The upheaval in the United States following the election of Donald Trump and his initial announcements about the policies he will pursue have taken Europe by surprise. According to the author, the regime that Trump wants to impose on Americans has similarities with Putin’s ; in both cases, the oligarchs plays an important role. Are these parallel developments behind the structural rapprochement between the two countries? To what extent has the Kremlin encouraged these changes in American society and in Trump’s entourage through the infiltration of conservative elites? These are the crucial questions raised in this uncompromising analysis.
“Do you not see that the Jacobite [Jacobin] faction has caused those disorders… Organized like an empire in its metropolis and affiliations, blindly directed by a few ambitious leaders, this sect forms a distinct corporation in the midst of the French people, whose powers it usurps, subjugating its representatives and proxies […]. Each day weakens the constituted authorities, substituting the partisan spirit for the will of the people; the audacity of agitators imposes silence on peaceful citizens, pushing aside useful men; sectarian devotion replaces private and public virtues, which, in a free country, should be the austere and sole means of attaining the first functions of government…”
La Fayette’s address to the French in June 17921
The second American Revolution
The ideologues of the MAGA movement have made no secret of their intention to bring about a revolution in the United States. As Elon Musk has proclaimed, “This government will be the most revolutionary America has seen since the Revolutionary War.” On announcing the creation of the DOGE (Department of government efficiency), the agency entrusted to him to purge civil servants, he hammered home: “This won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution.”
Since Trump’s re-election, Americans have had the feeling of being caught up in a situation beyond their control: “Somehow disruption doesn’t begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime,” writes Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent.
Even before Trump’s inauguration, all the symptoms of a revolution in the making are evident in the United States. The state of mind of American democrats bears a striking resemblance to that of the French liberals overwhelmed by events in 1788-89. The Marquis de Bombelles wrote about France in November 1788: “Many of our friends are going mad; anyone who dares to raise their voice in favor of the old forms is looked upon with disdain […]. Like fools, we are running to our doom. We shake off a yoke that has usually been gentle and, in order to remedy short-term defects, […] we unleash passions that will subject us to far more lasting, far more incurable misfortunes2…” Two years later, a repentant revolutionary, Abbé Raynal (May 1791), then aged 78, made this speech to the Assembly: “I have heard these insidious voices […] which inspire you with fatal mistrust, to make you successively destroy all the supports of the government […]. I shuddered above all when, observing […] those people who want to be free, I saw them not only ignore the social virtues, humanity and justice, the only foundations of true liberty, but also greedily accept the new seeds of corruption […]. France as a whole presents two very pronounced tribes, that of the honest people, the moderate spirits, a class of men mute and dismayed now, while violent men are electrified, closing their ranks and forming a fearsome volcano that vomits torrents of lava capable of engulfing everything…”
Many democrats are stunned by the irrational behavior of their compatriots and can say, like the historian Sallustus, who witnessed the wreck of the Roman Republic: when the Romans had everything mortals could wish for, “peace and riches, yet there were citizens who obstinately worked for their downfall and that of the Republic3”. According to Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, the conclusion is bitter: “Nearly half of all Americans have given up on democracy. They want their America back, and they believe that only a strong man can make that happen. The more authoritarian Trump becomes, the more popular he’ll be.” Some Democrats are engaged in painful introspection, seeking to understand the causes of their debacle and pondering ways to limit the damage of a Trump administration. They sense that abandoning wokism is the condition for the emergence of an anti-Trump coalition with moderate Republicans.
But the demoralization of reasonable people who feel powerless to go against the tide prevails: “We’re like the Germans in January 1933 wondering whether democratic institutions will hold,” observes psychologist John Gartner. And like the French monarchists in 1791, opponents of Trumpism take to hoping “that order will eventually be reborn from the excess of evil4.” Some even lean toward a policy of the worse, the better, hoping that the Trumpian revolution will fall victim to its own excesses, and that “the return of reason will be hastened by public discontent5”.
Trump “has shown how a feral candidate can change the mood of the country,” Washington Post columnist George Will noted. In his view, the Madisonian balance between the branches of power had been compromised for a long time: Congress had all too often consented to delegate to the executive branch what was constitutionally within its purview, gradually relinquishing its powers to the president. From this point of view, Trump’s drift was merely the culmination of a process that had been underway for several decades, a process that George Will believes is reversible.
