATO and forging of a Greater Eurasian Co-Prosperity Sphere of new-era fascist regimes, led by Moscow and Putin’s new lap dog ally, President-for-Life Donald J. Trump.

The above may, or may not, unfold. In the classic holiday film It’s a Wonderful Life an angel shows the protagonist, George Bailey, an alternate reality in which his community, the Rockwellian Bedford Falls, now “Pottersville,” is an unsavory place with sleazy bars, crime and callous people who live in fear. In 2024, Americans will decide whether they wish to live in Bedford Falls or Pottersville. It’s all up to the American voter — the same ones who have been registering in polls their support for indicted felon Donald Trump over Joe Biden. May God help us.

And with that, Merry Christmas (Happy Hanukkah, etc.) To All...And To All A Good Night!

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.