Why Trump and Putin Now Need Each Other—Desperately

When Donald Trump first heard on Thursday morning that Vladimir Putin had endorsed Kamala Harris for president, he must have been shattered. Not Putin, too!

After all, polls showed Harris taking the lead in the run up to the November 5 election. And analysts had concluded Trump had no upside and that his only hope lay with turning out his base. The dam that seemed to have held back rebellion against Trump in the Republican Party seemed to be breaking with the latest breach being the announcement this week by former member of the GOP House leadership Liz Cheney that she would now be endorsing Vice President Harris.

And above and beyond all that, Putin was and is, after all, was one of the foundations on which Trump’s base has long been built.

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Putin, Trump knew, had effectively bought the Republican Party. That’s why Trump had surrounded himself with an inner circle of Kremlin favorites including his running mate J.D. Vance, RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, and the dim bulb Russophiles in his own family. And now this?

Was Putin too giving up on the GOP?

What if he wanted his money back?

Fortunately for the former president, Putin was just joshing. He could barely keep a straight face when his made his comment about America’s Vice President, especially when he made his snide comment about Harris’ laugh proving that she was doing well.

One less thing to worry about. Or…was it?

As the Department of Justice made clear at a Wednesday press conference and with a flurry of activity this week, the fact that Putin was still pulling the strings for MAGA was a double-edged sword.

With the outcome of the Ukraine war and Trump’s personal freedom hanging in the balance, both Trump and Putin needed each other and a Trump victory in November more than ever. On the other hand, Attorney General Merrick Garland, working in close coordination with the the U.S. intelligence community and other executive branch agencies, appeared to be taking a much more aggressive stance to call out and stop Russian election interference than it had in 2016 and 2020.

Perhaps that is because of the criticism of the U.S. government passivity in the face of those efforts in the past. Perhaps it is because law enforcement and homeland security officials in the U.S. were learning more how Russia and other countries seeking to interfere in the elections worked and how to stop them. Or perhaps it was Trump and MAGA had grown overconfident that they could just shrug off tacit or explicit cooperation with Russians engaged in active measures to sway the U.S. electorate as a “hoax” that they had become brazen and reckless.

After all, not only had Trump surrounded himself with an overtly pro-Putin team, but the evidence of Russian involvement in this year’s election had grown so great that it was hard to ignore (although admittedly, most folks in the U.S. press had largely ignored it).

In the just the recent past, for example, Trump had welcomed Putin poodle Viktor Orbán to Mar-a-Lago after which both spouted Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine. Musk had become increasingly overt in the ways he was using the power of the social media platform he acquired in 2022 to support both Trump and Kremlin talking points on Ukraine and U.S. culture wars—which made sense when seen in the light of the fact that some of those who helped finance Musk’s purchase of Twitter were actually Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin.

A Putin favorite, “third party” candidate Jill Stein, was hitting the campaign trail again this time making her allegiances even clearer by campaigning alongside folks who had been federally charged with being Putin agents. And, of course, at the Republican National Convention, Russian media darling Tucker Carlson not only gave an address and was seated in Trump’s box, but it is widely believed he played a key role in persuading Trump to pick Putin fanboy J.D. Vance as his running mate.

GOP support from and ties to the Russians had been obvious for years: Not a hoax at all but backed up by the Mueller investigation and the assessments of every U.S. intelligence agency. Core GOP supporters like the National Rifle Association were revealed to be beneficiaries of Russian financing and targets of Russian influence operations. GOP politicians had received donations from Russian oligarchs. And of course, Trump bent the knee before Putin every chance he got.

As a result of this or perhaps just in addition to it, for weeks in DC there had been rumors that the government had significant information about new, bolder Russian operations to influence the 2024 elections, efforts that would ultimately point to big name MAGA and GOP figures. But a question hung in the air: Would the notoriously cautious attorney general act on the information?

This week that question was answered. On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted employees of Russian television who were allegedly behind an effort to funnel money and Russian disinformation to right wing American influencers. Although the language in the DoJ indictment was cagey about who the influencers were, subsequent reporting revealed that one recipient of Russian funds was a company called Tenet Media.

Tenet was a platform used by a stable of right-wing media figures. These include Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool. Pool, for example, was so prominent that he recently featured interviews with Trump and his son, Don, Jr. The platform directly parroted Kremlin talking points (such as those characterizing Ukraine as an enemy of the U.S. and the country that “started” the war that was actually triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014).

They also featured Kremlin propaganda including that featuring Tucker Carlson gushing so profusely over a Russian supermarket that the Russian’s behind this plot were revealed to be embarrassed by it in some of the evidence made public by the Department of Justice.

Also revealed in the indictment package were detailed talking points spread by both the nitwits at Tenet (who claim they are “victims” in this case and that they had no idea where the money they were getting paid came from…even though their contacts regarding the funding were themselves Russian), and also by Russian bots and trolls who used a number of web-sites seized by the Justice Department. It is worth noting that much of the Russian propaganda was regurgitated to a massive audience by Musk, a man who has also been accused of being too cozy with Putin.

Then, on Thursday, former Trump adviser and Russian TV commentator, Dimitri Simes and his wife, whose Virginia home had been raided by federal agents several weeks ago, were accused of working for Russian television and laundering money to help them evade sanctions. The Simeses had, according to reports, relocated to Russia in apparent anticipation of their legal troubles.

These days, as a consequence, while Trump may need Putin more than ever as his political fortunes in the U.S. appear to be flagging, Republicans and MAGA mouthpieces across the country have got to be skittish every time the phone rings or that there is a knock on their door. Some are surely doing a deep dive to see where some of their funding has come from. Others know where it has come from and wondering how to handle what comes next.

But will you hear Trump or any of themselves distance themselves from Putin? Of course not. Because they know that without Putin’s money and his bots and his trolls and his witting and unwitting agents in the U.S. and perhaps the help of other foreign actors, it will be much harder for Trump to eke out a victory in November. Which means it will be much harder for Trump to stay out of jail.

So, consistent with their stance for the past nine years, the GOP will defend Putin, the Kremlin, and Russia’s interests ahead of those of the United States and just hope that in so doing they can make it from here to the election. After that, of course, if Trump wins, thanks to the Supreme Court, he can shut down these investigations and, if he wants to, openly collude with Putin in violation of U.S. laws and declare that treason is now patriotism. And Putin can accept his payment in the form of America stopping aid to Ukraine and pulling out of NATO.

And if you don’t realize that keeping Trump out of jail and giving Putin Ukraine and whatever else of Europe he wants on a silver platter are what all these stories are really about, well, you may be just the kind of clueless voter Trump is counting on.