What’s MIA in the Trump–Putin Story

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, in August 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

As an adult, I have had two recurring dreams for decades. The first is that I must return to college to complete my studies and earn a diploma. (I left school a semester shy of graduating but ended up taking courses elsewhere, transferring the credits, and snagging that sheepskin.) The second is that I appear on an episode of Saturday Night Live and—most important—attend the afterparty. There’s not much I can do to address the anxiety of unfinished business underlying the college dream. As for the second, I say it’s never too late. And the closest I’ve come to realizing that dream occurred earlier this week when I was a guest on The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart invited me on to discuss my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, and the latest news about Trump, Putin, and the war in Ukraine. I’ve never had such an entertaining and amusing chat about a profound threat to American democracy and global order. Stewart was a generous host, allowing me plenty of time and opportunity to respond to his smart questions and sharing the laughs. The crowd was supportive.

At one point, Stewart posed an intriguing query. After I noted that Trump was now consummating his “man crush” on Putin, he asked whether it was possible Trump was pursuing the theory that it would be good for the United States, in terms of stability and prosperity, if the world were divided into spheres of influence dominated, respectively, by Russia, China, and the United States. I countered that Stewart was giving Trump too much credit. He replied that there’s “a first time for everything.” The audience laughed. He added, “He was very good on The Apprentice.” Stewart then remarked that he believes a line from Peaky Blinders explains Trump’s view of the world: “Big fucks small.” That became a tagline for the rest of the interview.

You can watch it here:

Stewart displayed a firm grasp of the big story of Trump’s yearslong infatuation with Putin and what it might mean for the rest of us. But even as Trump’s recent full-throttle embrace of Putin and his abandonment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have become headline news these past two weeks, much media coverage still lacks the full context of what’s occurring—that this is the triumph of Putin’s decadelong shadow war against the United States (which I detail in the book).

A few hours before The Daily Show taping, I appeared on Nicolle Wallace’s MS Now show to discuss Trump’s capitulation to Putin, and she asked me, “Why do you think people can’t get their brain” around the complete tale of Putin’s assault on the United States and Trump’s complicity? I answered: “The fact of Russia intervening in our democracy—which [Putin] did in 2016, 2020, 2024, and he’s doing right now…may be too tough a truth for people to get ahold of.”

I explained that Trump has succeeded in the messaging war:

I will give him credit: This whole messaging, that this is all BS, it’s all a hoax, a witch hunt. If the Democrats are not pushing this issue—and they stopped after the Mueller report—he’s had a wide-open field for seven years now to try to discredit this story. Some reporters, politicians, and others think it’s the past. If you write a book like I did, then you’re obsessed with it, you’re looking backwards. Those are the kinds of criticism I get from the MAGA right. But I did the book because I think it’s a major part of the Trump story that hasn’t been fully presented as a coherent narrative.

In the following days, I realized that even though Trump’s recent accommodation to Putin—the diesel deal, his absurd defense of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, his shocking denunciation and abandonment of Zelenskyy and Ukraine—was drawing much media notice, the overall story of Trump and Russia was still not being conveyed. As Wallace might say, brains still were not wrapping around it.

Two striking examples of this were major analyses of the recent developments by a pair of top New York Times reporters. David Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent (with whom I went to high school in White Plains, New York), wrote a smart piece, noting: “Trump’s intensifying effort in the past few weeks to rehabilitate Russia and usher President Vladimir V. Putin back into diplomatic society is remarkable for its speed, its characterization of Mr. Zelensky as the primary obstacle to peace, and its brazen denial that Russia is continuing the war that Mr. Trump says he is trying to end.”

Correspondent Valerie Hopkins sagely noted: “Mr. Trump has set aside years of U.S. foreign policy by openly embracing Mr. Putin and easing the economic pressure on the Kremlin. At the same time, Mr. Trump has vilified President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the putative American ally trying to defend his nation against a Russian invasion.” She pointed out, “Putin has never been so close to his goal of normalizing relations with Washington without having to make any compromises on Ukraine.”

These were solid and perceptive takes. But neither mentioned that Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump win the White House.

Or that Trump aided and abetted that attack by accepting and echoing Putin’s false denials. Or that in subsequent elections, Putin, as part of his ongoing twilight war against the United States and the West, continued to mount disinformation and influence operations for Trump’s benefit. Or that Trump has never acknowledged this gray-zone warfare and has thus been complicit in this assault waged by a foreign adversary on the US. Or that Trump, during his second stint in the White House, has run his own disinformation operation that releases formerly classified information that he and his minions falsely claim shows that there was no Russian assault in 2016. Or that Putin is currently meddling in the midterm elections by having his disinformation operators spread fake videos pushing scurrilous allegations against Democratic candidates. (See here and here.)

There’s no sense of history or of the overarching narrative in those New York Times analyses. They sharply capture the moment. But they do not place it in full context. What’s now happening is both the culmination of Putin’s long-term operation to weaken the United States and the West, which is part of his grand scheme to restore the Russian/Soviet empire, and the fulfillment of Trump’s yearslong craving to forge a bond with Putin—a yearning Putin has exploited. The Russian tyrant has been scheming for over a decade to accomplish this. And for that same stretch, Trump has betrayed the nation by repeatedly covering for Putin and declaring all talk of Russia’s hybrid warfare against the US is a Deep State conspiracy.

