Is Trump Intentionally Trying to Destroy the United States?
Serious question: Just how compromised is this guy?
We hear stuff like this all the time in one form or another: “He’s destroying the country!”
But wait. What if he is doing it on purpose?
If you promised yourself years ago you’d never take another conspiracy theory seriously again, I understand, but hear me out, because this is not about a grand conspiracy. It’s about one man who might be compromised by a foreign power.
The best way to understand that is to hit the wayback machine to the 1980s, and Donald Trump’s first encounters with the Soviet Union and Moscow.
Trump first came to the attention of the Soviet KGB in 1984
The empire that Putin longs to return to, then called the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), was a massive federation in those days. The area in green on the globe below includes Ukraine and Kazakhstan, along with a dozen other republics that are now free of Russian dominion. A few, like Belarus, are still beholden to Putin, but most of them have moved on.
Its government at the time was worried that U.S. President Ronald Reagan would order a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.1
So KGB General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov started poking around the United States to see if the KGB might find a few people willing to sell out their country for the right price.
Knowing what you know now about Trump, who do you think he found?
This was back during the prime of Soviet power, but just before it fell apart. The USSR had a massive empire, powerful armed forces, and enough nukes to shatter Mars into a few thousand little asteroids.
The KGB “directorate” was filled with about 12,000 officers, compared to only 3,000 or so in the 1960s.
Two things can be true. You can be a mighty empire, and you can fall very quickly anyway, especially when your budget is stretched thin (like ours is). The Russian people discovered this in the early 1990s, and we may be about to discover this now: Empires often scream and roar the loudest while they are toppling.
The USSR, at that time, was still roaring, led in no small part by the claws of an expansive and powerful spy agency, the KGB.
Nobody knows why the KGB had an interest in Donald Trump. Russia’s current president, Vlad Putin, who worked for the KGB during those years, is certainly not telling us. We do know that materially, the KGB was struggling to gather solid intel on the United States, despite the USA’s open nature and ease of access compared to the Soviet Union.
One difficulty when trying to gather intel on a rich, open society is that the only people who might be interested in doing it harm are generally not in any position to do so. Poor folks in South Central L.A. were not of much use to the KGB. Groups representing the most struggling citizens were not attracted to Stalinism or the communism of the Russian state, even if they were interested in a socialist solution to America’s growing inequities, which accelerated almost the moment Reagan took office.
Not even the most restive Chicano movements had much to offer. No powerful separatist effort grew out of that.
To resolve the problem, the KGB developed a questionnaire for KGB officers trying to recruit in the USA. One of its primary questions:2
“Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”
The document then created a template of characteristics that recruiters should look for. Some of these may now be so familiar that they are etched in your soul:3
The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
“Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
Some reports suggest that Eastern Bloc intelligence first became interested in Trump well before 1984, as far back as 1977, when he married a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia named Ivana Zelnickova.
In those days, Czechoslovakia was still in the firm grip of the Soviet Union. Like many of the Eastern European nations of those days, Czechoslovakia possessed a thriving intelligence service. Trump was probably no more than a line item in Eastern European spy agency reports, but an important one, with a raised eyebrow overlooking the entry.
It wasn’t easy for a young Czech model to emigrate in those days. But Ivana managed it, and quickly married Trump in 1977. (Hot take: she may have had a little “assistance.”)
Nobody knew it at the time, and nobody outside of New York City would have much cared anyway, but Czech spies kept a dossier on the happy couple from the moment of their first smooch. We know this because the Czechs declassified their paperwork in 2016, and the paperwork tells us so.
Trump was already sniffing around the political scene some, and becoming interested in bloviating about national issues. He used the Howard Stern show as his bullhorn, which didn’t blow much further than New York City’s metro area, but that was enough to morbidly captivate the attention of a broken media system.
The KGB at this time concerned itself with two kinds of assets:
One was a spy, which required “conspiratorial collaboration,” and the “willingness to take KGB instruction.”4
The other was a doveritelnaya svyaz, roughly translated to mean “confidential contact.”
