The True Axis of Evil: Trump-Putin-Musk

Are they heading a vast right-wing conspiracy to take over this country and kill democracy in their endless pursuit of power and riches? Be surprised at nothing.

“With him, all roads lead to Putin. I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially,” Nancy Pelosi declared in 2020, referring to Donald Trump.

“Like Trump, [Elon] Musk cares only for his personal business dealings and his image. Putin, Xi, and other dictators always find such people easy to exploit because it’s also how they operate. No messy oversight, laws, or national interests, just quid pro quo,” posted Russian dissident Gary Kasparov on “X” recently.

In the past several days it has come to light that Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been in fairly regular contact with Vladimir Putin. Whatever they’re discussing, you can rest assured it’s not the kids, the weather or sports. In fact, you can forgive this former national security official for letting his imagination run wild with wicked thoughts. I conjure up a bad joke in my head: “A dictator, a sociopath and an oligarch walk into a bar…” You can bet the punchline won’t be funny.

So, the “Russia hoax,” amazingly, continues to have legs, marathon legs at that. Regarding the Trump camp, Nancy Pelosi was spot on. All roads lead to Russia, and Elon Musk has climbed aboard. And you can bet that the best interests of the American people is not what’s being discussed.

In his latest book, War, Bob Woodward reports that Trump has been carrying on direct conversations with Vladimir Putin since he left office, amounting to perhaps seven phone calls over the last four years.

The Wall Street Journal writes that Musk has been carrying on his own direct dialogue with the Russian strongman at least since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. According to the WSJ, “Knowledge of Musk’s Kremlin contacts appears to be a closely held secret in government. Several White House officials said they weren’t aware of them. One person aware of the conversations,” they wrote, conceded that “no alerts have been raised by the administration over possible security breaches by Musk.”

More, however, is known of the substance of the Elon-Vlad exchanges.

Musk has not only been chatting it up with Putin, but also with other senior Russian officials, notably first deputy chief of staff and architect of Russian disinformation Sergei Kiriyenko. Late last year, the U.S. Justice Department held him responsible for having created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s “X.” Kiriyenko, moreover, has been slapped with sanctions by the U.S., E.U., and U.K.

Ian Bremmer, head of the political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group, says Musk told him that Putin said to Musk that he was “prepared to negotiate” over Ukraine. But the terms he laid out — retaining Crimea and the other territory currently under Russian occupation and Ukrainian neutrality — are the same terms he has been pushing and rejected repeatedly by Kyiv. Putin added that if Zelensky invaded Crimea, Russia would retaliate with a nuclear strike against Ukraine.

Musk has been pushing the Kremlin line ever since Moscow issued threats to destroy Musk’s SpaceX satellites on which the Ukrainian military had relied. Musk biographer Walter Isaacson writes that Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, had warned Musk in September 2022 that Moscow would use the most powerful weapons in its arsenal if Ukrainian sea drones, guided by Musk’s Starlink communications system, were used to strike Russian naval vessels. “The ambassador had explicitly told him [Musk] that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response,” Isaacson recalls.

It was at that point that Musk rejected Ukrainian appeals to extend the coverage of the Starlink system to enable them to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in a Pearl Harbor-type assault. The company explained that the system was meant for civilian use only.

Since then Musk has been parroting the Kremlin line on Ukraine. In late 2022, as Ukrainian forces began pushing Russian troops from the eastern part of the country, Musk began calling for a halt to the Ukrainian advances. He has echoed Russian propaganda that Crimea is “absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia” as well as Moscow’s assertion that Russia would resort to nuclear war if Ukraine tried to recapture the peninsula.

And — Oh! — since Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukrainian forces have sunk around 15 large warships of Russia’s Black Sea fleet and damaged several others. Ukraine, furthermore, has launched numerous strikes and acts of sabotage in Crimea. There’s been no nuclear retaliation by Moscow. Musk has fallen hook, line and sinker for Russian bluster.

Trump has exercised greater communications security regarding his phone calls with Putin. He shoos away staffers during the calls. When he was president, Trump sometimes excluded U.S. officials, including State Department interpreters, when he met with Putin. At one point, he even confiscated a State interpreter’s notes and destroyed them.

Personally, I rule nothing out concerning Trump’s dealings with Putin. The smoking gun surfaced in the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. I’ve long maintained Trump has been a Russian intel asset for decades. The dimensions of his treason against America have no limit, in my view. One day, the details will emerge and will make Benedict Arnold look like a patriot by comparison.

And what is the world’s richest individual, the owner of the largest and most powerful social media platform, “X,” doing carrying on with Russia’s chief of disinformation, the man spearheading Putin’s schemes to sabotage our elections?

Tesla and SpaceX combined tally at least $15.4 billion in government contracts over the past decade, $11.8 billion with NASA alone. SpaceX is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA. Musk oversees some of the most highly classified programs of the U.S. government. Were he anything less than a corporate god, he would be stripped of his security clearances as a result of his murky dealings with Russian leaders. In my government career, I’d seen civil servants lose their clearances over much less.

Here’s the bottom line: both Trump and Musk are out of their depth when it comes to statecraft. They are being played by a wily Vladimir Putin to the great detriment of our country. As I said, Trump is definitely more than a “useful idiot.” Whether Musk is that or something more has yet to be determined.

And, of course, Musk is the fourth largest contributor to the Trump presidential campaign, pulling out all the stops to get his man elected.

Former National Security Council official and top Russia expert Fiona Hill, in an interview with POLITICO, lays out succinctly how these men are being manipulated:

Putin wants to see the United States weak. In a private conversation, he will be pushing out messages that reinforce his preferences — advising, perhaps cajoling, Trump to do or say certain things. Unfortunately, this messaging might be working — a lot of the statements that President Trump and people around him, like vice presidential candidate JD Vance, have made about the war in Ukraine sound exactly like the statements that Putin has made about his preferences for how the war in Ukraine ends.

Musk’s takeover of X has weaponized disinformation from Russia, from China, Iran, North Korea and other countries that have the United States as an adversary. And we have to ask, why is Musk not stopping that?

I describe the dangers of amateur hour statesmen like Trump and Musk in my last piece, “The Problem with Diplomatic Freebooters.” I recount the case of Armand Hammer, a wealthy industrialist who was a darling of the DC Beltway power set for decades and who inserted himself into high stakes negotiations between Washington and Moscow over Afghanistan in the 1980s. It wasn’t until years after his death that we learned that Hammer had been a KGB agent of influence.

Just how nefarious is the Trump-Putin-Musk axis? Are they heading a vast right-wing conspiracy to take over this country and kill democracy in their endless pursuit of power and riches? Be surprised at nothing, and recall Alexander Pope’s warning, “When to mischief mortals bend their will, how soon they find fit instruments of ill!”

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