On the other hand, Steve Bannon, one of the new regime’s ideologues, is convinced that the United States has already crossed a point of no return: “Something has changed in the last 48 hours in this city, in the imperial capital. There’s a feeling that there’s been an earthquake in political culture. And I think we know there’s no going back.” Every revolution seeks to create the irreversible. In France it was the regicide, in the USSR collectivization, in Nazi Germany it was the Holocaust. Trump has convinced a large part of his fellow citizens that the government is their enemy, that the American people, like himself, are its victims, and that there is a huge revenge to be taken. The time has come for demolition.
The revenge of politics
The big question is: to what extent is the revolutionary dynamic sweeping America endogenous? To what extent have parallel developments taken place in the USA and Russia, which would explain the structural rapprochement between the two countries (see below)? To what extent has the Kremlin had a direct influence?
History provides us with examples of republics that succumbed by transforming themselves into empires. The precedent of Athens comes to mind: victorious over the Persians, surrounded by allies seeking the protection of its fleet, Athens became an opulent maritime empire which, in the space of a few decades, made itself odious to its allies, unscrupulously extorting from them the funds it appropriated; Athens, under the influence of demagogues, converted to the law of the strongest, was to get bogged down in the fatal Peloponnesian War as it struggled to bring its insurgent allies back under its rule. The analogy is even more striking with Rome, where republican institutions failed to withstand the influx of wealth from Asia, the disappearance of the Carthaginian enemy and the consolidation of the empire.
Let’s listen to Sallustus : “When the most powerful kings had been tamed, the barbarian peoples and the great nations subdued by force, Carthage, the rival of the Roman Empire, destroyed to the ground, when seas and lands were all open to the victor, fortune began to wreak havoc and upheaval. […] First the thirst for money grew, then the thirst for power; this was, so to speak, the fuel of all evils. Greed destroyed loyalty, probity and all other virtues […]. The progress of these vices was unnoticed at first […]. Then, when the contagion had spread like an epidemic, the city changed; the most just and best of governments was transformed into a cruel and intolerable empire6…” The illusion of military power had a deleterious effect: “Do not believe that it was through arms that our ancestors turned a small state into our great Republic. […] It was other qualities that made them great, qualities that we no longer have: inside, a love of work; outside, an authority founded on justice; in the councils, a free spirit, free of remorse as well as passion. Instead, we have the love of luxury and money, the ruin of public finances, the opulence of private individuals. We praise riches, we follow laziness7”.
These precedents prompt us to ask whether the United States is not being swept along by a tidal wave, whether the disintegration of democratic institutions is not, among other things, a delayed consequence of the end of the Cold War. After the collapse of the USSR, American leaders not only believed in the end of history, they also believed in the end of politics. The invisible hand of the market would take care of everything, they thought. Democratic leaders imagined that their role was to make minor adjustments to the creative dynamics of capitalism. As the political field seemed to have atrophied, they threw themselves into the societal, the defense of minority groups, alienating a large part of the American people, including the so-called minorities who did not recognize themselves in the ideological fantasies spouted by the campuses. In today’s democracies, there is a desire not for a strongman, as Putin’s propaganda would have us believe, but for a statesman, i.e. a politician who is not a feckless manager with his eyes riveted on the polls, but a leader capable of foresight, of asserting authority, of putting common interests above personal interests, while respecting the law.
Post-communist Russia also fell victim to the illusion of the “Washington consensus.” Instead of focusing on the establishment of representative democracy, Westerners believed that the emergence of the market would solve everything. They neglected institutions and focused on privatization. They thought the KGB was a kind of Russian-style school of management, and mistook Putin for a modernizer. Today, we can see the results of this self-delusion.
