Will Netanyahu Escape His Reckoning?

 Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)

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Will Netanyahu Escape His Reckoning?

https://portside.org/2026-10-07/will-netanyahu-escape-his-reckoning

 

David Remnick

 

October 7, 2026

The New Yorker

 

In his desperate attempt to hold on to power as Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to cast a spell on the electorate with a stark and profoundly cynical message: Forget the horror of October 7, 2023, and my responsibility as the guardian of national security. (Blame everyone except me.) But celebrate me, elect me, for all that I have done to assert the military dominance of the state, on October 8th and thereafter. It is an outrageous argument. It is also one that could, against all odds, prevail.

 

The election is October 27th. Netanyahu and his party, Likud, are not ahead in most mainstream polls, and yet most observers of any credibility agree that damn near anything could happen, especially given Israel’s complicated parliamentary arrangements and wild array of parties. Netanyahu’s principal opponent, Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist former Army general and the leader of the Yashar Party, could end up forming a winning coalition with parties led by Yair Golan, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Lieberman, as well as a moderate Arab party called Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas. Or there could be a deadlock and yet another election next year. Or Netanyahu, who sometimes in his long career has been stronger in the final ballot than in the polls, could find a way to form, yet again, a right-wing coalition.

 

What is astonishing—politically, morally, strategically—is that Netanyahu has any chance at all. Within days of the Hamas attack on Israel, the worst disaster in the history of the state, it was all but a given that he would soon be out of power. How could any electorate look past such a collapse and national trauma? For a while, Benny Gantz, a well-known former Army general who is seen as a Gary Cooper-like centrist, was the presumed favorite—but it turned out that he had very little to say and even less charisma with which to say it. As a presumptive Prime Minister, he proved no more durable than a wedding cake left out in the rain. Gantz quickly became the forgotten man of Israeli politics.

 

More recently, Eisenkot has emerged as a figure of solidity and a focus of sympathy. (He lost a son and two nephews in the war. Everyone knows this about him.) When he became the potential leader of a putative opposition coalition, Netanyahu made it clear how he would set out to attack him. He would declare his opponent soft on security, soft on the Arabs, and (God forbid) a supporter of finding a path toward peace with the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. A blend of bravado and bigotry has worked for Netanyahu in past campaigns.

 

But it is one thing to predict the ugliness of a campaign, and quite another to watch it play out. Earlier this week, Yinon Magal, the leading talk-show host and commentator on Channel 14, an ardently pro-Netanyahu outlet, denounced a group of former hostages and their families who contributed to a book called “Mr. Abandonment: The Legacy of the Man Who Abandoned the Hostages.” Their argument was that the Prime Minister had failed to make freeing the hostages his main priority. Magal did not hesitate to smear them. “Anyone who took part in the campaign saying he abandoned the hostages will be remembered in infamy, on a pillar of shame,” Magal said during a radio broadcast. The hostages and family members who dared to criticize Netanyahu for his handling of the issue, he said, are “the lowest people living in the State of Israel.”

 

Eisenkot, who joined a war cabinet at Netanyahu’s invitation, quit that council when he determined that Netanyahu was refusing to make the hostages his first priority. Magal, who welcomes Netanyahu onto his show “The Patriots” with the audience singing praises to him as the “King of Israel,” spit venom at those who dared to criticize the Prime Minister. “I’m telling you,” Magal said of the former hostages and their families, “these are despicable people, and the only thing that can absolve them is if they put the Likud ballot slip for Netanyahu into the ballot box in the election. ‘Forgive us, absolve us, pardon us.’ That’s the only way they can atone for the abomination they committed by participating in ‘Mr. Abandonment.’ ”

 

Netanyahu’s critics have often pointed out that, even in the early days of the war, he rarely visited the hostage families or expressed much concern for them. That omission, that coldness, has not been forgotten. At a ceremony Monday, in Jerusalem, commemorating the October 7th massacre, a bereaved father, whose son was killed at one of the kibbutzim near Gaza, rose during Netanyahu’s speech and said, for all to hear, “You did not protect my son. You did not protect the twelve hundred people who were murdered in a single day, on October 7th. Shame on you, disgrace.”

 

At the same ceremony, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, called for an investigation into the security collapse. “No amount of time that passes can allow us to forgo this obligation. There are clear lessons we already know we must internalize: We must not ignore warnings or worrying signs.”

