By John McLean
Upon becoming President in January, 2025, Donald Trump engaged in a tirade of playground type insults against our fellow dominion of Canada which, unlike the United States, is a beacon of genuine freedom and democracy; Canada never had slavery and, like Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and India, fought for freedom in both world wars from the first day to the last.
In the war against the Kaiser’s totalitarianism and military aggression the United States stayed out of the fighting, making money out of trading with both sides, until almost the very end. Their government’s main reason for at last coming in on the side of the victims (Belgium and France) seems to have been to get a big place for themselves at the eventual peace conference so as to be in a position to help America’s big corporations get a slice of the post-war business in Europe. Similarly in the Second World War America stayed out of the fighting, again making money out of trading with both sides, until the Japanese forced them into the war by their sneaky and unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbour.
France had traditionally been known as America’s “oldest friend”. However, when France was fighting for its life and eventually fell to defeat in 1940, the United States sent neither a single gun nor even a spade to help its “oldest friend”.
At the same time the United States was such a “friend” to Britain that, when the latter was being bombed every night by the Luftwaffe and was on the verge of being defeated, the U.S. government required that Britain’s purchases of planes and other war equipment from America had to be paid in cash on an adverse exchange rate. If Britain required expanded purchases, they had to pay cash up front for the construction costs of expanding American factories where these things were to be made – to cover “structural and equipment costs”. They drained every ounce of gold out of Britain and it was only when Britain’s foreign exchange and gold reserves were utterly empty that the Americans came in with trumpets blowing and announced “Lend-Lease” – they would pass us equipment but in return would take 99 year leases on military and naval bases in British colonies such as Bermuda and some Caribbean colonies.
In New Zealand there has always been an understandable respect and gratitude for the way that this country was saved from enemy invasion in the Second World War by the U.S. Marines in their brave fight at Guadalcanal and elsewhere and nothing should detract from this. However, Washington’s motive was not to save the people of Australia and New Zealand from the Japanese but to win the war that America was at last engaged in. If Pearl Harbour had not been bombed one can only speculate as to whether this nation of money-makers, that remained unmoved by the defeat of France and the bombing of England in 1940, would have come to our aid. In 1942 soft-on-Communism Roosevelt is on record as saying, “I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse”.1
Donald Trump is the last in a long line of unscrupulous American Presidents who have run the country not for the good of its people or the world but in the interests of powerful forces – large corporations – that finance the two main parties and, in some cases, for the benefit of foreign (even hostile) governments. According to two former KGB agents, Alnur Mussayev (ex-6th Dept. of KGB) and Yuri Shvets, Donald Trump was recruited in 1987 as an “asset” for the Soviet Union and was given the code-name “Krasnov”. An “asset” is not an active agent but a reliable friend who can be counted on to do favours from time to time for Russia.
At the time he was recruited (1987) Trump was in Moscow seeking finance for his tottering property empire. Therefore he was vulnerable to “going over to the other side” – “we shall bail you out of your difficulties in return for you helping us in the future”. The trip to Russia was well planned. The previous year he had a meeting in Trump Tower with the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, who invited him to Moscow. This was at the height of the Cold War. The trip was arranged by the KGB affiliated Intourist bureau.
Upon his return to New York from this trip Trump purchased three full page advertisements in the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post newspapers at a cost of $94,801 to try to swing American foreign policy Moscow’s way. The ads criticised how America was being “exploited” by NATO and demanded a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Japan and South Korea – things that Moscow had always wanted. Whether it was Trump who paid in his personal capacity or as an agent of the KGB is not known but, in view of his then parlous financial state, it would appear that the Russians paid Trump who then paid the newspapers in his own name.
Alnur Mussayev has alleged that Putin holds compromising documents and videos of Trump on his visit to Russia while President de Sousa of Portugal has stated: “The top leader of the world’s foremost superpower is, objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset. He operates as an asset……objectively the new American leadership has strategically benefited the Russian federation”.2
Yuri Shvets told the Guardian in 2021 that Donald Trump had been “cultivated as a Russian asset…..and proved so willing to parrot anti-West propaganda”3 – a habit he has not grown out of. “His narcissism made him a natural target…..he was cultivated over a 40 year period, right up through his election [in 2016],” wrote Edward Lucas of the Centre for European Policy Analysis.4
In the words of Yuri Shvets, “For the KGB it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable, intellectually and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery”.