But politics cannot be ignored without paying a price: that is what the evolution of the United States is showing with the Trump phenomenon. The final tipping point came when crypto heavyweights and Big tech giants such as Elon Musk rallied behind Trump. Here, the analogy with Russia is obvious. It was wealthy oligarchs who propelled Putin to power, and for the same reasons: to dismantle the state and its institutions, replacing them with a “power vertical” topped by a sham “strong man” with whom the tycoons can conclude “man-to-man” agreements. Oligarchs “seek to escape the law as children seek to escape their father8,” observed Plato. In the United States, digital tycoons took a very dim view of the Biden administration’s attempts to regulate cryptocurrencies and its cautious approach to artificial intelligence (a recent executive order requires companies to comply with government AI security standards). Whether in Yeltsin’s Russia or in the United States, the big oligarchs perceive the state as an untolerable obstacle to their ambitions, and an enemy to be put down; the people as a mass that can be manipulated at will, and laws as a device put in place by the weak to put obstacles in the wheels of the strong. What they have in common is megalomania and an indifference to ethics. A staggering example: Trump has just explained that Ukraine has “ridiculously” lost 400,000 soldiers and “many more civilians” (December 8). It does not even occur to him that people might get killed to be free. That Russia is waging a genocidal war against Ukraine simply does not enter the narrow horizon of the Trump family and the MAGA cult.
Russian remote control
This profound convergence explains the influence that Russia, a pioneer in this evolution, has been able to acquire across the Atlantic. But it also raises the question of deliberate Russian remote control. Of course, every revolution breeds and feeds on conspiracy theories, as Edmond Dziembowski has shown in his masterly study of conspiracy in the French Revolution9. If in the France of 1789-1794 conspiracy fantasies had no basis in fact, in the case of the United States Russian interference in Trump’s favor is already well-documented, and the role of Moscow’s hand is attested not only by the boasts of Kremlin propaganda, but by the nature of the transformations underway.
There is an easy way to distinguish between what in the MAGA’s program stems from an indigenous aspiration and what is inspired by the Kremlinophile nexus. All we have to do is to take into account Russia’s objectives with regard to the United States. Since the summer of 1945, the Kremlin’s leaders have wanted to drive the Americans out of Europe in order to gain control of the continent. They are working to undermine all the instruments of American power: alliances, military strength, the “hegemony of the dollar,” the ideological attraction embodied in the “American dream.” In 1987, according to Georgy Arbatov, one of Gorbachev’s advisors, the USSR’s ambition was to make the United States “a pariah in the international community10.” After the collapse of the USSR, Russian elites close to the Kremlin and the siloviki dreamed of the dismemberment of the United States, and even of civil war. Influential journalist Maksim Shevchenko commented on Ekho Moskvy radio on Trump’s inauguration in 2017: “I want these four years to see a tidal wave of political confrontation in the United States […]. I want to see America’s elite face off in a new Gettysburg. […] I want to see new confederates and grassroots activists rise up against federal power in Vermont. I want African-Americans in Ferguson to remember the white cops who killed their own. […] That’s why I’m so hopeful about Trump taking office. That’s why I supported him and will support anyone in the American establishment who will go for confrontation, division and split. […] All against all – that’s my scenario for America11.”
The Kremlin’s men set out, on the one hand, to make the United States hated all over the world; on the other, to incite Americans to dismantle their state themselves, targeting in particular the instruments of their power: the Pentagon and the special services, and “the hegemony of the dollar” (a “satanic currency” according to Russian far-right political philosopher Alexandr Dugin). It is safe to assume that most of the measures adopted by the MAGA cult in this direction are driven by the Kremlin’s conscious or unconscious agents.
