Strong Reaction
Prince
I am not sure Trump qualifies for puppet but he definitely qualifies as a Russian asset, and its not by accident.
Most who pay attention to such things know the answer: Trump first and most boldly proclaimed such views in September 1987, when he took out full-page ads in major newspapers to assail U.S. allies for not covering their fair share of our common defense.
“’Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?” the ad asked provocatively.
Surprisingly few people are aware that Trump took his first of four trips to Russia less than two months before placing this infamous full-page ad. Traveling to Moscow at the invitation of Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin, in a private jet accompanied by “two Russian colonels” (his words), Trump claimed he would meet with the general secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev. That hoped-for meeting did not take place, but others did.
In the barrage of talk shows and speaking appearances that followed for the next two years, Trump took advantage of every opportunity to return to the same theme. In a typical statement, Trump proclaimed to the 1988 Lehigh University graduating class: “Forget about our enemies — Russia, we don’t deal with them that much … Our friends are making billions of dollars and stripping us of our dignity.”
The message aligned perfectly with the KGB’s talking points at the time. My father, Paul Auerswald, led the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Public Communication during the 1980s. His office published a pair of reports on “active measures,” as Soviet influence operations were known, as did congressional investigators and the CIA in that era. In the United States and Western Europe, such activities had a priority objective: to weaken public support for our defensive alliances, particularly NATO. A second, co-equal objective was to denigrate American institutions.
