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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

I used to think Trump being a Kremlin agent was tinfoil hat thinking, but then someone pointed out if you take that as an assumption, ALL of Trump's actions make 100% sense. Then I remembered the old adage if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

I'm still not fully prepared to believe it, but I'm beginning to believe maybe it's because I don't want to believe it - because it's making more and more sense.

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Remember who gave loans to him after he burned bridges with the large western banks.

Yuri Bezmenov, a defector and ex-KGB analyst spoke publicly in the 80s about the "long game". What he described is pretty much a blueprint for everything we've seen in the past few years.

I agree with you on all of this... and from a practical perspective one could argue it doesn't matter if he's a Kremlin agent or not if everything he does is indistinguishable from what a Kremlin agent would do.

But also if we are theorycrafting conspiracy theories, I think the explanation that makes most sense is widespread systemic blackmail originating from Russia but now spreading out virally through Trump. Because the suspicious behavior is not just coming from Trump but also the very many people who flipped from being very vocally against him to being pathetically loyal (see: Graham, Rubio, Cruz, Vance, and dozens of others).

It feels to me like there's got to be more going on there than people just hitching their wagons for political expediency, because a lot of them also have to know that this is all a cult of personality and when Trump is gone their wagons are going to be thrown into chaos and yet they've still hitched them...

This is the right way to frame it. Trump hasn't got a W-2 from the FSB. But it looks very likely that he, his family, and many people around him or who influence him, have been targeted for influence, bribery, blackmail, etc.

There might be an outright Robert Hanssen in that set of people. Or not. But that's not the important thing.

Everything Trump does also makes total sense if you take in account American exceptionalism; which also explains why half the population and half the political apparatus supports him; even beyond that, that also explains how the other half is adamant on blaming a country with a GDP less than even some US states on this problem rather than self reflect on the internal causes.

Another way to view it is:

If another Kremlin agent got Trumps job, could he be more effective in furthering Kremlins agenda?

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