Continuing on with new writers and a diversity of perspectives on the same general subject, this is today's newsletter. The author is Daniel Pinchbeck, and this is his bio for you to gather background information on him and his writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pinchbeck . This is Thanksgiving Day, and there might be a chance to read it later if you are busy with friends and family.
Author Daniel Pinchbeck
Below is my latest newsletter. I thought I would share it here. I look at the thesis that Trump is an operative for the Kremlin. He owes a huge debt to Putin, who not only has Kompromat on him but also has provided the strategic model for the authoritarian playbook that Trump is using. This model for how to deconstruct a society has also been used by other authoritarians over the last decades, in countries like Turkey, Romania, Hungary, and so on. Some may argue that this explanation isn't necessary, that "the president of the United States is an elderly, narcissistic nihilist who is making it up as he goes along." I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive. Both can be true at the same time. The Trump regime shows fealty to Putin because he provides the model for how to take over this country. Putin is motivated by a desire for vengeance against the U.S. for the breakup of the Soviet Union and other actions. He has accomplished a tremendously successful campaign of assymetric warfare to tear us apart. The only question for us is what we can do now, and what comes next.
"Power is not a means; it is an end." - George Orwell, 1984
Today I want to say out loud what my most well-informed friends say in private when we talk about our increasingly rogue federal government and Trumpocalypse2. It feels crucial that U.S. citizens understand what is happening. We need to talk about it. Personally, I think we should be out on the streets protesting in huge numbers before we lose our country—and perhaps the world—beyond hope of salvation. But hey, that's just me.
The core of the argument is that Trump is deeply enmeshed with Vladimir Putin and the Russian mafia state. A substantial body of investigative work now suggests that Trump has functioned for decades as a kind of Russian "asset," consistently advancing the Kremlin's interests. Journalists like Craig Unger, in books such as House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, describe how Soviet and then Russian security services began cultivating Trump as far back as the late 1970s and 1980s, when he first came onto their radar.
After his casino empire and other ventures collapsed, Trump and his companies reportedly owed around $4 billion to dozens of banks. Cut off from mainstream credit, he became increasingly dependent on opaque inflows of capital from Russia and the post-Soviet world. Russian buyers, including figures later identified as mobsters or oligarchs, bought up condos in Trump Tower and other Trump properties, often through shell companies, providing Trump with a financial lifeline when he was otherwise near collapse.
Unger and others report that Trump Tower was, strangely, one of only two buildings in New York permitted to sell apartments to anonymous buyers via shell companies. That practice allowed purchasers to conceal their identities while moving large sums into U.S. real estate. Unger writes about how two forces converged: on one side, a torrent of flight capital and dirty money pouring out of the collapsing Soviet bloc; on the other, Trump's eagerness to sell high-priced condos "no questions asked" to buyers using shell companies. In his account, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and other white-collar intermediaries helped transform Trump properties into a de facto laundromat for Russian and post-Soviet money, possibly on a scale of billions of dollars. Whether or not every detail can be proven beyond doubt, the broad pattern of Russian-linked buyers using Trump properties to move money into the United States is well documented.
Trump's 2016 campaign, we now know, was riddled with contacts with Russian officials and intermediaries. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report documented hundreds of contacts and dozens of meetings between Trump campaign figures and people linked to the Russian state, including intelligence-adjacent actors. Michael Flynn, for instance, had been paid by Russian state media and attended an RT gala in Moscow where he sat near Putin; he later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chair in 2016, had long-standing ties to pro-Kremlin oligarchs and passed internal campaign polling data to a man the U.S. government later described as a Russian intelligence asset. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Putin ordered an extensive influence campaign to help Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton; Mueller did not charge a criminal conspiracy, but he did find that the campaign "expected it would benefit electorally" from Russia's actions and welcomed them.
Now, with Trump's return to office, we've entered a far more brazen phase. The recent rollout of his so-called "peace plan" for Ukraine exposed the power dynamic between Trump and Putin in an unusually crude way. The 28-point plan tracks almost point-by-point with Moscow's maximalist demands: freezing lines roughly along current frontlines, entrenching Russian control over occupied territories, and placing tight constraints on Ukraine's future security arrangements—while Russia rebuilds its military to strike again. European diplomats and language experts quickly noted that the draft reads like a direct translation from Russian, with clumsy phrasing and legal constructions characteristic of Russian originals. Critics have suggested it looks as if it were dropped straight into a translation program and barely edited. There is also the surreal image, widely circulated on social media, of Steve Witkoff, our emissary to Russia, placing his hand over his heart while meeting Putin, like he was showing fealty from a knight to a king.
All of this comes at a moment of painful vulnerability for Ukraine. A major corruption scandal in the country's energy sector, involving figures close to President Volodymyr Zelensky, has shaken public trust and given ammunition to critics at home and abroad. Zelensky has moved to purge some officials and promise reforms, but his standing has been undeniably weakened at exactly the time when he faces enormous pressure from Washington to accept a settlement on terms largely favorable to Moscow. In that context, Trump's "peace plan" is actually a capitulation plan: a tool to force a battered ally into submission, to Putin's advantage, radically endangering not just Ukraine but all of Europe.
Across a range of policy arenas, Trump acts like a sad jester-puppet, shilling for Kremlin objectives. Putin seeks vengeance for what the U.S. did to the U.S.S.R. in the past. Russia's strategic goals include humiliating the United States, weakening its alliances, and degrading its political institutions, economy, and social fabric.
