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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I don’t think Trump is reliable enough as a human being to be a Russian asset, all else aside.

I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and I wouldn’t lose any voters

An iconic quote, for sure, but what is he actually saying? He’s saying that enemy propaganda runs off him like water off a duck’s back, it has no effect. Imagine the infamous Trump ‘pee tape’ alleged by Christopher Steele released tomorrow in The Guardian. Would anyone believe it? We live in the age of AI video now, so presumably not, but even in 2016 special effects were already very good, Trump’s opponents very rich, Trump’s supporters already very suspicious of mainstream media.

This makes Trump a very poor Russian asset. The classic tools of Russian tradecraft - conspicuous-but-plausibly-deniable assassination and kompromat - are both unusable (the former because it would only bring more anti-Russia politicians to power and the latter because it would have no effect on Trump’s popularity). The only other thing the Russians had in the Cold War, and the source of most double agents, was communism and ideology, but Trump has little of that and these days neither does Russia.

Also Trump only became President due to several unlikely twists of fate. If you were trying to cultivate KGB assets 40 years ago in the hopes that one of them would eventually become President, you would mostly be focusing on congressmen and governors, not moderately famous real estate developers.

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