The Russians get this. “Well done, Trump,” one of Putin’s pundits proclaimed on state-controlled television. “Today, he’s on our side!” And in her article, Hopkins quotes pro-Putin journalist Marina Akhmedova: “In my personal view, victory has already been achieved.”

The title of my book seems a reasonable appraisal these days. But that’s because it’s attached to a thorough telling of what has led to Trump’s surrender to Putin. Even though there’s much shock and anger over Trump’s appeasement of and submission to the dictator he once asked to be his “new best friend,” perhaps a bigger outrage is that for 10 years, Putin’s operation and Trump’s collaboration occurred in plain sight and the media and political world for most of this time have neglected or ignored this story. And that’s still happening today.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

On a recent episode of the new podcast I’m co-hosting with Garrison Hayes, we looked at some of the most extreme Republican candidates running in the midterms. It’s good to keep in mind that even if the Democrats do rout the GOP in these elections, far-right radicalism will not be extinguished. 

I’m traveling the next few days, so we’re going to skip an issue. See you real soon. Try not to get too anxious about the elections. In just a little over a week, we’ll see what the American electorate thinks—and whether Trump will once again attempt to destroy the republic.

As Election Day nears, there’s the inevitable surfeit of bullshit from candidates and their surrogates. The judges could not be bothered to wade through all that muck. They’re not paid enough. But they did spot several doozies to cite.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), looking to win friends within the GOP as he contemplates seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, has been trying to boost his party’s senatorial candidates. As part of that, he slandered Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Senate in Michigan. “I believe Abdul El-Sayed is Muslim Brotherhood,” Cruz declared.

I believe? There’s no evidence El-Sayed is a member of the group, which he has publicly disavowed. So Cruz’s belief is based on nothing and is just another shot of Islamophobia from a Republican. (See this piece for a list of hateful, anti-Islam statements made recently by Republicans.) Anti-Muslim bigotry has become not a bug, but a feature for the GOP.

Now let’s turn to Sen. Susan Collins, who’s in a tight race to hold her seat in Maine. A major criticism of her has been her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice. She identifies as a pro-choice Republican, but that vote placed on the court a conservative judge who voted to toss aside Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion. Playing defense on her decision to support Kavanaugh, Collins said: “I’m very disappointed in his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. There was no way for me to anticipate that.”

No way? Abortion was one of the key issues during that contentious confirmation battle. Although Kavanaugh said during the confirmation hearings that Roe was an “important precedent,” supporters of reproductive freedom pointed out that in a previous case, Kavanaugh had signaled his willingness to limit abortion access. Yes, there was cause to fear a Kavanaugh vote on Roe.

Vice President JD Vance, last week’s victor, was once again in contention—for multiple statements. At a press conference, he refused to criticize the disgraceful ad aired by Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, which featured the mother of Amy Acton, the Democrat in that race, calling her daughter a “liar.” The problem with the ad is that Acton has said that as a child, she was raped by her stepfather, who was indicted for the alleged crime and fled the state, and Acton’s mom sided with the stepfather, which prompted a decadeslong estrangement between her and her daughter. Ramaswamy’s decision to weaponize this family tragedy and Acton’s trauma was widely slammed, with many conservatives and Republicans denouncing the ad.

Vance took a much different tack. Not only would he not criticize this spot, he chastised those who did criticize it:

What is my concern is who’s going to govern the next generation of American government. Who’s going to win the Senate race in the state of Ohio?... Who’s going to win the governor’s race in the state of Ohio? I’m a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America.

All that matters to Vance is winning and power. That’s quite the position for a leader of a party that once professed to care about character and family values.

Vance had another contender in that press conference, when he said: “There is no person who hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government than Donald J. Trump.”

No comment is needed for that. In a similar vein, Vance, during a recent interview, stated, “It’s laughable to me the idea that Donald Trump has somehow been enriched by political office.”

Another absurd comment. Trump reported making $2.2 billion in the first year of his second stint as president, with most of that coming from his crypto grift. He’s also been trading stocks like a wild man. Americans get it. A recent poll showed that 59 percent of them believe Trump is either illegally or unethically profiting off the presidency.

Vance also made it into this week’s contest for an idiotic remark about Putin that seemed like praise:

[Putin is] more soft-spoken than you would actually expect. The American media has a particular image of him. He’s soft-spoken in a certain way. He’s very deliberate. He’s very careful. And fundamentally he’s a person who looks out for the interests, as he sees it, of Russia.

Sounds like a great and misunderstood guy. Keep reading for more nonsense in that vein.

The recent developments on the Ukraine front—that is, Trump embracing Putin and abandoning Ukraine—led to many outlandish remarks. Talking to reporters, Trump lamented that Russia’s military had been too incompetent to achieve an early win in its war against Ukraine.

Trump seemed to be suggesting it would have been a good thing for Putin to have succeeded with his invasion of Ukraine—which was in keeping with his long history of never criticizing Putin for starting this horrific war.

