Putin and Rasputin

The battle is on for the soul of America—and control of the future. It's a battle we the people can't afford to lose.

Old conventional wisdom: "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross."

New conventional wisdom: "Fascism has already arrived, but its flag is Russian, and its cross is X-shaped."

This week, as the DOJ exposed the tip of a new Russia-funded election-interference iceberg, the reality of who would actually be pulling the strings in a second Trump term came into its sharpest focus yet.

Yes, Project 2025 is still the Republican Party's plan. But the corrupt, amoral, psychopathic Trump doesn't really care about that. He has no natural affinity with the Christo-Fascists who carried his tired, mentally feeble ass into the home stretch of this year's Presidential race. And he knows that their massive, 920-page master plan is dragging him down in the race's final stages.

Trump's true allegiance lies with the people most committed to getting him over the finish line in 2024: The Silicon Valley plutocrats, crypto libertarians, oligarchs and autocrats who seek to partner with—and manipulate—him as he dismantles US democracy and creates a new American kleptocracy.

Trump knows he can only win the same way he did in 2016: By cheating.

The two people helping Trump cheat the most—and to whom he will owe the most—as he wheezes toward the finish line in 2024 are Vladimir Putin, a 71-year-old ex-KGB agent, and Elon Musk, a racist billionaire who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa—a man who can never be President, but will settle for calling all the shots as America's Rasputin.

Project 2025 is not helping Trump win

Sure, if the Bible-selling, flag-humping psychopathic-grifter-clown Donald Trump ekes out a narrow Electoral College victory in November, he'll will give the Christian nationalists and white supremacists everything they want:

• For the "Christians" who want to invent new laws not found in the Bible, he'll deliver a national abortion ban, restrictions on what school-kids and college students are allowed to be taught, and a whole lot more.
• For the racists who want to "take back our country," Trump will not only start mass deportations, he'll allow an explosion of intimidation and terror against non-white immigrants and non-English speakers, whether here legally or not.
• For the greedy billionaires who care more about avoiding the estate tax than letting their kids inherit a livable planet, he'll give more unfunded tax breaks to accelerate America's fast-track to bankruptcy.
• And for the corporations who want the freedom to pollute our planet, to make our food supply less safe, to pay working people less, and to put kids to work in the physical and dangerous jobs only "immigrants" used to do, he'll make all that happen, too.

Those intent on "Making America Alabama" will be made very happy. But Trump has as much interest in all those details as he does about understanding childcare.

He has already told the Christo-Fascists that he only needs them to vote in one more election. That maybe a sign that he has no plan to ever leave. But it's definitely a reminder that Trump's attachment to Christianity is as tenuous and transient as his commitment to producing "the world's best steaks." It's a marriage of convenience. And both sides know it.

Trump will focus on corruption. He'll give Putin and Musk the world

If Trump's first term was a crime spree, a Trump second term will signal to the GOP and the world that Trump is, forever, above the law. And he will certainly act that way.

The only part of Project 2025 that Trump really loves talking about is firing thousands upon thousands of "crooked" federal workers.

Trump is 100% sold on the idea of eliminating all of the experience, the expertise—and the roadblocks—that might otherwise thwart his plans for unprecedented corruption and plunder.

Left to his own devices, Trump wouldn't have a foreign policy, he'd have a bidding war. Last time around, he got bags of cash from Egypt and China and millions from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia who developed a sudden liking for Trump Hotels. Jared and Ivanka made hundreds of millions while "working" at the White House—and Jared later banked $2 billion more from the Saudis after his WhatsApp buddy MBS was pardoned by Trump for murdering Jamal Khashoggi.

Imagine what happens when Trump once again has the unilateral power to declassify Classified information and decides that selling that info to foreign adversaries is an "official act."

Russia is pulling out all the stops for Trump in 2024

No one knows more about how easy Trump will be to manipulate in a second term than Vladimir Putin.

For whatever reasons—kompromat or otherwise—Trump has been Putin's "useful idiot" from Day One (based on a Kremlin-backed cultivation process that began years, perhaps decades, earlier.).

When Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Trump showed future Tenet Media influencers like Tim Pool how to impress the boss by calling the Russian leader "genius" and "savvy."

In the final two months of the election, with the tired, mentally feeble Trump apparently unable to campaign on a regular basis, the Republican candidate appears to be relying more than ever on the same kinds of psy ops and social media disinformation that propelled him to victory in 2016.

In 2024, Moscow has launched a "sprawling election interference campaign" which we may not full understand for years to come, if ever.

This week's indictments of Tenet Media revealed a Kremlin plot that paid prominent right-wing grifters to create pro-Russian videos and divisive US-election content for distribution on YouTube and X. Before Tenet got shut down, more than 2,000 videos had been created.

