The real Russian victory with the election of Donald Trump, no pee-pee tape required
I find it laughable that people, including former CIA Director John Brennan, believe that the Russians have something on Donald Trump that would allow them to blackmail our thug-president to do their bidding.
It’s not that I don’t believe that they have such information, it’s just that I don’t believe that revealing it would be at all politically damaging to Trump. And I’m confident that Trump believes this too.
This is, after all, the presidential candidate who sailed on to electoral victory in spite of by his “grab them by the pussy” boasts in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. And, as much political hay as Trump opponents would like to make about revelations of adulterous affairs with adult-film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, his base responds either with a yawn or with that special form of compassion reserved for useful sinners.
So I don’t think that the airing of a Moscow “pee-pee tape” — one that I personally hope never to see — will be of much political consequence, except perhaps to boomerang in predictable blame-the-messenger fashion. And for those on the left who profess to celebrate every variety of consensual sexual pleasure, expression of outrage at Trump’s golden shower escapades would, of course, be the height of hypocrisy.
What’s missing in all this drama is consideration of the likely plan Vladimir Putin had in mind during the rise of the candidate Trump in the 2015–2016 presidential campaign. He thought — as almost everyone else did — that there was little chance of Trump’s winning office. But not so little that he wouldn’t throw a few hundred thousand dollars toward messing with the minds, if you can call them that, of right-wing Americans on social media.
(I don’t include in this the much more dangerous Russian meddling with the machinery of American voting that is largely going undiscussed these days.)
No doubt, the Russians had some goods on Trump which they thought they could use should he get elected. My guess is that their primary hope was to use whatever information they had to pressure him to rescind American sanctions on Russia and Russian oligarchs, something that Trump was already inclined to do.
But the Russians got a lot more than they expected with the election of Donald Trump. And that wasn’t because he was some sort of clandestine Manchurian candidate, but because he was, well, Donald Trump.
Once elected, this narcissistic, whiny man-child, who knew nothing of world affairs and who considered bullying the highest form of diplomacy, proceeded by dint of ignorance and bad temper to wreak havoc on the alliances on which the West had relied for decades to address Russian (and prior Soviet) geo-political advances.
The disorder among American allies, now rudderless in a world without credible American leadership, is worth hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian treasure. And that’s a hell of a lot more than any pee-pee tape recorded in a Moscow hotel room could have ever got them.