Trump went further in separate remarks when he suggested Putin was currently doing nothing wrong in Ukraine: “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much.”

On the day he said that, Russia launched a strike on a park in the Kharkiv region that killed six civilians, including children, and its missiles hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and left hundreds of thousands without power. For Trump, that’s all “fine.”

Yet Trump’s rhetoric of appeasement was surpassed by his not-ready-for-prime-time diplomat Steve Witkoff, who easily claimed the trophy this week.

After Putin released a 74-year-old American who had been captured by Russian forces in Ukraine and convicted of working as a mercenary in a case the US government called “fabricated,” Witkoff laid it on thick while speaking to Putin: “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian—you are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that.”

Killing civilians, kidnapping Ukrainian children, murdering political foes and critics—Putin is no humanitarian. Every American should be embarrassed by this Putin-lovin’ lickspittle.

A (dis)honorable mention goes to Vance. Asked about Witkoff hailing Putin as a “humanitarian,” he said:

I agree with Steve Witkoff saying something nice to a person who just released an American hostage…I care much less about what Steve said than about the fact that he’s bringing an American hostage home to his family.

Putin obviously released the man, Stephen Hubbard, as a PR move to score points while he’s slaughtering civilians in Ukraine. Trump, Witkoff, and Vance were happy to aid and abet this murderous dictator.

Elon Musk sure riles up readers, as he should. A reader named JB appreciated the ending of the recent issue on the racist and misogynistic trillionaire who’s dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the midterms to elect Republicans. He wrote:

This is one of the best lines I’ve ever read in any newspaper or blog, ever: “Americans are going to have to figure out how to keep a schmuck like this from having so much sway in US politics.”

Ann Lamb posed this question:

Do you also have the creepies about Starlink slowing down drone/missile attack warnings in Ukraine? How much does that technology reach for the US? I know a relative in a small Texas town gets internet/TV from Starlink.

That whole episode is worrisome, indicating that Musk can singlehandedly stymie the battle plans and defenses of a country under assault by a fascist aggressor. Starlink has nearly 3 million subscribers in the United States and is trying to expand its market share. Who knows how else Musk might try to manipulate Starlink here or abroad? This is a matter worthy of a full congressional investigation.

Responding to the issue about Trump’s full embrace of Putin, Olivia Koppell emailed:

I was just in Europe. They are terrified of what Russia is doing and planning, now made worse by Trump’s total embrace of Putin. Trump is destroying our democracy, but his signing on with Putin is in my mind a red line that has now been crossed and will have tragic outcomes. Trump has taken America away from its allies and we are now on the other side. I simply can’t understand how this could have been allowed to happen. I am beyond distraught. The ICE operations already had me thinking that we will have that as a black mark on our history that will never be erased. But this turn of events will change America and the world in ways from which we won’t recover if allowed to go unchallenged. The silence in DC is deafening.

Charles Ericson sent in this note:

I’m no lawyer. Just an old submarine officer. I do know an enemy when I see one. How close is Trump’s aiding and abetting of Russia satisfying the case for treason? This despicable human has to be removed from an office that used to model good behavior for American kids. 

Charles, I’m not sure that American presidents have always been good models for kids. As for your main point, a lawyer will tell you that treason is narrowly defined in the Constitution as “levying” war against the US (meaning actually organizing a military attack against America) or aiding a hostile enemy that is explicitly at war with the US. Putin has indeed been waging a shadow war against the United States, but a court might not consider that outright warfare. Betrayal is not necessarily treason, per this definition. But I think you can use the term “treason” in a descriptive sense, if not a legalistic one. 

Thanks to those of you who have written in to praise our new podcast, Stress Test, which you can subscribe to at youtube.com/motherjones. John Sherwin had this to say:

I am so enjoying Stress Test. You and Garrison Hayes make a great team. I am also enjoying your new book and am spreading the word about it! Keep it up and hope to see you at an Our Land Zoom gathering.

A Zoom get-together is coming soon.

Diane Gosnell wrote:

For all of us streamers (because we can’t catch everything), thank you for including your C-SPAN clip in the Our Land newsletter. Over the years, it has always amazed me how patient and thoughtful you are with callers from the Republican side of the aisle (I couldn’t do it). I really enjoyed the piece and as an added plus I saw it before my mom.

I’m still loving your Stress Test podcast. I realize that you can’t be on every broadcast (after all you do need to eat, sleep, and, more importantly, feed Moxie) but I am enjoying getting to know Garrison Hayes, your cohost. The episode with Kiera Butler was both informative and surprising. (Some whack jobs think empathy is a sin?) Anyway, thanks to your fantastic podcast team!

Many thanks to all who have given Stress Test a listen or a watch. Please let us know what you think of it so we can produce the best podcast we can.

“That was the vet on the phone? What did she say?”
“Moxie, she said you have a heart murmur that has changed slightly from last year.”
“A heart murmur? That sounds bad. Real bad.”
“It’s not so bad. But why don’t we call it a heart whisper?”
“Yeah, good, okay, there’s nothing wrong with a whisper, right? It’s just a whisper.”
“Yes, just a whisper.”