America First? Not by a Long Shot*
Putin First, a Fully Compromised Trump Second, and America — Under the Bus with the Allies It has Betrayed — Last
I quote below from Rachell Maddow on her Friday show. That was the day an American president definitively merged the United States with the “axis of evil.”[i] On behalf of a tyrant, Trump unsuccessfully used Russian propaganda to bully a courageous warrior — the democratically elected leader of a country under Russian invasion and a three-year sustained attack — into waving the white flag. The United States through Trump and craven cowards in the congress are doing that now.
That was the day Trump lectured Zelensky about his “fellow victim” in the “Russia hoax”: “‘Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,’ . . . as though they were Army buddies. ‘He went through a phony witch hunt[ii] where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. You see the hatred he’s got for Putin,’ Trump said of Zelensky. ‘It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate.’” Trump Is Rootin’ for Putin (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, March 1, 2025). Yes, it is difficult to understand how the leader of a country that Russia attacked and has relentlessly bombed, from which it has kidnapped thousands of children, and where it has killed tens of thousands of its citizens in a sustained campaign to steal its land, resources, people, culture, and autonomy, could hold anything but love for Putin.
Ms. Maddow invited her audience to engage in a clever thought experiment:
“Imagine . . . if the Putin government somehow could exert control or influence over the government of the United States. What do you think the Putin government would have the U.S. government do if he could control it? What kind of headlines would you expect to see about the operations of our government under that kind of a scenario? And what would you expect the news out of the Oval Office and the White House to look like on a day like today?”
Some pundits and former diplomats and a few pols walk right up to the edge of the cliff, peek over at the jagged rocks far below, and back away. There is no soft landing for anyone who displays the courage to jump by naming what it obviously is.
After witnessing Trump’s second attempt to extort Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, this one at the White House in a mob-style mugging, which the former Apprentice star touted would “be great television” — and it was . . . for Russian state T.V.[iii] — let’s not pretend it’s anything other than what the compelling, overwhelming evidence supports and the obvious answer to Rachel Maddow’s thought experiment: it’s no hypothetical.
The American executive is fully compromised, and not just intellectually and with personality disorders. He is an asset. He has turned many GOP officials, MAGAs mostly, including Utah’s Mike Lee,[iv] into the Kremlin’s useful idiots. During senate and congressional hearings, on X and other toxic platforms, and in front of cameras from early in his first term until now, many congresspeople, mostly Freedom Caucus types, spew Russian propaganda in defense of the indefensible. Trump’s agenda — his scheme to hand Russia the spoils of Putin’s intended land-grab, his betrayal of the EU and the 80-year alliance that has sustained the international order, and the literal destruction of America from within — is nothing less than doing Putin’s bidding. Later, I discuss possible reasons why that is.
As chronicled in her recent episode on the evening of the Kremlin’s Oval Office ambush of President Zelensky, Rachel Maddow walks right up to the cliff’s edge and jumps, sort of. Even under a Trumpian definition of “America first,”[v] this isn’t it. She “look[ed] at a string of peculiar behavior by Donald Trump and Trump administration policies that don’t seem to have the welfare of the United States as their goal, and wonders who those policies are good for if they aren’t good for the U.S.”
Hmmm. I wonder. Who could it be? I envision the Church Lady mixing up “Satan” with “Putin.”
Maddow first plays a collection of news clips from before and after the election in which reporters ask Trump if he has spoken with Putin. He repeatedly answers, “I don’t want to say,” or “I don’t talk about that,” or “I don’t ever say.”
Maddow asks in various ways, why not? Trump brags about his conversations with other world leaders. Why not Putin? She does not finish the thought by stating the obvious, that Trump is acting under Putin’s orders to keep his fucking mouth shut.
