Putin photo, Rustam Minnikhanov. Trump photo Gage Skidmore. Both Wiki Commons
Putin photo, Rustam Minnikhanov. Trump photo Gage Skidmore. Both Wiki Commons
It is unprecedented that a former president of the United States, while running for the office of the presidency, would speak with the leader of a foreign nation that is an enemy of this country.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Well, folks, a miracle has occurred: One of the infamous October surprises has finally gone the way of the Democrats. This morning, the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN reported that Donald Trump has spoken to Vladimir Putin on the phone as many as seven times since Trump left office. The information comes from an advance copy of “War,” a new book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
Coming with less than 30 days until the election, this is what we used to call a bombshell.
Going all the way back to when he first ran for the presidency in 2016, Trump has not tried to hide his affinity for the Russian “president.” His son-in-law Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort welcomed a representative of Russian intelligence into the Trump campaign office in 2016 shopping information about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. When told the Russian national they would meet with had “dirt” on Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. said “I love it,” and told aides to schedule the meeting.
At the Helsinki meeting of the G7 in 2018, Trump stood next to Putin at a press conference and said that he believed Putin’s denial that he had tried to influence the 2016 election over an authoritative report by U.S. intelligence services that the Russian influence campaign did, in fact, take place.
Trump called Putin “a genius” when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and since then has continually prevailed upon Republican leaders in Congress not to approve U.S. military and financial support for Ukraine’s war against Russia’s aggression. On multiple occasions, Trump has refused to say that he supports Ukraine to win its war with Russia.
This morning, Marcy Wheeler, at her Emptywheel blog, reminded everyone that Trump hosted right-wing Hungarian president Victor Orban at Mar a Lago last summer. Orban presented Trump with a so-called “peace” plan that would allow Russia to keep the land it took from Ukraine and force neutrality on Ukraine, meaning that Ukraine could never become a member of either the European Union or NATO. Trump’s running mate, the execrable JD Vance, last month said that a solution to the war in Ukraine would be to allow Russia to keep the territory it has seized and receive a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine that would include a ban on joining NATO, which sounds a lot like the “peace” plan Viktor Orban pitched to Trump at Mar a Lago.
Russian efforts to influence this year’s election on behalf of Trump are continuing. Recently, two representatives of the Russian television network RT were arrested and charged with paying some $10 million to right-wing “influencers” to post pro-Trump misinformation on their podcasts and other social media operations. One of those arrested and charged was Lauren Chen, who was on the board of Turning Point USA, a right-wing so-called “youth” organization supporting Trump which has been tasked with running the Trump campaign ground operation in several battleground states.
Trump infamously said that if elected, he will “do nothing” if Russia invades NATO states which Trump believes have not paid their “fair share” to support NATO.
But worse than that, during his debate with Joe Biden, to make the point that if he had been president, Putin would have never invaded Ukraine, Trump let this slip: “When Putin saw that, he said, you know what? I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream. The difference is he never would have invaded Ukraine. Never.”
Got that? Trump let it slip that he had spoken on the phone with Putin before he invaded Ukraine.
Marcy Wheeler also makes a point I haven’t seen anywhere else: If Trump was talking with Putin after he left office, that opens the possibility that at least some of those calls occurred while Trump was in possession of the top-secret documents he stole from the U.S. government and took with him to Mar a Lago. Some of those documents were not recovered by the FBI during the search of Mar a Lago. We know this because there is film of Trump aides loading the distinctive white boxes Trump’s stolen documents were stored in onto his plane when he departed Florida for his Bedminster golf club before the FBI search of Mar a Lago.
To this day, we do not know what happened to those documents, at least one of which Trump waved around and talked about with a writer working with Mark Meadows on his memoir. Neither the ghost writer for Meadows nor anyone else present in the room at Bedminster at the time Trump showed them the document—said to contain plans for an attack on Iran—had a security clearance.
Neither did Vladimir Putin have a security clearance when Trump spoke with him on the phone as many as seven times. Another revelation in Bob Woodward’s book is that Trump secretly sent several COVID test kits to Putin at the Kremlin early in the pandemic when the test kits were not widely available here in the U.S. and were impossible to get in Russia.
If Trump had a way to send COVID test kits secretly to Putin, it raises the possibility that he could have sent some of the top-secret documents he stole from the U.S. government to his pal in Russia as well.
It is not unprecedented that a foreign nation such as Russia would seek to get a friendly candidate elected as president of the United States. It happened in 2016 and 2020, after all, and it is happening again. But it is unprecedented that a former president of the United States, while running for the office of the presidency, would speak with the leader of a foreign nation that is an enemy of this country. It’s like Wendell Willkie, who ran as a Republican against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, picking up the phone and regularly chatting with Adolph Hitler while Willkie was a candidate for office.
That’s what Donald Trump has been doing: picking up the phone and chatting with the man who started the first war in Europe since Hitler invaded Poland 85 years ago.
This is evidence that Donald Trump is a traitor to his country, and it’s past time for the American press to start treating him like one.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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