A copy of the Putin system
Basically, Russia’s leaders realized that the best way to destroy the United States was to Putinize it. The first step was to find a man capable of implementing this policy, a man whose deep-seated motivation was the same as Putin’s, a man driven exclusively by vanity, greed, resentment and a thirst for revenge. Trump ticked all the boxes. The guru was found, all that remained was to shape the cult. Thanks to social networks, the Kremlin was able to apply to the American masses the recipes it had used to decerebrate Russians: painting an apocalyptic picture of the existing state of affairs, designating the enemy (the deep state, the elites), spreading a rhetoric of hatred and resentment, addiction to vileness and debasement. The Kremlin’s spin doctors have found talented followers in the United States, such as Steve Bannon, who summed up his task very well: “It’s not about persuasion: it’s about disorientation.” Indeed, those who wish to persuade appeal to reason. Here, it is the opposite: appealing to emotions and relying on stupidity. The main target is not the opposition, Bannon further explained. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he told writer Michael Lewis in 2021. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” A recipe straight from Putin’s playbook. Russian propaganda has helped push the United States into the post-truth world. It popularized the anti-vax campaign, which played the same role in the rise of the MAGA movement as Mesmer’s magnetism did in the genesis of the French Revolution in Paris between 1778 and 1785. German physician Franz Mesmer claimed to cure illnesses with a magnetic fluid. The infatuation he aroused popularized subversive thought, as Mesmer challenged the official scientific authorities denouncing the imposture, – which encouraged the “crystallization of a crude radicalism12”, as Edmond Dziembowski points out in his above-mentioned book. The pro-Russian movement seems to systematically attract crackpots. For example, the fanatical pro-Putin Tucker Carlson, a journalist and fervent Trump supporter, claims to have been attacked and scratched by a demon in his bed. By frequenting Dugin, he has become convinced that “Satan himself” runs President Joe Biden’s White House. The importance of this component of unabashed charlatanism and delusional beliefs in the pro-Russian nexus is also attested to by the meteoric rise of Calin Georgescu, the pro-Russian candidate for the presidency of Romania. A fanatical anti-vax activist, he claims that Fanta and Pepsi contain microchips that seep into the brain, that man has not walked on the moon, and criticizes Caesarean sections for “breaking the divine thread.” Georgescu prefaced the Romanian translation of The Real Anthony Fauci, the anti-vax bestseller by Robert Kennedy Jr., future Secretary of Public Health in the Trump administration. Kennedy complained a few years ago that the only media where he could express himself was Russia Today.
Like Communist propaganda, Putin’s propaganda knows how to spot the sensitive points of democracies, seize on them and, by giving them a conspiracy explanation, turn them into wrecking balls. In the 1930s, “anti-fascism” was one of the themes exploited by the Stalinist USSR to seduce large sections of the Western intelligentsia and working class, and create powerful networks of influence among the elites. In reality, the slogan was used to turn the masses against their government, accused of “class” complicity with fascism. In the 1950s, it was “the struggle for peace” that served to undermine governments, accused of warmongering because of their support for NATO, and to extend the pro-Soviet movement to churches. Today, “anti-Wokism” and the slogan of “traditional values” serve the same purpose: to turn the masses against the elites, discredit the media, and push through a program to paralyze or dismantle states. This relentless propaganda is systematically aimed at shrinking the world and atrophying morality, so as to encourage every citizen to forget the common good and focus on what is presented as his or her immediate interest. Jingoism, parochialism, provincialism, short-sighted national egoism and xenophobia are cultivated by the Kremlin in all the countries it wants to bring under its influence. One example among thousands, this statement by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick as future Pentagon chief: “Ukraine is important, but all that pales in comparison to the crime in our streets, the woke in our culture…”
The choices made by Trump since his election, the measures announced, are strikingly reminiscent of the transformations wrought in Russia by Putin in 2000, during the first months of his presidency. The American president is in the process of building a “power vertical” in the image of the one put in place by Putin. Like the Russian president, he relies on a clan of oligarchs at his beck and call. The criteria for his choices are the same as Putin’s: he only wants yes men around him, docile men who depend solely on him. Like Putin, he has a predilection for personalities who have had a run-in with the law, tainted by kompromat, whether in matters of morality or corruption. Sallustus pointed to the formidable solidarity of those who aspire to impunity for their crimes: “People covered in crimes […] have seized the Republic […]. The more guilty they are, the safer they are; the fear that their crimes should inspire, they inspire in you, through your cowardice. The conformity of their desires, their hatreds, their fears, has melted them into a single block13.”