Maddow identifies actions by the new administration that Republican members of the house and senate seem to be having difficulty addressing with constituents. I encourage you to watch the short segment from her show if you haven’t, Maddow connects the dots on Donald Trump’s behavior toward Russia. Her list and analysis of the administration’s actions, in my view, leave little room for any possibility other than Trump is Putin’s bitch, IMO.
Maddow says, “What exactly is it that we are doing up to and including switching sides in a war? But it’s not limited to that. It’s all things that don’t seem like good news for the United States . . . . With Donald Trump back in the White House, we keep doing these things, relentlessly, and urgently, and they all cut in the same direction. It’s really hard for Republicans to explain because of what it obviously means. . . . [I]t gets all the more clear when you just line this stuff up. Let me show you what I mean”
“Here’s one. Donald Trump’s hand-picked attorney general, she gets sworn in to lead the U.S. Justice Department. On her first day on the job, what is the first thing she does?
“Headline:
“‘U.S. Cuts Task Forces on Foreign Influences and Russian Sanctions. In a memo sent to staff Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed she had disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, a unit dedicated to investigating violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Bondi did not elaborate but figures on the Republican Party’s conspiratorial far right have accused the government of abusing FARA to unfairly target political operatives, like Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager who was indicted in a probe into Russian influence in that year’s US election.’
“‘Also on Wednesday, the day of her swearing-in, Bondi disbanded the Task Force KleptoCapture, an initiative started in 2022 to enforce sanctions on Russia.’
Maddow asks, “Who’s all that good for? Shutting down the Foreign Influence Task Force? Shutting down enforcement of the Foreign Agent’s Registration Act, and getting rid of the Task Force that enforces sanctions against Russia? Who are all those things good for? Why’d we do those things? And so urgently, her first day on the job?
“Here’s another one that happened that same day. . . .
“‘Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a halt to a years-old federal law enforcement effort to combat secret influence campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries that try to curry favor and sow chaos in American politics. . . . [T]he order disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Last year, Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents exposed an alleged scheme in which Russia-backed media funneled $10 million to a conservative media company that hired prominent right-wing influencers.’ Here’s how The New York Times bannered that one, bluntly: ‘Trump Dismantled Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations. Dozens of employees who had been working to fight foreign interference in U.S. elections have been reassigned or forced out.’ That includes not only the FBI but also CISA, the Cybersecurity division at Homeland Security, which we soon learned the president’s top campaign donor had installed a 19-year-old operative, [Edward “Big Balls” Coristine] who reportedly personally operates websites in Russia and who has been associated with multiple criminal cyber hacking gangs. That’s who the president’s top campaign donor installed at CISA, giving him full access to systems and data at the U.S. Cybersecurity Agency. A 19-year-old kid with ties to Russia and cybercrime.[vi]
“Who’s that good for? How do you explain to your constituents who that’s good for? And why we are doing that as a country? . . .
“What else is hard to explain to ye old constituents when it comes to that radical switch in the U.S. government . . . ? How about this: “C.IA. Plans Largest Mass Firing in Nearly 50 Years.’
“Well, that’s good for someone. Who’s that good for?
“That came right after this: ‘Trump’s new hand-picked C.I.A. director sent a list of C.I.A. employees to the White House in an unclassified email. Current officials confirmed that the C.I.A. had sent the names of employees to the Office of Personnel Management, complying with an executive order signed by President Trump. Senator Mark Warner, top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote that the sharing of the officers’ names was “a disastrous national security development.” One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”’
“Ah, yes, a disaster for the United States, for U.S. intelligence in particular. But very good news for someone.
“Speaking of things that ought to be classified, headline, ‘How Trump’s security clearances order could make the U.S. vulnerable. The plan to give temporary clearances without background checks opens the door to breaches and espionage, experts say.’ Giving out security clearances without background checks that look for things like criminal entanglements, lots of debt, anything that they could blackmail you over, or any contacts with foreign governments, to make sure that you’re not, you know, secretly working for . . . . We’re not doing the background checks anymore. Trump just has ordered that the classified material be made available to whoever he says, with no checks.
