Is Putin really stupid enough to want Trump to be president?

In a republic whose media are rife with lunacy, addled by sex, and enthralled by magically appearing damsels in distress, there are few crazier analyses than that which argues Russian president Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Let us leave aside that Putin’s government is closely linked to Mrs. Clinton’s senior lieutenant John Podesta’s consulting company, which was hired and paid by Putin’s favorite Russian bank. (1) Let us also leave aside the fact Putin also has all of the e-mails — as do China, Iran, and others — that Mrs. Clinton and her traitorous, Comey/Lynch-immunized team of IT experts and senior aides made easily accessible to the republic’s enemies. There is no use arguing this point. Whether Julian Assange got none, some, or all of his Clinton e-mails from Putin’s intelligence service is irrelevant. (NB: My own guess — and it is only that — is that Assange got them via his own methods, perhaps including the young DNC employee murdered in Washington after Assange’s first Clinton-related leak, about which the media is now silent.)

Mr. Putin is not a moron. There simply is no way that it is in Putin’s and Russia’s interests to give Assange the cream of the crop of the Clinton e-mails; namely, those that document Clinton’s sale of the influence via the Clinton Foundation while secretary of state; those showing her extorting highly paid speaking jobs for he husband; those demonstrating the top-secret material she intentionally put on the unsecured server is now safely cached on secure servers in Moscow; and those that show she is wholly responsible for the murder of four Americans in Benghazi and the Iranian nuclear scientist who was working for U.S. intelligence.

No, dear, dumb media and foreign-policy experts, those e-mails — or at least copies of them — will be presented, if she is elected, to President Clinton by the Russian ambassador just after the inauguration. The copies will be accompanied by a short, hand-written note from Putin that will read something like, “Madam President, congratulations to you and to me! Please read these documents and then guess who is now calling the shots. Call me soon — that’s not a suggestion. Respectfully, V. Putin.”

Does anyone really think that Putin is stupid enough to give away one of history’s greatest intelligence coups by giving all the e-mails he derived from Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured server to Mr. Assange to exhaust prior to an election from which may emerge a U.S. president whom he will be able to control, perhaps even command? No, Mr. Putin is much too talented, street smart, nationalistic, and, frankly, simply has too much of a taste for the jugular of Russia’s enemies to do such a self-defeating thing and thereby let Mrs. Clinton off the meat hook she crafted for herself and on which she so richly deserves to be impaled.

But, again, let us leave aside the realities of the Catholic-hating Podesta playing Putin’s cat’s-paw and Mrs. Clinton’s obvious treason, and again ask why the Russian president would want a hard-ass, frugal, economy-reviving, nationalist like Trump to be president, when he could have a corrupt, compromised, lawless, profligate, bankruptcy-loving, and civil war-promoting virago like Mrs. Clinton at the helm of Russia’s greatest enemy? If he did want Trump elected, Putin would be trying to end a string of four U.S. presidents — Bush, Clinton, Bush, and especially Obama — whose mad foreign and economic policies have all but killed America, while putting Russia back on the road toward superpower-dom, even though its economy is still in only marginally better condition than the shambles the USSR left behind. This kind of self-immolating tack can make sense to no one except a Democrat or Anderson Cooper. (NB: Forgive my being redundant.)

What Putin absolutely does not want to encounter — much less help to elect — is a U.S. president bent on reestablishing the republic’s financial solvency, military and economic power, social cohesion, and rule-of-law. Nor does he want to face a U.S. president who will stop conducting a foreign policy of relentless and unnecessary interventionism, which is, clearly, a pro-Russia policy in that it has earned much of the world’s hatred, all of its laughter for America losing the wars Washington starts, and which has made Putin and Russia appear to be a stronger, smarter, more reliable, and less indiscriminately destructive nation than the United States.

No, Putin is not going to waste all of the best e-mail bullets he stole from Clinton’s unsecured server in order to prevent the election of a hectoring woman whose personal greed, dreams of open borders, elitism, stated intentions, education, Ivy League-colleagues, and tyrannical goals certainly will finish the destruction of the United States — either by bankruptcy, civil war, or both — and quicken the rehabilitation of Russia’s international stature and power. Indeed, Putin knows that, with Clinton’s election, Russia will be well-positioned to win the nearly 75 year-old contest between Russia and the United States, and would be set do so without firing a shot, spending a nickel, or losing a soldier.

If Putin knows anything about U.S. history, he must know that Mrs. Clinton — despite her recent assertions — is not even the palest shadow of Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Clinton is as close to being like Lincoln, as her husband is to being like a celibate monk. But what Mr. Putin might not know is that Mrs. Clinton, her party, and their supporters are fully capable of making one of Lincoln’s still-pending predictions come true. “Shall we expect,” Lincoln asked an audience in Illinois in January, 1838,

“some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach[es] us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Mrs. Clinton’s actions as president surely would make Mr. Lincoln’s prediction come true. Under Mrs. Clinton and her party, the American “nation of freemen” undoubtedly will “die by suicide,” and she, her party, their supporters, and most of the media will be “the author and finisher” of the republic’s destruction.

Mr. Putin must be licking his chops.

Endnote

  1. See, for example: With Saudi and Russian ties, Clinton machine’s tentacles are far reaching, according to Panama Papers, and Clinton campaign chief linked to Russian bank listed in Panama Papers.

Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.