It was certainly a good investment from Russia’s point of view. At the time of his election as President in 2016 his campaign and transition team had 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russian linked operatives.5 None were reported to the proper authorities and Trump and his team tried to cover them all up by their usual method of telling lies.
Prior to his first campaign for the presidency in 2016 Donald Trump consistently praised Putin as a strong leader. “I spoke indirectly and directly with President Putin who could not have been nicer”, he boasted.6 However, when it became potentially vote-losing he changed his tune. “I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is”, he lied during the campaign.7
Krasnov put himself further into Putin’s power in December, 2021, when Trump Media was on the verge of financial collapse and suddenly two loans totalling US$8 million were paid to it from obscure Putin connected entities. $2 million was paid by Paxum Bank, part owned by Anton Postolnikov, a relation of Aleksandr Smirnov, a former Russian government official who shortly afterwards was appointed to run the Russian shipping company, Rosmorport. The other $6 million was paid by an ostensibly separate entity, ES Family Trust, whose director was the director of Paxum Bank at the same time.8 – “Hey, Vladimir old friend, you help me get this $8 million and I’ll be your liege man for ever more”.
Trump’s services to Russia continue as – unbelievably and unthinkably for the President of a country that is allegedly committed to democracy and non-aggression – he has turned decades of U.S. foreign policy on its head by siding with Putin, the aggressor, and vilifying and undermining Ukraine, the victim. Despite the fact that Putin has broken 25 ceasefire agreements since Russia started its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, and that Russian bombers and drones target residential areas of Ukraine – even hospitals – virtually every night, Trump has shown on several occasions that his heart is with Putin and not with Ukraine, whose own planes and drones target aerodromes and military installations inside Russia and not civilian areas.
In November, 2025, Trump put forward a “peace plan” for Ukraine which was almost identical with one that Putin had presented and which required Ukraine to hand over vast swathes of its territory to the aggressor, including land that the Russian Army had not yet reached in its three year invasion. This, of course, was not a “peace plan” but a surrender document. In pushing this cowardly and brutal plan Trump argued that Russia had “the upper hand”, which was a lie since the Russian invasion has conquered so little of Ukraine’s vast territory that, at the present rate, it would take them more than a hundred years to capture the whole country.
In the same diatribe Trump screamed that Zelensky and the Ukraine government must “play ball” (do as they’re told). In other words might was to prevail over right. “Zelensky will have to get on the ball and start accepting things,” said Trump.9 Zelensky was being pressured into accepting considerable territorial loss in return for unspecified U.S. “security guarantees” that would not be worth the paper they’re written on since Putin had already broken 25 ceasefire agreements in respect of Ukraine and he knows that, with his man Krasnov in the White House, there would be no meaningful American response to him breaking yet a further agreement. There is only one way for a genuine and lasting peace in the Ukraine and that is for complete unity on the part of the entire Western world in ceasing all trade and business contacts with Russia such as would bring its tottering government and economy to its knees and convince them to get right out of Ukraine to which they have no legitimate claim.
That was how President Reagan ended the Cold War; by using America’s economic superiority he challenged the Soviets to an arms race that they could not win and so that was the end of the Soviet Union. The same could be done to-day to end Russia’s ridiculous and unjustified invasion of her neighbour but it will never happen so long as Trump is President as he is both too cowardly and too compromised to stand up to Putin.
Trump’s efforts to undermine NATO, which has been responsible for keeping the peace in Europe ever since it was created in the late 1940s, is also an aid to Putin, who would like NATO to self-destroy so as to make it easier for him to make further aggression into Europe beyond Ukraine. The Russians must be very happy with their Krasnov. In the light of the hold that Russia apparently has over Krasnov (some form of blackmail?) it can be said that he is not serving the interests of the United States but those of its enemies.
This is not “conspiracy theory” as how else can his unprecedented actions be explained other than him being beholden to the West’s enemies who have a hold over him?
On two occasions this congenital liar and historically illiterate nincompoop has stated that it was Ukraine, the victim, who started the current war and not the invader, Russia. This is the same as saying that it was Poland that started the Second World War and not Germany. And yet Trump boasts “I’m supposed to be a very smart person…..I have vast knowledge!!!!”10
In the words of Rafael Behr, writing in the Guardian on 13th August, 2025, Trump’s swallowing of Putin’s lies is a bigger threat to peace than Russia’s drones. “The challenge for Zelensky and his allies,” wrote Behr, “is handling a U.S. President who talks about war and peace in terms detached from any moral, historical or strategic context. Trump draws no meaningful distinction between a settlement that allows Ukraine to thrive as an independent state and one that satisfies the appetite of a Russian president bent on conquest. He values two kinds of deals – those that make him richer, and those that allow him to luxuriate in the status of a great deal maker” – even if that involves abandoning
America’s allies and interests.