“That doesn’t seem like good news for the United States. But again, it’s good news for someone.
“How about when they decided that the first agency they would destroy would be USAID? Who cheered the loudest for that? ‘Russia Welcomes USAID Cuts, Calls Agency “Machine for Interfering.”’
“It was fantastic news for someone. No one was seen to benefit more or to be more loudly cheering it on than Vladimir Putin.
“And that was before the specific news, confirmed today, that among the projects Trump is explicitly and specifically turning off, right now, this week, is the program by which the U.S. helps Ukraine keep its electric grid up and running, even though Russia has repeatedly targeted that electric grid throughout the war. Because Russia’s idea of how it wants to win the unprovoked war it declared on our ally is to make the civilian population, including kids and the elderly, hospital patients and everyone, their best idea for how to prosecute that war is to cause them to freeze to death by bombing the electric grid in February. So more than any other evident targeting, they have targeted the electric grid that serves the civilian population in Ukraine. It is the United States that has helped Ukraine masterfully keep the power grid up despite those repeated onslaughts by Russia, until this week when Trump just cut it off.
“Which is good news for someone, right?
“President dressed up the defense secretary he hand picked off the cast of the Fox and Friends weekend show, put him in a bright blue suit and sent him to Europe where he volunteered, unasked, that Ukraine can’t be expected to keep all of its own territory. He said that would be ‘unrealistic.’ It would be ‘unrealistic’ to not let Russia take parts of Ukraine. He then volunteered, unasked, that Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO.
“We’ve pro-Trump Republican senators saying, yeah, not just Ukraine won’t be allowed in NATO, we ought to get out of NATO too which, of course, would collapse NATO.
“Who would that most benefit? For whom would that be really really good news?
“Donald Trump says let’s let Russia back into the G-7.
“Donald Trump is reportedly preparing right now for his own big in-person summit with Vladimir Putin.
“Donald Trump already started high-level meetings between the Russian and U.S. governments, including an inexplicable 3.5 hour meeting specifically between the president’s real estate friend and Vladimir Putin himself. Steve Witkoff came back from that meeting and how’d that go?
“Went pretty well for someone.
“Headline: ‘Parroting Putin and Trump, Witkoff says Russia was ‘Provoked’ into invading Ukraine.’
“Headline: ‘Trump Envoy Can’t Name a Single Concession Russia Will Make in Peace Deal.’”
(Emphasis added.)
Back to Rachel Maddow’s thought experiment. If Putin could exert control over the U.S. government, what kind of headlines would you expect to see about the operations of our government? And what would you expect the news out of the Oval Office and the White House to look like on the day the Ukrainian president visited?
The headlines would be the same as or very similar to those highlighted above. It is beyond peradventure, in my opinion, that Trump is taking express direction from Putin and, if not, he is clearly obeying in advance.
Why has Trump turned against America’s longstanding allies including Ukraine in favor of Russia and set out to destroy the United States from within?
Shortly after the last presidential election, I posted, Trump Will Continue Advancing Putin’s Goals to Reduce U.S. Credibility and Undermine its Longstanding Alliances (Medium, December 1, 2024). There I hypothesized a couple of reasons.
Everyone knows Trump admires and envies strongmen and will eagerly suffer any slight or indignity and surrender to any fawning gesture for their acceptance and admission to the fraternity. Putin allowed a Russian state-run television program to “congratulate” Trump on his 2024 win by displaying sexually charged photos of a nude and scantily clad past and future first lady from her days as a model. ANALYSIS: Kremlin Power Games Begin: Exposing Melania Nude Photos on State TV (Katie Livingstone, Kyiv Post, November 11, 2024). Livingstone suggested the message was meant to set the “Kremlin’s power dynamic of the Putin-Trump and Moscow-Washington relationships.” Livingstone thought the “stunt” was also a reminder that the Kremlin may possess material that could embarrass or politically damage Trump, although it’s become near impossible to imagine anything that could accomplish either.
