President Krasnov: The Long Con of Donald J. Trump
How Trump’s ego and greed made him the ultimate mark for Russian intelligence
Howdy everyone.
Returning to a political theme today. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a couple of interactions with some American friends. Of course, they’re worried about the shenanigans over the pond, but all of them said more or less the same thing regarding the media coverage of what’s been happening lately.
Protests aren’t being covered, and events in real-time aren’t being covered. What tends to happen is you get a few talking heads in a studio, and they bark at each other. That’s not news, as you well know.
About four years ago, The Guardian published a piece about Donald Trump being the ‘perfect target’ as a Russian agent. And, over the past few days, as you’ll see in my piece below, another former KGB agent has come forward to say that the Tango’d One was recruited and given the name Krasnov, which means ‘red’ literally, but it turns out to be a bit of Cold War slang meaning ‘traitor.’
What’s most fascinating about the overall story, though, is that Trump hasn’t become a Russian asset because of some ‘noble’ ideal or romantic notions. He didn’t need a handler; he was just bought. Plain and simple. The Art of the Deal, eh?
Anyway, I’ve got plenty of spirituality/mental health articles on the go, too, and normal service will resume soon. This was just released on the other platform today, too, and it’s already hit a few thousand views, so, y’know, I wouldn’t want my Substack subscribers missing out.
All the best, I hope you enjoy the article.
The thing about a long con is that it only works if the mark never figures it out.
You don’t sell a man snake oil and leg it; you convince him it’s the paramount elixir of life, and you stay just long enough to watch him evangelize it to the world.
This is the story of how a two-bit New York real estate huckster, perpetually teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, became something far grander: a lifelong Soviet project.
Alnur Mussayev, ex-head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, a man with firsthand knowledge of KGB recruitment ops, says Donald Trump was recruited in 1987. Given a codename: Krasnov. A convenient patsy. A man whose ego was so gaping you could drive a T-72 tank sideways through it.
They wined him, dined him, provided the ladies of the night, and filled his head with visions of Moscow skyscrapers bearing the Trump name, and then, when he got home, he immediately took out a full-page ad in major American newspapers criticizing NATO and demanding the U.S. withdraw from Japan and South Korea, a perfect echo of Soviet talking points.
Imagine the high-fives in Yasenevo.
Krasnov was up and running, and was even spending his own money. If they weren’t already laughing at him, they sure as damn well were after that.
Act I: The Mark
Donald Trump has always played the part of the brash New York mogul, but in reality, he was a man neck-deep in debt.
The 1980s and 1990s weren’t kind to him. His casinos bled cash. The Plaza Hotel was a financial catastrophe. He failed at airlines, a football team (The Baltimore Colts), indeed a football league (theUSFL), steaks, twice launching vodka, and a mortgage company, and that’s just a few.
American banks wouldn’t touch him. Why would they? Everything he touched turned to govnó (things haven’t changed, either, eh?).
Enter Russia.
Money poured in from Russia through shell companies and oligarchs looking for a safe place to park their wealth in gaudy Florida condos. At least63 Russian nationalsbought nearly $100 million in Trump properties in just one state.
No one asks questions in real estate, and that’s the beauty of it. Laundered money doesn’t stink to the high heavens when it’s been run through enough drywall and gold plating.
Paul Manafort, a man with more Russian clients than American ones, lived rent-free in Trump Tower while shoveling Kremlin-friendly policy into the campaign’s foreign policy.
Then there’s former, disgraced Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who got an FSB-paid vacation to Moscow and ended up whispering in Trump’s ear on a direct line to Kislyak.
But Trump? He swore up and down: I have no ties to Russia.
A bizarre claim for a man whose campaign met with Russians at least 272 times.
Act II: The Setup
By the time 2016 rolled around, Krasnov wasn’t just useful, he was necessary.
The Russians had kompromat. They had an asset one election away from the most powerful office in the world.
And so they did what they do best:
Hack DNC emails and leak them at precisely the right time.
Flood social media with weaponized disinformation to fool gullible Americans.
Coordinate secret meetings with Trump campaign staff on U.S. soil.
All of it tied back to Moscow. The Senate Intelligence Report confirmed Trump and his cronies had extensive backchannel communications with Russian officials.
But here’s the really maddening thing: they never needed a direct order from Putin.
Because Trump had spent three decades being shaped, molded, and trained like a Benzo’d circus bear to do one thing: serve the interests of the Kremlin without even realizing it.
Act III: The Payoff
Moscow got everything it wanted from a Trump presidency. NATO was fractured. Sanctions were ignored, and Russian-made misinformation was everywhere.
The post-Cold War order was shaken to its foundation. And for his part, Trump spent four years praising Putin like a starstruck teenager meeting Taylor Swift.
Then came 2024.
The election where, for once, the fraud actually seemed to benefit Trump. Suddenly, claims of vote-rigging weren’t coming from Democrats but from confused election integrity groups looking at irregular drop-off rates in key states.
Elon Musk, who spent the last year cosplaying as an American oligarch, was suddenly Trump’s greatest advocate.
Trump himself bragged about Musk’s understanding of voting machines in Pennsylvania.
And when you put all the pieces together, the foreign laundered money, the backdoor deals, the whispers of artificial vote inflation, you start to see the shape of something as rotten as a bloated rat floating belly-up in a Moscow gutter, its guts spilling into the street, its eyes pecked out by crows that know only too well the taste of corruption when they come upon it.
The Endgame
This isn’t about Trump being a Russian agent in the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy sense; he hasn’t done it for a noble or romantic cause.
He’s something worse.He’s a man so easily manipulated and driven by grievance and vanity, power and money, that he became an asset without even realizing it.
He didn’t need a handler in the shadows.
The Soviets picked him because he was a perfect mark, a fool who would act in Russia’s interests simply because it flattered him to do so.
And now, after everything, after the hacks, the kompromat, the shadowy billions, the stolen election narratives, and whatever Musk’s role in Pennsylvania was, we find ourselves in a second Trump presidency.
One that is already ripping up American democracy just a month after he’s taken office, with much of that down to Musk and his techno-accelerationist mates. More on those in this article.
So what now?
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just an American conman who got lucky.
Haha, yeah, sure.
Resist, resist
The man currently squatting in the White House is not just a grifter who got lucky. He’s not just another name in the long, lurid history of American corruption.
He is something else entirely, a man cultivated, molded, and unleashed onto the world stage by a hostile foreign power, and now he holds the highest office in the land, his stubby wee fingers clutching at the levers of power like a rat hoarding scraps.
If you give a toss about democracy, and I mean real democracy here, not the paper-thin two-party system America peddles, then you put your body on the street.
You flood the offices of your elected officials with calls, letters, emails, and social media posts. You go to protests and show up in numbers that they cannot ignore. You boycott anything and everything, even slightly connected with the administration, and break their comfortable routines with the sheer, unrelenting force of your presence.
You organize. You throw wrenches into the machine. You push back, and you bloody well push back hard.
Because let’s be clear, folks: If you do nothing, if you just sit back and hope the system will correct itself, you are complicit.
If you believe that one day the truth will simply “come out” and justice will be served, then you are a fool. This is not a TV show. The bad guy does not always lose.
Who am I? Hi! I’m Paddy Murphy.
Thanks for reading my article about the Pistis Sophia. I’m actually a counselor, teacher, and professional writer with 20+ years of experience.
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Sad but true.
There has been money changing hands and he’s bought and paid for - if Putin prefers it- it will likely happen. That is reality.