But even as Trump’s appeared highly reluctant to come to the conclusion that Putin is playing him, Republican lawmakers have been doing it for him. They’ll often dress it up in order to avoid alienating Trump, but they’re painting a picture of a US president who’s been had.
“President Trump wants to make sure that he is giving every opportunity for peace to get this war resolved. But Putin is playing him right now,” Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa said Wednesday, before adding: “And I think the president understands that.” Sen. Thom Tillis made similar comments.
Oh, he’s getting a paycheck. Of course it’s not direct, I’m sure it comes in many different forms, but just look at, say, the crypto scams he keeps pulling. Have no doubt that one of the keys there is Russian money propping up their value.
I don’t doubt he’s a pedophile, but at the end of the day, no matter what anyone releases, he can call it fake and 99% of his followers would happily move on. That would have been how it went even before generative AI was a big thing; now it’d be trivial for him to wiggle out of blackmail like that. Not even the current Epstein stuff has moved the needle significantly. And it never will.
I’m not saying the Russians don’t have a tape like that, but really there’s no way of knowing, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. Don’t forget, this is a guy who could shoot someone on 5th avenue in broad daylight and not lose any support. I don’t think it’s possible to reliably blackmail him. Trump lines up with fascists ideologically anyway, so it’s far easier to simply bribe him, to make him think you’re his friend, rather than trying to threaten him.
You’re probably right.
I would like to think that the majority of his supporters—the Q-ultists LARPing as investigators, “discovering” the evidence for themselves that king Donald was secretly trying to bust an undercover pedophile ring of elites that drank babies like juice boxes for immortality; the voters for the party about “family values” and “protecting the children”; and the disenfranchised people who bought into his rhetoric about “draining the swamp”—would turn on him with irrefutable proof that he’s a child-fucker…
But again, you’re probably right. Even without the opportunity to deny the evidence as fake, they would still back him. Fucking shameful, that we’ve come to the point of having 1 in every 4 voting-aged citizen practicing blind faith in a false shepherd and obeying the party when it tells you to not believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.