We don’t know which, if either, Trump was, for sure, but my educated guess is that he was probably both.
Fast forward to 1986. Trump was lured to an Estée Lauder luncheon hosted by Lauder’s son, Ronald, in Moscow by Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin.
Fun facts, according to recent files released by the DOJ:
Jeffrey Epstein created a Limited Liability Company (LLC) named “Friends Ventures” for Ronald Lauder and billionaire Leon Black.
The LLC enabled Lauder and Black to share ownership of a $25 million painting by German artist Kurt Schwitters, named “Ja-Was? - Bild.”
The files show communication between the Epsetin and Lauder as recently as 2017.
Yes, these idiots paid $25 million for this:
That could pay for a lot of cereal in the Bangladeshi hinterlands, but I digress.
The full breadth of Lauder’s association with Epstein is unknown because the DOJ has only released about half the files it is legally obligated to, but we don’t need to see a direct crime by Lauder to understand that the web of contacts between Epstein, Trump, and Russia was beginning to build back in 1986.
There are so many references to Trump in the Epstein files that nobody can provide an accurate count. 30,000? A million?
The current DOJ dataset available to the public has 9,584 references to Moscow. Many of them are flight itineraries for various Epstein clients/associates.
Epstein was not really in the picture at the time of the Lauder party, but that doesn’t matter. His social network, with common points of interest vis-à-vis Trump, was in its early stages without him even being around. He got into it by becoming the ringleader of a billion dollar child trafficking ring.
Ambassador Dubinin first met Trump six months earlier in New York City, when, according to his daughter Natalia, he fluffed up Trump’s feathers by saying, “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Upon hearing that, Trump’s head expanded to the size of a blimp, and staffers were forced to hold his feet down to prevent him from floating away.
A forty year relationship was born.
Dubinin wasn’t just an ambassador. He had close ties to the Soviet intelligence community, especially through the Soviet Union’s UN offices, where there were as many as 300 intelligence officers.
Trump, in the book The Art of the Deal, which he dictated to his more literate co-author, Tony Schwartz, tells us of his first bit of good news out of Moscow:
“In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”
Thanks, Goscomintourist. Thanks a lot.
This might be a good time to mention that Goscomintourist was run by the KGB, according to Viktor Suvorov, a former spy.5
Thus began 40 years or more of shoulder shrugs by the U.S. government regarding Trump’s activities, crimes, grift, and other misadventures.
Another fun fact: The Goscomintourist agency threw a lot of parties. With lots of “nice girls.”
This part may sound familiar, too:
Suvorov describes some of the KGB’s lures:
“There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control, security cameras and so on. The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”
“Him,” of course, being the subject of Soviet interest. 6
It may have been easy at one time to dismiss Suvorov’s claims as being just some crazy old Russian spy with an axe to grind or a desire for publicity. Except that the descriptions of the parties are way too familiar to ignore. They are too close to the Epstein Files to dismiss with a shrug the way the U.S. government has for the last 40 years.
Trump was never anything special to the Russians
If the Russian spy agency, the KGB, targeted Trump, they didn’t do so because they thought he had any unique gifts. It was a numbers game, according to former spy Suvorov: Find a bunch of guys with Trump’s personality attributes, the griftier the better, hope they miraculously plug themselves into a leadership role in the U.S., and then, maybe, just maybe, they could compromise one of them to the point where he becomes a Russian asset.
It was like throwing a dart from fifty feet away against a stiff headwind, but it was all they had, so they took their best shot.
Who knows? Maybe they’d find someone so narcissistic, so trained on graft, so oriented sexually towards abuse and mayhem, they’d find themselves with a mole at the upper most reaches of government.
It must have seemed like an impossible long shot.
Even in 1987, when Ambassador Dubinin brought Trump to Russia, he couldn’t have been fantasizing about a compromised president.
“An extraordinary experience”
In his self help book on graft, Art of the Deal, Trump wrote that the invite turned into an “An extraordinary experience” in Moscow. Either he really liked snow and small cars that didn’t run well, or he was given some extra nice treats while he was there.