The personalities promoted by Trump to government positions have two things in common: absolute submission to his person and looking good on TV. There is no ideological consistency in his team. Like Stalin, like Putin, Trump prefers unscrupulous careerists and shuns men of conviction, because they cannot be manipulated. According to Rick Wilson, former Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a committee of Republicans opposed to Trump’s re-election, none of the personalities selected by Trump have the necessary skills to occupy his post. Their only expertise lies in shining his shoes. Michael Waltz, the future National Security Advisor, is notable for suggesting that Dulles airport be renamed Trump airport. Sebastian Gorka, his deputy, a protégé of Steve Bannon, was called a “crook” by John Bolton, who is calling for an FBI investigation into his background. An anti-vax charlatan like Robert Kennedy is in charge of public health, a sex offender was to be entrusted with Justice, Defense falls to a TV presenter who defended war criminals, the Navy to an oligarch who made a large donation to Trump’s campaign; the FBI is to be headed by Kash Patel, a conspiracy theorist who hates the agency so much that in a September interview he called for its Washington headquarters to be dismantled and “turned into a museum of the deep state”; in a 2023 interview with Steve Bannon, Patel announced that the Justice Department under Trump would “give chase to conspirators, not just in government but in the media.” Intelligence coordination is entrusted to Tulsi Gabbard, aka “the Kremlin parrot,” formerly a member of the Science of Identity Foundation cult led by a sulfurous guru14. Matt Whitaker, a football-mad lawyer “who wouldn’t be able to name the member countries of NATO,” is catapulted as ambassador to NATO.
Trump seems possessed “by a nihilistic desire to destroy institutions,” observed author Damon Linker. This nihilistic substratum makes him the ideal instrument for “a group of people animated by a kind of revolutionary fervor […] who are going to launch a Jacobin assault on our democratic institutions.” Almost all the personalities chosen by Trump represent in some way the negation of the administration entrusted to them, agrees editorialist Rob Tracinski. “It was like an explicit statement: ‘I’m going to break everything’.” Tracinski also observes that Trump likes to humiliate those who serve him, to see how far they will go in debasing themselves. “It’s as if he’s saying, ‘I can make you swallow anything because I’ve corrupted you little by little. I can make you do whatever I want’.” In short, summarizes blogger Michael Popok: “This cabinet, including Defense, Public Health, Intelligence, Justice, all these people seem to have been selected by Putin. It’s hard to see how a Putin list and a Trump list could differ. Even in his wildest dreams, Putin could never have imagined such an outcome in America. Now, a president-elect in the United States is choosing the people Putin wanted to fill these posts. It is as if he is a Trojan horse, that Trump is the Russian agent, not Gabbard…” Conclusion: “Donald Trump is demolishing our national security in broad daylight.”
Kremlin propagandists are ecstatic: “What a fantastic team,” gushed Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov. “If we let them, they’ll demolish America in half an hour, brick by brick.” Moscow is especially enthusiastic about Kash Patel as head of the FBI, “that pillar of the deep state”, and Hegseth as head of the Pentagon. Kash Patel, “that guy with the crazy eyes, will definitely organize a lustration at the FBI,” enthused one of Solovyov’s guests. Trump prioritizes the enemy within, and understands that if he chooses confrontation with Russia, he will have to “put his political enemies back in power […]. We’ll have to take that into account when it comes to negotiations.” Putin propagandists welcome the fact that there will be no one left to tell Trump: “You mustn’t do that,” and that everyone will say in chorus: “Excellent decision! That’s the way to do it!” In his recent speech in Astana, Putin reveled in the “decay of the US political system”.
To install his “power vertical”, the Russian president has gutted all institutions. The media has been brought to heel by corruption, intimidation, and the control of oligarchs close to power; parliament has become a mere rubber-stamping chamber; parties have become avatars of the ruling party, United Russia; the regions have been put under tutelage by political commissars imposed on governors.
When Trump announces his intention to put an end to what he calls the “deep state”, i.e. the bureaucratic and financial elite that has dominated political life in the United States since the 1980s, he is pursuing exactly the same objective, which is to hollow out administrations in order to make way for his “vertical of power.” Of course, Trump is no ideologue, no more than Putin is. He is pursuing a personal vendetta against the various administrations. But a vendetta can go very far, as we can see today with Putin and Ukraine. His methods are identical to Putin’s: intimidation and corruption. Trump has declared that “real power” is the ability to generate fear. By appointing Elon – “our Musk”, as the Kremlin’s propagandists call him – to head the notorious DOGE, Trump has given himself the means to exert control over the state’s bureaucrats by hanging over their heads a sword of Damocles always ready to fall. Musk “is the Cheka”, says a guest of presenter Olga Skabeyeva on Russian TV, “and now it’s going to get hot.” Elon Musk has already accused retired US army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman of high treason, as he is “in the pay of Ukrainian oligarchs,” for which “he will pay the appropriate penalty.”
