The curious case of Comrad Krasnov

We all know by now that Donald Trump will do whatever Vladimir Putin tells him to do. And most of us have long suspected that his eagerness to bend over for the Russian president is not based on, say, mutual respect or the shared love of golf.

So this claim from former KGB official Alnur Mussayev, reported in the Irish Star, kind of rings true. Mussayev says the KGB recruited Trump while he was visiting Moscow in 1987, on one of his many failed real estate ventures. At the time, Mussayev says, he was running a directorate charged with “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” A man like Trump – clueless, vainglorious, infinitely susceptible to flattery – would have fit the bill nicely. The KGB even bestowed a code name: “Krasnov.”

I’ve often pondered those pictures from Trump’s first meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in 2018. In each of them, Trump looks a little sore in the backside, while Putin wears the satisfied smirk of a man whose long game is paying off bigtime. I thought then, and think now, that only one of those men was in charge. And it wasn’t Trump.

Now that Trump is back to befouling the Oval Office, and American interests in general, it’s hard to see his enthusiastic embrace of Russian interests as anything other than obedience. If he’s not Putin’s blow-up doll, he sure as hell acts like it, every day of the year. 

Maybe Mussayev’s story is 100 percent true. Maybe not. Problem is, we seem to be past the point where it matters. However he managed it, Putin has managed to destabilize the United States for years to come.