Stroking Trump’s fragile ego and playing to his desperate insecurity, Putin more recently said Trump “is an intelligent and already quite experienced person. . . . By the way,” he added, “in my opinion, he is not safe now,” claiming the attempts on his life were “‘uncivilized methods’ deployed against Trump during the campaign.” Putin then said, “he expects Donald Trump ‘will find a solution’ on the Ukraine war” (emphasis added), anticipating a Trump-led U.S. will pull military aid and seek a ceasefire on terms very favorable to Putin’s territorial objectives in a newly drawn Ukraine, and Poland and Scandinavia. Trump previously informed the EU he would disregard the United States’ commitment to NATO’s collective defense clause, and “encourage Russia ‘to do whatever the hell they want’ to member countries he views as not spending enough on its own defense.” See also How Donald Trump’s re-election threatens NATO’s Article 5 and thus plays into Russia’s hands (The Economist, February 13, 2024); How the world should brace for Trump 2.0 (Editorial Board, The Washington Post, November 30, 2024) (“‘America First’ means diminished American global leadership”).
Recent and not-so-recent sourced reporting, including that below, suggests that the Kremlin knows exactly how to advance Russia’s interests through Trump, how simple it was and will continue to be, and that Trump is the successful product of Kremlin’s recruitment going back decades.
Trump came to the Kremlin’s attention in the late 70s when he married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova and became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service working with the KGB. They found “he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.” The KGB “played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality. . . . Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through [the 2016] election.” The Perfect Target (David Smith, The Guardian, January 29, 2021).
See also
· Is Trump a Russian Stooge? (Julia Ioffe, Foreign Policy, July 25, 2016): (“That blinding flash of light you saw this weekend? That was the byproduct of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the American media’s two greatest obsessions, fusing into a single intoxicating storyline after the Democratic National Committee’s internal emails were hacked and made public with the apparent assistance of Russian hackers, and to the apparent glee of the Republican nominee. The conventional wisdom, after sifting through all the evidence, has reached a verdict, and it’s that Trump is Putin’s stooge, a veritable plant through which Putin plans to take over the United States. Okay, I exaggerate. But not by much.” The article references Trump’s deep dependence on Russian money from people close to Putin, questions about Trump’s ties to Russia no later than 1987, his continuing attempts to do business in Russia, and his business ties to “shady people from the former Soviet Union.”).
· The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow (Luke Harding, Politico Magazine, November 19, 2017) (“In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen.” Harding’s piece in Politico gives important context to a detailed history of Trump ties to Russia beginning before his first trip to Moscow in 1987.).
· When a Young Trump Went to Russia (Craig Unger, The New Republic, August 25, 2018) (“In 1987, the real estate tycoon visited the country to explore a hotel deal. Is that when he became compromised by Russian security services?”).
· Former Intelligence Officer Claims KGB Successfully Recruited Trump beginning in 1987 (Isabel Van Berugen, Daily Beast, February 21, 2025) (Alnur Mussayev alleges, “In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the USSR KGB in Moscow. The most important direction of the work of the 6th Administration was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries. It was that year that our administration recruited a 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov.’” “Anthony Scaramucci who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications director in 2017, said . . . on Friday that he thinks there is a mysterious ‘hold’ on the president. ‘I don’t know why it’s like this. [H.R.] McMaster couldn’t figure it out, [James] Mattis couldn’t figure it out, [John] Kelly couldn’t figure it out.’”).