 

This is the very same message that has come from Eisenkot and so many of Netanyahu’s opponents. For three years, the opposition has demanded that Netanyahu do what the Israeli government did in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, despite warnings from various sources in the security establishment. That exhaustive investigation, the Agranat Commission, led to numerous resignations and, eventually, the end of Golda Meir’s career as Prime Minister. By contrast, Netanyahu and his circle have done all they can to defer any kind of official inquiry and, at the same time, to put out the word that everyone but the Prime Minister is to blame. Leading figures in the security establishment have issued public apologies and left the scene. Netanyahu remains.

 

It has been well known for a long time that Netanyahu badly misread the intentions and capabilities of Hamas, treating them as little more than a hyped-up street gang compared to Hezbollah, in Lebanon. His singular focus has always been on Iran. Over time, there has been a wealth of investigative journalism making plain that the security establishment ignored clear warnings of peril from mid-level intelligence officers and other sources. No less startling, Netanyahu himself got clear warnings from both the United Arab Emirates and Egypt that a major operation was imminent. Reporters for Haaretz wrote last month that Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the President of the U.A.E., told Netanyahu in late September that he had reliable intelligence about Hamas and its plans to attack Israel. (Netanyahu has denied the report and similar ones about warnings from Egyptian sources.)

 

In Trumpian fashion, Netanyahu and his circle have gone on the counterattack. The Prime Minister’s wife, who is known for treating aides and household help with high-volume contempt, even gave an interview recently that fed into widespread right-wing conspiracy theories that high-ranking Israeli security officials had inside information on Hamas’s plans. Speaking to Channel 14, Sara Netanyahu insinuated that Yair Golan, the former deputy chief of staff of the Army and leader of the center-left Democrats Party, drove south on the morning of the attack to rescue people, not because he was courageous or selfless but because he had advance knowledge of the Hamas assault.

 

“When you’re a military man of such high rank, claiming that you fought on October 7th, already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the Prime Minister,” she said.

 

Netanyahu generally tries to distance himself from conspiracy theories, leaving that work to his supporters and family members. In the meantime, he has focussed on highlighting criticism from abroad as a badge of honor. In his recent appearance at the United Nations, Netanyahu was speaking not so much to the scattered delegates in the room but to the cameras and his electoral base at home. According to Reuters, Netanyahu’s team posted the speech online, with the Hebrew caption “Netanyahu takes on the world.” His self-depiction is as the Churchillian defender of the nation.

 

Just as Netanyahu refuses to take any responsibility for the cataclysm of October 7th, he insists that his military campaigns against Gaza, where more than seventy thousand have died; against Hezbollah, in Lebanon; and against Iran have made Israel stronger—and to hell with his foreign critics, whom he often paints as antisemitic. The new documentary film “NAZA,” which focusses on war crimes in Gaza, and the foiled hijacking of the FlyDubai flight have all become fodder for his political campaign. He will do and say anything to deflect attention from his failures or his readiness to accommodate the haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, who insist on avoiding mandatory military service. As Ilana Dayan, an investigative journalist and the host of “Uvda,” on Channel 12, put it to me, “The vast majority of those who are for Bibi tell you ‘There is no one else but him,’ and that he is showing the world how strong we are. That is one of the pathologies of this political campaign.”

 

Eisenkot, who entered politics in 2022, insists that the choice in this election is “between responsibility and running away from responsibility.” When I interviewed him recently, in Israel, he told me that among his most immediate priorities as a national leader would be the establishment of an official commission of inquiry, one that would investigate, among other questions, Netanyahu’s culpability. More recently, he has argued that the Prime Minister is an “anti-leader,” who dodges responsibility and thirsts for credit he has not earned. “The FlyDubai plane incident is an excellent example,” he told the Times of Israel this week. “He takes an incident that constitutes a massive security failure, which was averted only thanks to the extraordinary heroism of Israeli civilians and an Indian pilot, and shamelessly leverages it for a photo op.”

 

Eisenkot went on, “I look at the polls and I am convinced that in 21 days, Netanyahu will no longer be prime minister of Israel. It makes no sense for a man who failed in the greatest failure since the establishment of the state, who for three years failed to achieve either the war aims or any of the goals he presented in the Knesset, to continue ruling through a cynical policy of divide and rule and a culture of lies.” ♦

 

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.

 

Source URL: https://portside.org/2026-10-07/will-netanyahu-escape-his-reckoning

 

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Tireless Socialist

 Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)

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The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Tireless Socialist

https://portside.org/2026-10-13/rise-and-fall-americas-most-tireless-socialist

 

Joanna Scutts

October 12, 2026

The New Republic

 

What can the history of American socialism tell us about the present and future of democratic politics? The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in socialism, from Bernie Sanders’s runs for president to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recently the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor. Each of these figures has had to face the long-standing assumption in American politics that socialists just can’t find traction in the United States. American Socialist: The Life and Legacy of Eugene V. Debs, by former Jacobin editor Shawn Gude, offers an important corrective, illuminating the forces that shaped America’s foremost socialist evangelist, and the exceptional efforts of his opponents to crush him and his movement. Along the way, the book reveals a deeper truth: that in the United States, the story of socialism is really the story of opposition to socialism.