The world has been through all this before in 1938 when Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, appeased Hitler with a boundary change, giving Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany (just like the parts of Ukraine that Trump talks of ceding to Russia). Chamberlain said that his appeasement of Nazi Germany was to prevent excessive expenditure on armaments. Trump also talks along these lines, wanting to decrease America’s armaments that, more than anything else, have guaranteed world peace since 1945. And the end result of Chamberlain’s appeasement was the outbreak of world war in 1939 – just as any appeasement of Putin over Ukraine will only whet his appetite for further invasions of small countries in the free part of Europe, starting with the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and including Moldova and Georgia in the south. As Churchill wrote, “The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion”.11
Historically Russia has committed aggression against all its neighbours over the centuries but that is something that Trump, who is not known ever to have read a history book, would be unaware of. And anyway the need for Krasnov to please his “godfather” in Moscow overrides everything else.
Russia has always had an historic hostility to individual freedom and democracy. Every American President since 1945 has recognised this and been wary of Soviet/Russian trickery. Except Trump who has not done anything that Putin does not like but has done some serious things to please him, e.g. obliging Moscow’s aim of dividing the United States from its traditional allies in NATO.
Putin has even threatened Europe with war – something he is unlikely to have done without Trump intimating that America’s support of the European members of NATO is much less than it was under any other President. Trump is only a “fair weather friend” to Europe and other democracies. He has attacked Europe’s values and government systems – criticisms that he has never applied to Russia. He spurns America’s traditional friends from Canada to Europe while defending and even heaping praise on Putin’s brutal rule in Russia.
“Trump is at Putin’s little finger”, said Sir Richard Shirreff, the former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.12 He suggested that Trump was eyeing potential business opportunities for himself and his family in the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine – or even in Russia itself – and called the situation “pretty shameful”.
Such a family enriching goal is likely as Trump is running the U.S. government primarily for the benefit of himself, his greedy and seedy family and other hangers-on. Take for example the on, off, on again, off again tariffs that sent the New York stock market up and down as they were variously announced, increased, decreased and revoked. The main purpose was to manipulate the stock market so that the Trumps could make killings by buying or selling in anticipation of the rise or fall caused by his ever changing mind on tariffs for particular countries.
What makes the whole thing more odious is the contrast between Trump’s craven subservience to Putin and his bullying of less powerful groups – smaller countries and even the homeless on the streets of Washington D.C. Caving in to the strong while bullying the weak is, of course, the mark of the coward. Deep down and in spite of all the boasting and bullying Trump is – and always has been – a first class coward.
He dodged the draft for Vietnam FIVE TIMES. Four of these were deferments on educational grounds but, after leaving university, that no longer held and so, frightened of going in to the Army, Trump made up a fake injury because “I wasn’t going to Vietnam” he told his lawyer, Michael Cohen.13
The injury that he invented was bone spurs on his heel. There were no medical records of this and no surgery because there was no injury – just a selfish coward who lacked the courage and patriotism to serve in the armed forces of which he is now Commander-in-Chief!!
The United States has had many crooks as President but it wasn’t until the arrival of Krasnov in the White House that it suffered a real live traitor in its highest office. His continuance in office is a threat to the security of all the countries of the West that value freedom, truth and the principled opposition to totalitarianism and military aggression that has prevailed in the West since the Second World War.
The Western world and Western values are too precious to be influenced by a traitor like Krasnov who, because of America’s enormous power, has the means and the will to tip things Russia’s way – as he is doing in Ukraine and will do to other victims of Russia’s aggression in the future because of the hold that Russia has over him. He is not just America’s problem but a problem for the whole Western world – a public menace who is actively upholding Russia’s aggression and doing the Kremlin’s dirty work for it at every turn.
References:
1 FDR; A Biography, Ted Morgan, Page 637
2 Kiev Independent, 29 August, 2025
3 Foreign Policy publication, 10 March, 2025
4 Ibid
5 Guardian, 29 January, 2021
6 Wikipedia
7 Ibid
8 Wikipedia
9 Guardian, 9 December, 2025
10 Guardian, 9 December, 2025
11 The Second World War, Vol. I, P. 273
12 Dagens.com 29 November, 2025
13 Military Times, 27 February, 2019