In July, the DOJ disrupted a Russian 'bot farm' being used to spread propaganda in the US.

In August, CNN reported on a swarm of fake pro-Trump accounts that were targeting US voters while using stolen and AI-manipulated images of European influencers.

And those are just some of the known knowns.

Meanwhile, Putin's infiltration of the GOP runs deep. Senators Mitch McConnell, Ron Johnson and Rand Paul—and Speaker Mike Johnson—are among those who have been tainted by their financial ties to the Kremlin and/or been caught actively doing Russia's bidding.

Musk has become Putin's biggest ally in the war on America

Elon Musk has now fully embraced the "Nerd Reich" vision of Silicon Valley's unhinged, pro-ethnic-cleansing plutocrats.

He's all-in on fascism. And also quite mad.

As The New York Times wrote on September 6:

"Musk has long used his account on X, where he has nearly 197 million followers, to push his political views. In recent weeks... his posts have become more erratic. On Sunday, he endorsed a post that suggested that women did not have the ability for critical thought and should not participate in government or democracy. On Monday, he shared an artificial intelligence-generated image of Ms. Harris dressed as a communist."

Musk, of course, "repeatedly boosted the accounts" of the right-wing grifters getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per month—by Russia—to interfere in our election. And those grifters were, of course, double-dipping as "Blue-Check" influencers and also getting paid by X for the divisive content Elon was amplifying.

It's bad enough that Musk controls the algorithm of one of the world's most influential social media sites. But he's also got contracts for spy satellites and spaceships. And as Roger McNamee told Ali Velshi on MSNBC's The Last Word on September 6, that makes his unhinged pronouncements increasingly dangerous:

"His companies, specifically Starlink and SpaceX, are government contractors and, as such, he has obligations to the government that... require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security. What you have is someone who runs really strategic defense and aerospace projects for the federal government who's actively undermining the government which is paying him. And somewhere in there is a legal case that needs to be prosecuted."

Like Putin, Musk sees Trump as stupid and easy-to-manipulate.

Elon knows that, with Trump, all past insults are forgotten the minute you open your checkbook. Trump is not only promising to "make Elon's life good," he's also offering him unprecedented power to reshape how the government spends its money as head of a new "efficiency commission."

Trump needs Moscow and Musk to win one more election

Trump doesn't care about Christians. But he loves his oligarchs. If he wins in November, he'll be able to stop pretending he knows the difference between the Old and the New Testament.

But he'll be deep in hock to Putin and Musk—and those guys will want to collect.

More than some crony capitalism and a few short-term no-bid contracts, they want the power to control the world long after Trump becomes a ketchup stain in the history books.

Giving Putin what he wants is bad news for NATO, Ukraine—and the world

For Putin, his vision for a second Trump term includes a weaker NATO, a Europe that's more vulnerable to Russian aggression, US acceptance of a new map of Ukraine, and a new, fractured and anti-democratic world order that gives Russia and China more ability to flex their muscles on the world's stage.

Sadly, achieving that vision might be as simple as Putin making steady public pronouncements to tell the world that his good friend Donald Trump is a big, strong, powerful and intelligent man that everyone is scared of.

Giving Musk what he wants is bad news for humanity

Two months out from the election, Musk is almost as desperate for Trump to win as Trump is himself.

He doubled down on his support for Trump immediately after the assassination attempt in July. At that point, he thought a Trump victory was a foregone conclusion. Now he realizes that a campaign of mass deception will be needed to push the GOP nominee to victory.

Elon Musk is positioning himself to become an American Rasputin—a behind-the-scenes power broker whose influence could steer the country toward policies that prioritize technological dominance at the expense of ethical governance, global stability, and the well-being of ordinary Americans.

Musk understands that rapid technological change could transform the world and the global economy within a few years—as advances in AI and robotics make all kinds of jobs obsolete.

For Musk, establishing tech authoritarianism now is crucial to maintaining the dominance of "high T alpha males and aneurotypical people." (Like I said, he's quite mad.)

As I wrote in May:

New technologies—combined with corrupt and selfish motivations—will make it easier that ever for a global coalition of rich white men to lock in our current economic imbalances and power structures, especially in the US, where income inequality has long been at a level that would have previously caused citizens to revolt.

The South-African born Musk can never be elected President. But he can be a "shadow President." He knows Trump is too old, too stupid and too cognitively impaired to understand what the technological future will look like.

Spoiler: It's not just windmills and boats with batteries.

Musk is looking for unchecked influence on military and technological policy that could trigger irreversible changes, including the AI-driven militarization of space, armies and local police forces, the tracking of every girl's menstrual cycle, the "ethnic cleansing" of American cities—and the crypto-induced collapse of the US dollar.

The battle is on. Not just for the soul of America, but also control of the future.

It's a battle we the people can't afford to lose.

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