He and Ivana stayed at the National Hotel on Red Square, in Lenin’s suite, which was, according to the Politico article I’ve been linking to in the footnotes, right next to the KGB’s Goscomintourist headquarters.
Coincidentally, Trump’s began to criticize the NATO alliance shortly after his return home.
According to Voice of America, his other visits to Russia or with Russian (or Soviet) leaders and Russian oligarchs, were:7
1987
Trump Meets Gorbachev
In Washington, Trump met with visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.1996
Second Trip to Now-Russia
Trump traveled to Moscow with a proposal for luxury residential complex to be built on property owned by a U.S. tobacco company and publicly praised the city’s potential.1996
Trump Applies for Russian Trademarks
Trump starts to seek trademarks in Russia for company names, including Trump Tower. CNN Money reported at least eight trademark applications were filed in Russia from 1996 to 2008.
1997
Trump Meets Alexander Lebed in New York
Trump hosted retired Russian general and presidential aspirant Alexander Lebed at Trump Tower in New York.1997
Trump and Statue of Christopher Columbus
Trump spoke of installing near the Hudson River in New York a bronze statue of Christopher Columbus created by a billionaire artist friend of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and donated by the Russian government. The statue, taller than the Statue of Liberty, ended up in Puerto Rico.1999
Trump Negative About Russia and Yeltsin
Trump described Russia as “out of control” and Yeltsin as “a disaster” during a television interview.
2005
Trump Eyes Moscow Trump Tower
Trump worked with New York’s Bayrock Group to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow. A site was chosen, but the project did not go forward.2006
Trump’s Children Travel to Moscow
Trump’s children, Donald Jr and Ivanka, made a trip to Moscow. In 2008, Donald Jr stated this was one of six trips he made to Russia over a period of one and one-half years.2007
Third Trip To Russia to Promote vodka
Trump and partners promote “Trump Super Premium Vodka 24K” at the Millionaire Fair in Moscow. Bottles are “decorated with pure twenty-four karat gold.”2008
Trump announces TV show partnership
Trump and partner, Affliction Entertainment, a mixed martial arts company, announced plans to film a multi-episode reality TV show in Russia. The show did not get made.2013
Fourth Trip to Moscow for Miss Universe Pageant
Trump and NBC sold rights to Russians to host the 2013 Miss Universe pageant and Trump attended the event. After the trip he tweeted: “Moscow is a very interesting and amazing place” and that “TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”
The Russian election connection
Today, the sordid stories of Trump associates like Paul Manafort are well known.
Americans have mostly forgotten many of those details. I won’t rehash something you can find by typing “Paul Manafort” in a search engine, other than to say that associations with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs ran deep.
I won’t ruin your day by bringing Steve Bannon and his Cambridge Analytica crimes into the story, because that, too, can be rediscovered easily enough with a simple query.
And I won’t discuss the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections other than to say that the Wikipedia entry for it starts with this warning:8
This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. When this tag was added, its readable prose size was 22,370 words.
Jack Smith also chatted a bit about this during a recent congressional hearing. The real deep state, the one led by Trump and his crime family, has successfully squashed all of this.
The purpose of my introducing his early days was to remind you of how long this has been going on. It’s a reminder that there are many layers of law enforcement that have ignored it all, including the Epstein affair. This has been a bipartisan effort. Democrats are as guilty as Republicans.
In the world of Democrats, Merrick Garland deserves a meritorious service award from Trump himself. Not many people kicked up their feet on their desk and did nothing as effectively as Garland.
How else can we judge the actions of his two terms in office other than being acts of treason?
Circumstantial evidence gets a raw deal sometimes. Especially when the Department of Justice is acting like a crime lord’s personal staff of lawyers.
But how else to explain certain behavior?
Tariffs
Let’s start with the most benign: tariffs. Normal presidents, when trying to impose tariffs, seem to have a genuine belief in them. At a minimum, they apply them logically so that businesses can adapt. But Trump’s tariffs seem designed for chaos. We can assume, too, that many of the back and forth tariffs are designed for various insider trading grifts. but we won’t discover most of those until the regime finally collapses.