The Senate is in the crosshairs. Donald Trump is demanding that senators renounce background checks for his nominees, in particular by the FBI, and approve them without looking too closely. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represents Georgia in the House and has been the Kremlin’s most zealous auxiliary in torpedoing aid to Ukraine, has no qualms about threatening the Senate should it oppose the nomination of some high-profile people chosen by Trump. Her conception of the Senate is identical to the Putin idea of the Duma: “The mandate Trump received from the American people allows him to appoint whomever he wants. Your job is to say ‘Yes Sir’ and get on with it. Whatever Trump has decided to do, we’ll find a way to implement it.” Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to have a talent for anticipating the Kremlin’s desires when she declares that the blue states (governed by Democrats) are “traitors” and that we should think about a “national divorce.” The dream of an American break-up now seems within reach.
Isolationism and unilateralism complete the self-destructive construction inspired by the Putin model. George Will believes that the realization of Trump’s economic program will cause “such a recession that we’ll see grass growing in the streets of American cities.” In his opinion, if Trump keeps his election promises, he will ruin trade and break supply chains. All of which would be a godsend for the Kremlin, which dreams of relegating the United States at the margins of the community of nations. A president who, in one late-night tweet, alienates Washington’s two neighbors and partners, Mexico and Canada – who could do better? Today, Trump is threatening to impose a 100% tax on the BRICs. Russia and China are rubbing their hands, delighted to be able to show that the United States is an irresponsible player.
The Russian footprint
Does Putin blackmail Trump? The Kremlin’s extraordinary insolence would suggest so. How are we to interpret the exhibition of photos of Melania stripped to the nines on the first channel of Russian television? Putin’s nerve in denying that an interview had taken place with Trump, when the latter had just asserted the opposite? In any case, Trump is returning to the disastrous practice of secret channels with Moscow, one of the former KGB’s favorite instruments for extracting concessions from Western leaders while hiding them from public opinion. Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Tucker Carlson provide these secret channels, and one can only imagine the messages brought by these two men devoted to Putin.
One might also wonder about the strange remarks made by Nikolai Patrushev, an intimate of the Russian president and former secretary of the Security Council, to the effect that “to win the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” A few days later in Astana, after referring to the “vile acts” committed against Trump by the deep state, Putin added: “Trump is not safe […]. Unfortunately, in the history of the United States, various incidents have occurred. I think he [Trump] is intelligent and I hope he is careful and understands that.” This insistence by Kremlin leaders is strange, to say the least. Most observers interpret it as a thinly-veiled threat to Trump should he be reluctant to carry out Moscow’s orders. Putin’s remarks in Astana suggest a second hypothesis: the Russian president, posing as the defender of Trump’s interests and those of his family, wants to play on his paranoia and tell him that he cannot trust anyone in the United States. The safest thing for Trump would then be to entrust his protection to the FSB. We know that Soviet/Russian services traditionally provide protection for foreign leaders who are loyal to them. Is it not what Putin and Patrushev had in mind when they invited Trump to take the right steps to ensure his security? The same logic may have prompted Margarita Simonian, the Kremlin’s ace propagandist, to propose a few days later that Trump allow Russia Today back into the U.S., recalling that the channel served as an incubator for many of the future members of his administration, frequent guests on its sets. Was it not in Trump’s interest to have experienced professionals doing his propaganda for him?