Trump's trade wars and tariffs have disrupted global supply chains and alienated traditional allies. His efforts to chip away at the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansions undermine the basic health security of millions of Americans. His administration has rolled back environmental and climate regulations, opened more federal land and offshore areas to oil and gas drilling, and sabotaged programs that support renewable energy, all of which prolong dependence on fossil fuels—the foundation of the Russian state's power. Meanwhile, he has increasingly allied himself with anti-vaccine activists and taken steps that weaken public health institutions, both physically and psychologically. These choices make Americans sicker, poorer, and more divided, which supports Russia's strategic plan to destroy the United States as a functional entity.
What's shocking to me is how many Americans I know still support MAGA, after everything we've learned, because they believe it meshes with their self-interest, despite the negative impacts on the general population, the Earth's ecology, our future, and so on. This includes many people I know in crypto, AI, tech, podcast comedy bros, and so on. These people wil have a lot to answer for, if we manage to escape this catastrophe with some freedom intact.
We just learned that much of the loud pro-MAGA chorus on Twitter / X is not actually coming from the United States at all, but from countries like Russia, Nigeria, India, Thailand, and others. We already knew that Russia deploys bot networks and fake personas to inject propaganda, polarize Americans, and exhaust our ability to discern truth from lies. The MAGA social media ecosystem is one front in a multi-leveled psychological operation designed to turn our public discourse into toxic sludge.
Russia under Putin is a "mafia state.' There are no boundaries between security services, political leadership, and organized crime, just a single system of kleptocratic power wrapped in faux Christian pieties. Trump and his entourage want to remodel the United States along similar lines. Unless we stop this authoritarian collapse, we will see a narrow elite prosper while the vast majority slide into precarity and uneducated ignorance. Young women will be reduced to breeding stock and unpaid caregivers in a resurrected patriarchal order; young men will be channeled into militarized roles in wars of conquest or into low-wage, surveilled labor at home.
We should look at the Trump regime as a soft occupation by a hostile foreign power—even if foreign soldiers are not shooting at us on our streets. The war being waged is less about tanks and missiles than about psyche, perception, and attention. Territory, in this new form of conflict, is cognitive and emotional, not just physical. The right-wing media ecosystem and its extensions in tech platforms aim to saturate every information channel with lies, half-truths, and numbing cliches until people cannot distinguish reality from fabrication and finally give up. Attention and psychology are war zones to be invaded and taken over.
What I find terrifying is that a large portion of the U.S. public seem oddly oblivious and uncaring, not paying attention to the scale and intent of what is happening.
Political scientists speak of the "resource curse," where a country rich in a single commodity like oil or diamonds ends up with a small hyper-wealthy elite and a population mired in poverty and corruption. For Russia, the cursed resource has been fossil fuels. John McCain once called Russia "a gas station masquerading as a country," only with thousands of nuclear warheads attached. The emerging vision for the United States under Trump and his allies swaps oil for data centers and AI. Our equivalent of the resource curse will be artificial intelligence and the infrastructure that supports it: vast data centers and mining operations that devour energy, water, and land, poisoning the environment around poor communities (as is happening now in Memphis and elsewhere) while generating extraordinary wealth and power for a tiny class of tech and finance barons, surveillance capitalists, warmongers, and their political patrons.
Trump still rails against "Russiagate" as a hoax and seeks to punish those who investigated him like James Comey. But in fact, multiple investigations—the U.S. intelligence community assessment, the Mueller report, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee findings—converged on a basic story. Russia, under Putin's direction, mounted a wide-ranging influence and hacking operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. The Trump campaign and its orbit had extensive, unexplained entanglements with Russian interests. They benefited greatly from those operations, even if prosecutors said the evidence did not meet the standard for charging a criminal conspiracy.
Craig Unger describes the origins of this arrangement in the late Cold War. In the 1980s, the KGB was frustrated by its failure to recruit more American assets and instructed its officers to find new U.S. targets. In Trump, they saw an ambitious businessman intoxicated by attention and desperate for cash, someone who would engage in dubious deals without asking where the money came from. Over the following decades, Russian mobsters, oligarchs, and their intermediaries bought into Trump's buildings, did joint ventures with his organization, and floated him when he could not get loans from mainstream banks. Unger and former KGB officers like Yuri Shvets argue that this was not a single master plot but a long, opportunistic cultivation of a particularly useful mark, who eventually found his way into the Oval Office. Whether you accept every part of that thesis or not, it fits disturbingly well with the observable pattern of Trump's behavior toward Russia and Putin.
I find it darkly fascinating to watch as MAGA seeks to import this style of rigid, Byzantine authoritarianism, grafting it onto the very different political culture in the United States. The result looks awkward and unstable, like a foreign operating system forced onto incompatible hardware. The same copy-and-paste feeling was present in the technocratic management of the Covid pandemic and vaccines: a sense of scripts being run from elsewhere, with little sensitivity to the actual needs and intelligence of the public. That awkwardness is not reassuring, but it does suggest that the project is not yet complete or irreversible. There remains, at least in principle, opportunity for the American people to reject this hybrid of Trumpism and Putinism before we live through grotesque scenarios scripted by Orwell.
The only way we don't go down in flames is if we refuse to get numbed or cowed into silence. We need to keep researching, reflecting, and informing people about what is unfolding. We need to wake people up by connecting the dots between Putin, the Russian mafia state, and Trump, his puppet. We need to understand whose interests this malevolent regime is serving as it pursues policies that seek to systematically devastate the United States. We need to confront the information war that keeps Trump's base deluded. The good news is there are also huge cracks appearing in the MAGA base and the GOP right now: Those need to be exploited and intensified.
PS if you read to the end of this piece, please subscribe to my newsletter for regular updates. I will put the link in the comments.
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Juan Matute
CCRC
Claremont, California
Harold Wilke House
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