An exploding budget deficit
Related to tariffs is the toll for paying the so-called “big beautiful bill.” The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill will add $3.4 trillion to $4.1 trillion to the budget deficit.9 This gets worse now that tariffs will probably need to be paid back to companies who’ve paid them.
You won’t get anything back, however.
While blowing apart the budget, he also led the destruction of much of the bureacracy and social services, which I’ve covered elsewhere:
A Progress Report on the Destruction of America
As I write this, the regime occupying the White House in violation of the 14th Amendment (Section 3) is one-third of the way through the implementation of Project 2025, aka Mandate for Christo-nationalism.
It all seems intentional to me.
Steve Bannon (1,893 Epstein references), on his podcast “The War Room,” has explicitly stated that Trump 2.0 would bring about the anarchy and chaos he thinks the U.S. government needs.
MAGA
MAGA was invented as a way to drop a machete into the middle of American society, cleave it in half, and try to grift off of the spoils. It was invented on that day when he announced his candidacy by speaking about rapists crossing the border. Thus began his decade-long campaign to divide America.
Now that Trump is nearing the end of his life and is as close to being a human vegetable as you can be while still maintaining a degree of semi-lucidness, MAGA is caught in a civil war over who is best honoring the hate and grievance he has promoted during the last decade.
War on America
I suppose we can sort of breathe a sigh of relief now that he finally fired Kristi Noem, but, nah. Let’s not make that mistake.
Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, has a brain the size of a mustard seed. During arguments in Congress over the Iran War, he said:
“How do you rebuild your legs after you shatter them? How do you rebuild a house after it’s been knocked down by a tornado or a hurricane? You can rebuild things”
There’s never a bad time for late night comedy, so let’s listen to Jimmy Kimmel report on some Mullinisms:
Mullin is the only senator without a bachelor degree. He’s a plumber. Not that being a plumber means you’re stupid. Some of my best friends are plumbers. Well, one of them. He’s a pretty smart guy, which is probably why he’s a plumber. Dude makes piles of money.
But he’d be the first to tell you he can’t run a border security agency with a $115.6 billion budget.
Guess what? Either can I.
It’s difficult to look at Trump’s choice to replace Noem, along with most of his other unqualified cabinet choices, without wondering, “Is he trying to destroy us?”
If anything, the DHS is in Stephen Miller’s hands more than ever.
And we all know what he thinks of America.
Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing
If you work with Donald Trump, you’ll likely get fired. He even starred in a reality TV show about it. If you don’t get fired, you’ll probably quit because the man who brags about sexually assaulting women is insufferable.
The legal system
Trump has issued executive orders barring legal firms that don’t honor his wishes (in almost any capacity) from representing the government in legal fights and obtaining government contracts. In effect, just as he’s turned the Department of Justice into his own personal legal machine, he is trying to turn all of the nation’s legal firms into his own.
This has the effect of destroying the legal system as we know it, flawed as it is.10
The media
Trump is taking over American media piece by piece. He bullied Paramount into installing MAGA influencer Bari Weiss as Editor in Chief of CBS News, and has recruited Larry Ellison and his son David to buy Time Warner, which includes CNN and HBO.
This is right out of the Putin playbook. Putin inherited a nation from Boris Yeltsin with a lively media landscape. That landscape is dried up now, all controlled by oligarchs friendly to Putin.
He destroyed the East Wing
It’s still rubble. It’s as if the Russians dropped the bombs themselves.
Foreign Affairs
He’s destroyed the nation’s reputation among allies in little more than one year. True, most foreign leaders breathed a sigh of relief over the end of his first hapless term, but there’s no comparison to the damage he’s done this time around. He has ruined our relationship with Canada, Australia, and Europe. He has been on the brink of destroying NATO almost since the day he entered office.