In a March 1, 2025 essay, staff writer for The Bulwark Cathy Young posted on MSNBC, How the ‘anti-war’ U.S. right became a pro-Putin movement. Young’s approach “doesn’t require conspiratorial explanations like KGB recruitment or blackmail.”[vii] She dissects anti-American “interventionist” leadership among right-wing activists, a reemerging cultural shift against the West as a “den of anti-Christian decadence,” a distorted and oxymoronic view of Putin as some “champion of traditional and religious values,” and “National Conservatism” which launched during Trump’s first term as “openly contemptuous of liberalism,” among other sentiments. “As for some figures on the rights such as Tucker Carlson — who is a leader, not a follower, in the Trumpian right’s pro-Russian drift — all these preoccupations are rolled into one big ball of anti-western, pro-Russian contrarianism. . . . The regime’s actual values don’t matter as long as they can be a battering ram against ‘the establishment.’”
She goes on:
“Meanwhile, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, a self-proclaimed monarchist who openly advocates for the replacement of liberal democracy with autocracy, has fantasized that the Putin regime will not only conquer Ukraine but reprise Tsarist Russia’s (brief) 19th-century role as the crusher of liberalism in Europe. This crankery would be negligible if Vice President JD Vance hadn’t expressed admiration for Yarvin’s work.”
Finally, Young highlights that recent polling suggests this “[Putin]-fawning is limited mostly to a small cadre of pundits, too-online influencers and trolls.” Recent polling suggests only a small percentage of Republicans think favorably of Putin but a growing percentage of them have negative opinions about Ukraine’s president. She concludes:
“Those are dangerous trends. The MAGA-fied GOP may not be in the Putin camp, but it is already leaning toward the anti-Ukraine camp. And this drift is based on misguided devotion to Trump and even more misguided ideas about Russia and the West.”
What’s happening in the United States is far afield of any definition of “America first.”
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
[i] The U.S. was clearly headed in that direction. In her March 1, 2025 Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson chronicles: “On February 24, 2025, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations voted against a resolution condemning Russia for its aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. That is, the U.S. voted against a resolution that reiterated one of the founding principles of the United Nations itself: that one nation must not invade another. The U.S. voted with Russia, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Russia against the measure, which nonetheless passed overwhelmingly.”
[ii] Republican-Led Senate Intelligence Committee finds Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election in five volume Report.
[iii] Russian state media was granted access. Associated Press and Reuters were barred.
[iv] Self-interested Utah Senator Mike Lee, who appears to have abandoned all principle in service of Trump and hope for a higher calling, “has called for the United States to withdraw from NATO.” US senator calls for NATO withdrawal as Trump weighs troop reduction (Azernews, March 2, 2025).
[v] While many have defined Trump’s meaning of “America First” as used in the campaign and his recent inaugural address, that of David Rowe, Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio — The Meaning of ‘America First,’ — appears spot on. It, sadly, “rejects the notion that American power should be bound by any overarching moral purpose apart from protecting America’s narrow self-interest. [Trump] thus disparages the United States’ traditional democratic allies, while praising unconstrained, authoritarian strongmen such as . . . Russian President Vladamir Putin. ‘It is the right of all nations,’ Trump proclaimed in his inaugural address, ‘to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone. . . . At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America.’ . . . Trump seeks to return the U.S. to a world of balance-of-power politics that the architects of the liberal order sought to escape. It is a world of unconstrained power ordered by fear rather than trust, in which the powerful do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must. Such a world may well yield short-term gains, as other countries make concessions to protect themselves from an aggressive and opportunist United States. But the long-term prognosis is grim.”
[vi] Elon Musk’s DOGE Staffer ‘Big Balls’ Related to KGB Defector (Jordan King, Newsweek, updated March 2, 2025) (Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, is reportedly the great-grandson of a former KGB agent).
[vii] She explains: “In an astute analysis, expatriate Russian political strategist Stanislav Belkovsky argued that Trump’s affinity for Putin is explained by several factors: his hatred for the American and European political ‘establishment’ and readiness to see its enemies (including Putin) as allies; his general affection for authoritarian rulers; and grudges over what he sees as his persecution by Democrats over charges of pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine misconduct.”