Understandably, the Kremlin wants to protect Trump at all costs. Some of the measures planned by the new administration seem to have been literally suggested by its networks, and are a measure of the depth of Russian penetration. Boris Epshteyn, a close favorite of Trump’s who is now embroiled in an influence-peddling scandal, told anyone who would listen that sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Already, Trump is hinting that he plans to run for a third term, openly defying the Constitution. Following in the Russian president’s footsteps, he is toying with the idea of making Canada the 51st U.S. state. Moscow is ecstatic. Duma deputy Adalbi Chkhagochev has said: “The Republicans are in power for a long time […]. Everything indicates that they want to stay in power. Four years is out of the question […]. We must offer him [Trump] the opportunity to lead the construction of a multipolar world.” Here he goes too far, and is harshly rebuked by presenter Yevgeny Popov: “No! We won’t allow him to lead anything anymore.”
But above all, the siloviki have always been Moscow’s priority target in its policy of subverting democracies. Russian services systematically try to infiltrate and take control of the special services and armed forces of target countries. If Tulsi Gabbard is not vetoed by the Senate, Moscow will have a say over the 18 intelligence services in the USA. Ostensible subservience to Russia will isolate American intelligence from most of its foreign sources and permanently neutralize it. The FBI will be confined to persecuting the enemies of the president and his clique. For the military, things are even simpler. Trump hates generals. The plan is to bring the top hierarchy before a commission whose task will be to purge the army. Colonels and one-star generals will have to judge four-star generals and decide whether they should keep their posts or be retired. All those who have criticized Trump or are suspected of not being devoted to him will be sacked. This measure, which introduces class struggle into the army, is inspired by Bolshevik practices, as is the use of the army for domestic repression. Trump knows that he can rely on a large number of rank-and-file men seduced by the prospect of a strong man. All this will destroy military discipline, much to the delight of the Kremlin.
But that is not all. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow Donald Trump to abolish the organization’s non-profit status at the stroke of a pen under the guise of “fighting terrorism”: yet another of Russia’s tried-and-tested procedures.
In short, Trump’s America is likely to resemble the picture of France in May 1791 painted by Abbé Raynal: “What do I see around me? Religious unrest, civil strife, the consternation of some, the tyranny and audacity of others […], the sanctuary of laws surrounded by frenzied men who alternately want to either dictate or defy them; soldiers without discipline, chiefs without authority, ministers without means…” So the MAGA malware can get the mighty American state agency to crash. We have seen how Putin’s regime has pushed Russia into a spiral of self-destruction. The Russian experience should cure Americans of their “strong man” illusions in time to stop the infernal machine.
But if America topples over and joins the pack of predators, fragile Europe will find itself the sole repository of the heritage of humanities that founded the West. Europeans will then recall what U.S. diplomat George Kennan, theorist of the doctrine of the containment of the USSR, wrote to his fellow countrymen in July 1947 in Foreign Affairs15 to dissuade them from giving in to isolationism and abandoning Europe to Stalin’s appetites. The policy to be pursued against the USSR, Kennan asserted, “is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction, the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsiblities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.” Today, these words apply to Europe. The first test is Ukraine’s survival.
She has a degree in classical literature and spent 4 years in the USSR from 1973 to 1978. She is an agrégée in Russian and teaches Soviet history and international relations at Paris Sorbonne.
Footnotes
- Quoted in: Pierre-Louis Roederer, Un été d’espoir et de sang, Perrin 2019, p. 35-6.
- Marquis de Bombelles, Journal, t. II, Droz, Geneva 1982.
- Conjuration of Catilina, XXXVII, 4.
- Duchesse de Tourzel, Mémoires, Mercure de France 2016, p. 189.
- Marquis de Bombelles, Journal, t. III, Droz, Genève 1993, p. 255.
- Conjuration of Catilina, X, 1-6.
- Conjuration of Catilina, LII, 21-2.
- Republic, VII, 548 b.
- Edmond Dziembowski, La main cachée, Perrin, 2023.
- The New York Times, 12/8/1987.
- V. Françoise Thom, Poutine ou l’obsession de la puissance, Litos 2022, p. 173.
- Edmond Dziembowski, La main cachée, Perrin, 2023, p. 272.
- Jugurtha’s War, XXXI, 12-14.
- Christine Gralow, My Battle with Tulsi Gabbard’s Cult Followers in Hawaii, Spytalk 4/12/24.
- “THE SOURCES OF SOVIET CONDUCT” by X.
