Donald Trump is still Vladimir Putin's man in America

While the 24-hour news channels are devoting 23.5 hours to someone’s underpants, there are other issues worth discussion.

Not since the beginning of the Cold War has a U.S. politician been as fervently pro-Russian as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Just four years after his predecessor Mitt Romney declared Russia to be Washington’s greatest geopolitical threat, Trump has praised President Vladimir Putin as a real leader, “unlike what we have in this country.” Trump has also dismissed reports that Putin has murdered political enemies (“Our country does plenty of killing also,” he told MSNBC), suggested that he would “look into” recognizing Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula and questioned whether the United States should defend NATO allies who don’t pay their way. When Russian hackers stole a cache of emails in July from the Democratic National Committee’s servers, as security analysts have shown, Trump called on “Russia, if you’re listening,” to hack some more.

Paul Manafort—who spent five years actively shilling the pro-Russia position in Ukraine and possibly took $12 million under the table while definitely arranging anti-American riots that interfered with US military policy and paved the way for Putin’s entry into Crimea—may have finally received a cordial farewell from his position at the top of Donald Trump’s campaign. But even without Manafort forming a direct conduit from Kremlin to campaign, that doesn’t mean that Trump is any less Putin's pawn in this game.

It’s easy to see why Putin views Trump’s ascendancy as a godsend—and why he mobilized his cyberspies and media assets to his aid, according to security analysts. “Trump advocates isolationist policies and an abdication of U.S. leadership in the world. He cares little about promoting democracy and human rights,” continues McFaul. “A U.S. retreat from global affairs fits precisely with Putin’s international interests.”