He has repeatedly threatened Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and even tried to give Ukrainian territory away to Russia:
Trump to Ukraine: "To Russia with Love"
So, oligarch-turned-diplomat Steve Witkoff created an AI-generated peace plan for Ukraine with the help of a Putin buddy from Moscow. The plan cedes all of the Ukrainian territory won in battle so far to Russia, plus Crimea, and provides an epic potential cash cow for Trumpland.
Whether as a side-effect or as part of an intentionally twisted assist to Russia, his war on Iran is diverting Ukrainian aid so that the war can be prosecuted.
We are lucky that Trump’s alpha gene is cowardice. Otherwise, he would have ended NATO by now. Something has stopped him. I don’t know what. But we know his intentions. He’s been arguing against NATO since 1987 after meeting with Russian spies at an Epsteinish party with lots of nice girls.
Russia is aiding Iranian intelligence to target American troops
According to a story in the Washington Post today, Russia is helping Iran target American troops, installations, and warships.11
This sounds counter to the notion that Trump has been compromised by Putin and Russia. For all we know, it is counter to that well-publicized theory. Their asset may now think he’s in control.
Or, in the grand tradition of conspiracy theories, maybe it’s part of the design. The always sober and definitely not liberal Adam Kinzinger wrote today after the Washington Post’s news broke:12
This is why the uncomfortable question keeps resurfacing. What does Russia have on Donald Trump? It is not a question people ask lightly, and it is not one that should be thrown around casually. But when the United States repeatedly responds to Russian aggression with restraint or accommodation, it becomes harder to ignore the pattern.
I think I know what Russia has on Trump. I think Adam Kinzinger knows. And I think you know. There are lots of Russian connections to the Epstein files that are still buried in redaction and sheer volume.
As the Breaking News Stories always like to say:
More to come.
Thanks for reading!
Notes
There are dozens of other examples of Trump’s blatant, seemingly intentional determination to destroy the nation. But my last piece was more than 30 minutes long. So rather than list them all, I’d rather know what your most obvious example is.
Hate subscriptions? Yeah, so do I. You can make a one time donation, instead, which helps motivate me to keep writing:
So does sharing:
And restacking…
Footnotes
Urban legend has it that whatever Reagan may have thought about nuclear war, his mind changed in 1983 after a private screening of Jason Robards in “The Day After.” You can view the full version of it here. Every indication is that this is a true story, as Reagan wrote in his diary that the film “left me greatly depressed.” The legacy of his tenure has left me greatly depressed, but that’s another post.
White, Jeremy B. “The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow.” POLITICO Magazine, November 19, 2017. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/.
White, Jeremy B. POLITICO, ibid
White, Jeremy B. POLITICO, ibid
White, Jeremy B. POLITICO, ibid
White, Jeremy B. POLITICO, ibid
Farivar, Masood. “Timeline: Trump’s Involvements with Russia.” Voice of America. Voice of America (VOA News), January 28, 2017. https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-involvement-russia/3695927.html.
Robertson, Noah, Ellen Nakashima, and Warren P Strobel. “Russia Is Providing Iran Intelligence to Target U.S. Forces, Officials Say.” The Washington Post, March 6, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/
Destruction of American higher education and the loss of foreign expertise.
The purging of seasoned FBI, and other national; security personnel.
Destruction of our medical research.
Destruction of the CDC's global reputation.
Setting the stage for the end of the dollar as global currency
Ending our means of exhibiting soft power through the destruction of USAID and Voice of America
Deporting farm hands and construction workers
Depleting our weapons reserves in an insane war with Iran
Creating animosity with our closest neighbor and ally.
Raising our national debt by trillions in his big ugly bill.
Alienating our allies to the point where they are seeking alternatives to American defensive partnerships.
Sending masked and heavily armed goons to terrorize America cities.
Creating distrust of our elections.
Setting up systems of mass surveillance.
Purging the miliary of flag officers who are not blind loyalists.
How would a Manchurian/Moscow agent behave any differently?
What does Russia have on Donald Trump? Actually, I can't imagine that Russia has anything on Trump that America doesn't have on him. Since everything Americans--even MAGA--know about him has not been enough to topple him, what could it be?