Asked about the poisoning of Alexi Navalny President Trump avoided the subject and suggested instead that attention should be on China. Of course this is not the first time that an opponant of Putin has been poisoned both in Russia and abroad while many others have died under suspicious circumstances so perhaps he has a point. We've come to expect such behaviour from the Russians so what's the point of drawing attention to it? Yet Trump has served Putin's higher-level objectives - dividing the United States internally, eroding solidarity with European allies and reducing the projection of American power abroad which has the effect of enhancing that of an otherwise much diminished Russia. At the same time Trump has ignored his own intelligence agencies with regard to the 2016 Presidential election and has done his best to undermine the American system of government itself. So what did Trump and Putin talk about in the sixteen private conversations they've had over the last four years? in July 2015 Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI, testified that Putin had "blackmail leverage over Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign". What, then, could Trump be possibly blackmailed with? The possibilities are endless but the two main theories centre on his visit to Russia in 2013 and the election campaign of 2016. The first suggests that Trump engaged the services of two prostitutes while in Moscow which was filmed by the Russian intelligence service. This is quite likely since the Russians have never been known to miss the opportunity to get compromising information on visiting western businessmen while Trump's sexual proclivities are well known. The second involves Trump and his family's dealings with Russia during the election. Primarily there were ongoing secret commercial negotiations between Trump and a Russian oligarch for the building of a huge hotel in Moscow which required the personal support of Putin. This in itself would be illegal for a Presidential candidate but, as Mueller suggested, the worst crime was that in order to facilitate the deal and further Putin's foreign policy objectives Trump conspired with Putin for Russia to interefere in the 2016 election. The election of Trump would, under such circumstances, be a grubby deal that amounts to treason. Little wonder that Trump would be so shy of criticising Putin and little wonder that US foreign policy would seem so subservient to Russian interests. Of course there is an alternative explanation - that Trump is simply a buffoon. Either way he is the worst candidate at the worst possible time in world history.
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