Trump Is a Russian Agent

But It's Apparently Impolite to Say So

The term fifth column got its origin in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The Nationalists (the bad guys) were attacking the Republicans' forces (these were the good guys) in Madrid. The bad guys had four separate columns of soldiers attacking toward Madrid from different directions, and the bad guys said there was also a fifth column inside the city, ready to attack it from within.

The term has been remarkably durable, perhaps because it is so useful.

Vladimir Putin is a career KGB agent turned politician, and today one of his favorite activities is erecting fifth columns in countries where he is feeling mischievous, like the United States. So who is leading his fifth column in America? Well, Trump, of course. He has helpers, like Mike Johnson and Tucker Carlson, but let's face it: Since the beginning, Putin has been putting his money on Trump. 

And Putin desperately needs Trump's column to succeed, since his main column, in Ukraine, appears significantly lacking in tumescence.

Like the New York Daily News (see picture above), I decided that Trump was a Russian agent after the Helsinki fiasco in 2018. That was five years ago.

But what kind of agent is he? He's certainly not a trained KGB officer like Putin. There are no mysterious gaps in his resume - times when he was off at spy school in Moscow, struggling to pick up some Russian while learning sixteen ways to kill a man quietly with his bare hands.

I think it's possible that he is an unwitting agent, that he thinks Vladimir is doing all these nice things for him out of friendship. And perhaps the file Vladimir keeps on Donald is labeled "useful idiot." Donald is, after all, quite stupid - and worse, he thinks he's smart.

Or maybe he's just a venal, money-grubbing slug whose real-estate con in New York has gone sour, and Roy Cohn is no longer there to show him the way out of his self-inflicted catastrophe. But Putin is there.

I don't know what exact category to put the Donald in, but I think the label "agent" fits. And I wish people who clearly think he is a Russian agent would say so more often, in public.

See also An Inflection Point; The Correct Strategy: Fight; 7/11 - The Day the Trump White House Fell Apart.