Putin’s Trump: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

It should come as no surprise that the news of Donald Trump’s election again was greeted with glee in Moscow. Russian dictator president Vladimir Putin sent his congratulations to Trump after the news was announced, but not for the reasons you may imagine.

According to Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, who had a guest op-ed published about it in The New York Times on Tuesday, “… it’s not because Donald Trump is seen as a pro-Russian politician or even one of their own — those illusions faded long ago,” he says. “Nor is it the prospect of an advantageous peace deal in Ukraine, ruthlessly brokered by Mr. Trump … the excitement comes from something else. It’s that to many in the Kremlin, a Trump presidency might bring about the collapse of the American state.”

The idea that the United States is entering the final stage of its history has been kicking around Russia for some time, Zygar says.

“For years, it was confined to fringe voices. But since around 2020, figures from the Kremlin have been making the argument, too. Leading the charge was Nikolai Patrushev, a former director of the Federal Security Service and one of Mr. Putin’s key advisers. Widely regarded as Russia’s leading hard-liner, he was among the first to claim that America was on an inexorable path to implosion.”

In a 2023 interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official publication of the Russian government, Patrushev detailed what that would look like. The United States would split into North and South, with the South moving “toward Mexico, whose lands were seized by Americans in 1848,” he said. “Make no mistake, sooner or later, the southern neighbors of the United States will reclaim the territories taken from them.”

Putin himself had laid out a similar view of territorial disintegration.

“As a former citizen of the former Soviet Union, I’ll tell you the problem with empires: They believe they are so powerful that they can afford minor mistakes,” he said in 2021. “But the problems accumulate, and a moment comes when they are no longer manageable. The United States is confidently, firmly marching down the same path as the Soviet Union.”

He is convinced that America is nearing its end. And he could be right.

Putin Sees America Hurtling to Disaster, With Trump at the Wheel

This is a long-held fantasy by politicians in the Kremlin going back at least to the early 1960s during the height of the Cold War.

One of the highest traffic stories in this archive dates from Jan. 20, 2019, when I wrote about this fantasy and it was picked up by Russian news outlets and blogs.

“We will take America without firing a shot….”

It’s almost too bad that there’s no truth to the long-held rumor that Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev used some form of this quote while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956.

Because it appears that Russia has taken over America — from inside the White House.

There is much dispute about the English translation of what Khrushchev actually said from interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev. A longer form of the quote can be found all over the internets using any search engine.

“We will take America without firing a shot …. We will BURY YOU! We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism. We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”

The only portion of this quote that has been confirmed is the part “We will bury you,” and that interpretation has even been disputed by the New York Times. Some even inaccurately attribute the quote to Lenin or even Stalin.

Russia Takes America Without Firing a Shot: From Inside the White House

Zygar says for the Kremlin, the way this will come about is through the ongoing culture war in America.

“Projects like Black Lives Matter and the rampant promotion of transgender theories are aimed at the spiritual degradation of a population already in a state of apathy,” Patrushev said in the same 2023 interview. “Ordinary citizens won’t lift a finger to preserve America’s unity, knowing they mean nothing to their own government. The U.S. authorities, without understanding the consequences, are destroying themselves step by step.”

Of course Russia has been trying to help this disintegration along for years. When I studied Russian politics in Political Science back in the 1980s, and read English translations of Russian media outlets like Pravda and TASS, the Russian equivalent of the Associated Press news agency, the U.S. was always portrayed as a disorganized, crime ridden capitalist society on the verge of collapse.

But in recent years, due to the rise of social media, Russian hackers and bots joined a broad assault on so-called “woke” culture and its supposed threat to traditional family and religious values in an effort to deepen the polarization of American society and ultimately break it apart by spreading conspiracy theories.

Liberal democracy in the U.S., including progressive values and the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad, has been compared to communist ideology in the former Soviet Union.

“Fewer and fewer people believe in it,” Zygar says, and “more and more find it absurd, and many increasingly lean toward a much more cynical perspective. To the Kremlin, the Democratic Party has become excessively dogmatic, resembling the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its final decade: an arrogant steward of a bankrupt belief system, stumbling toward a fall.”

Into this combustible setting comes Trump, Zygar says, “whose victory appears to vindicate Russia’s assessment of America.”

“To Moscow, he looks like a figure who could dismantle the ideology of liberalism at home and abroad, unraveling the country in the process. In this respect, he resembles — perhaps counterintuitively — Mikhail Gorbachev,” Zygar says. “Just as Mr. Gorbachev fatally undermined communist ideology, so too may Mr. Trump do the same for liberal ideology.” (Indeed, in recent days the term “American Gorbachev” has gained traction in Moscow.)

To officials in the Kremlin, mostly former K.G.B. members for whom the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of modern times, Gorbachev was a self-absorbed narcissist who loved to talk — a man without a plan, a strategy or any clear understanding of his goals, a politician who undermined core institutions that supported the state and left only chaos in his wake. They much prefer Trump.

“But they see him playing a similar role,” Zygar says.

He admits much of this is wishful thinking.

“Predictions of America’s imminent collapse have no basis in reality,” he concludes. “The Soviet Union fell because it bankrupted itself under the weight of excessive military spending and imperial ambitions. Its economy proved to be unsustainable and ethnic tensions emerged, with some Soviet republics pushing for independence. Mr. Gorbachev, for his part, was a reformer within the ruling party who aimed to refine rather than overthrow the system. The differences with the United States and Mr. Trump should be obvious.”

But that won’t stop the Kremlin from seeing what it wants to see, he says: “An America hurtling toward disaster, with Mr. Trump at the wheel.”

The truly sad part is, Trump will not even dispute this assessment. He knows his slogan stolen from Ronald Reagan, “Make America Great Again,” is a popular rallying cry among the right-wing, racist faithful who still fantasize about some fake dream of a pure-blooded, white Christian nation oblivious to the rest of the world and in defiance of all trends in history.

The irony is that the gene pool in the U.S. is the most diverse in the world, and from an evolutionary perspective, this is a good thing. It started when French trappers found this place and intermarried with the Native American tribes, followed by the Spanish, English, Irish, Scottish and Welch immigrants, followed by the Italians and Scandinavians.

The immigration from South and Central America is logical. Make fun of the Mexicans all you want, but they are willing to come here and do all kinds of jobs these poor white trash rednecks who support Trump would never do themselves for minimum wage, which ridiculously is still only $7.25 an hour. There is no way anyone could live anything resembling this fantasy of the American dream on that. Get real. If that is being “woke,” count me among the lucky ones who know facts and truth when we see it.

Trump is bad for America, and this will become all too apparent in the months ahead. Before it’s all over, even the Proud Boys might call for Trump’s head, when his newer, higher tariffs bring inflation roaring back. Soon no one will even be able to afford Walmart prices.

So there is a very real danger that the American empire will soon be over, killed by ignorance, the destruction of the education and communications systems that sustained this country for nearly 250 years.

Topographical map of Uruguay: NAJ screen shot from Wikipedia

Personally, I’ve been told by world travelers who have done their research that Uruguay is a country ripe for a new migration of Americans willing to start democracy anew in another place.

The Guarani Aquifer: NAJ screen shot from Wikipedia

The Guarani Aquifer, located beneath the surface of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, is the second largest known aquifer system in the world and is an important source of fresh water. Perhaps the Bush family knows something we don’t, since they have a large ranch near there.

Paraguay in a spin about Bush’s alleged 100,000 acre hideaway

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