Once upon a time, the future President of the United States took binders full of women to Moscow under the pretext of hosting the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant. Whilst there, it’s alleged The Donald slicked back his hair and dived headlong into a honeytrap, falling for the classic espionage technique the Russians call kompromat — allowing himself to become the subject of compromising materials which, if released, could ruin him.
So it is alleged, anyway, and so it is likely to remain: an allegation. The Russians deny it, but of course they would. What’s the point of having an ace up your sleeve if you play it too early? Putin is nobody’s idiot. He’s turned the US on itself, and while they’re cannibalizing their own, he’s quietly invaded Ukraine and muscled-up in Syria against ISIL, successfully painting the US as indecisive, internally divided, and impotent. A spent force. Which of course is untrue, but this is only the beginning of the long game, and first blood goes to the Russians.
But there’s another Russian word we should learn — безумный — which, loosely translated, means ‘imbecile’. We here in the West need to expand our Slavic lexicon, because the focus of so much liberal mouth-foaming, that Trump is a Soviet stooge in Putin’s pocket, is simply wrong. That would imply complicity, or common purpose or, indeed, intelligence. You can definitely be forgiven for being suspicious, because Trump had billions tied up in Moscow. Maybe that’s why he’s not letting anyone see his tax returns. Maybe that’s your kompromat right there — the dirty fiscal laundry of Donald Trump’s boardroom antics with one or more Russian oligarchs who may turn out to be what we Australians call double-dingo ugly from a political point of view. Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas. Maybe The Donald now knows what it feels like to be grabbed by the pussy.
But is this just all baseless speculation by a bunch of sore-losers? Not quite, because Trump himself boasted that the 2013 Miss Universe audience was ‘full of oligarchs‘. It would be nice to assume the billionaires were all there just to leer at the bimbos, but I doubt anybody in the room could have competed for their attention like The Donald, that infantile egomaniac so lacking in smarts or a moral compass that he failed to appreciate the peril he was in. Maybe they saw something in him that nobody (except Matt Groening) ever saw. Or perhaps the Russians took that episode of The Simpsons literally, and sent in their number-one agent to tempt him.
Whatever happened, something happened, and it will be the story of the year if anybody can find out. Rumours abound that it was in fact the Russians feeding WikiLeaks the juicy bits all along (to undermine the US administration, duh), so don’t look to Assange for answers this time. What we need is a real spy, a Cold War era professional who was at the pageant, who saw the schmoozing, and who can prove where Trump parked his slippers for the night. The rest is all cyber-ops. I’ll end with the words of Dr Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia: “It is bad enough that Trump has been labeled the biggest “Pinocchio” of all the presidential candidates by the fact-checkers at The Washington Post. But it would be far worse if his Geppetto, the man holding his strings, was Vladimir Putin.”
There won’t be war with Russia. In fact, other than some sabre-rattling and empty rhetoric, the Trump Administration will hide behind its walls and let the Russians do what they like. The Russkies haven’t paid Trump to do something for them in exchange for the electoral ‘assistance’ — they’ve paid for him to do nothing. Sure, there will be public denunciation, tokenistic troop movements, and harsh criticism of NATO for not doing more, but watch the ‘red peril’ spread across disunited Europe while the leader of the free world tweets his outrage.