 

From the beginning of the transformation of the United States into an industrial power, the tycoons, politicians, and judges formed the best-funded union in American history, a cartel that used its bottomless collective pocket to divide and conquer workers—all while promoting the myth of rugged individual success. The collusion of corporate and government interests to suppress worker power has been a constant down the decades, from Jay Gould cutting wages and firing union workers in the 1880s; to the Colorado state militia setting ablaze an encampment of strikers’ families in Ludlow in 1914, killing 11 children; and through thousands of more or less bloodily suppressed labor protests in between. Any history of socialist actions—union drives, strikes, demonstrations, political runs—is incomplete without the story of this ferocious, unequal reaction. And it’s vital for an understanding of Debs himself, of how and why a man would hurl himself time and again into the teeth of this enemy.

 

An elusive, often frustrating hero, Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, to immigrants from Alsace in northeastern France who ran a grocery store catering to their local French community (in other words, they stocked wine). Gene, his four sisters, and baby brother were raised to be skeptical of organized religion and to question American society’s entrenched inequalities. In the overwhelmingly white Midwest of Debs’s childhood, these were primarily economic. The Civil War was a distant roar, but the downturn that followed affected the family finances enough that 14-year-old Gene quit school to work for the railroad—then barreling across the open plains, transforming remote, windswept way stations into smoke-choked cities, home to a brand-new working class.

 

He began by scraping the grease off the side of trains, then painting the stripes on the engines. At 16, he became a “fireman,” shoveling coal alongside the engineer driving the locomotive—sweaty, strenuous, dangerous work. He lost his job when the railroad boom of the early 1870s crashed and plunged the country into depression, but Debs still identified as a railway man. In early 1875, he became a charter member of the local branch of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen—a secretive, exclusive fraternity priding itself on “benevolence, sobriety, industry.” These proto-unions supported their “brothers” and families after accidents, although many workers no doubt felt like the man who said, “I would prefer my limb instead.”

 

As the economy continued to bubble and burst through the late nineteenth century, the vast expansion of the railroads across the country drew in huge numbers of workers, who knew their importance to America’s industrializing project. As an alternative to exclusive craft unions and fraternities, the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 in Philadelphia, preached a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth” that would welcome everyone, Black and white, male and female, whether they worked in fields or factories, kitchens or coal mines. The Knights emphasized community as much as battle, with picnics, dances, newspapers, and study groups. Their vision of the labor struggle as a shared, joyous culture would, in time, resonate with American socialists, but few leaders grasped how vital that joy really was.

 

Eugene Debs’s union activism was, by contrast, conservative and cautious. He distanced himself from the strikes that were becoming more frequent, widespread, and violent, and in 1885, at 29, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives as a Democrat. There, he fought to introduce a bill to make railroad companies liable for worker injuries, only to see it quashed by the business-friendly state Senate. Tired of the compromises, he served out his two-year term quietly, and did not seek reelection. Debs did not really want to govern; he wanted to run, and run, and run.

 

As his political star rose, Debs began courting Kate Metzel, a friend of his sister’s, who came from a community of politically radical German immigrants. The two married in June 1885. Their relationship rested on shared ideals, but her personality remains shadowy. Few private letters or diaries survive, although Gude suggests, fairly, that their life together did not unfold as either of them expected. They could not have children, and Kate spent much of her mature life at home in Terre Haute caring for her elderly mother and her motherless nephew. She was a rock for her husband as he roamed, but the cost to her own soul is lost to history. For Debs, home and family were “the sustaining element,” as he wrote his sister, giving him the strength to continue his work of lecturing, writing, and travel. But this rosy view ignored the widening rift between his two closest allies, Kate and his devoted younger brother, Theo, each of whom was growing increasingly jealous of the other’s influence over Debs.

 

Gude describes Debs’s conversion to socialism as a “transformation of the soul,” which he declared publicly on New Year’s Day 1897. He had shed the doubts and compromises of his previous organizing, given up the slow work of bargaining for scraps and winning by inches. His vision now was Manichaean: good versus evil, socialism versus capitalism, humanity versus the “reign of gold.” And it was a particularly American vision. As Gude describes it, Debs’s rhetoric fused nationalist and Christian mythology with Marxism, evoking the spirit of Christ and the fire of the abolitionists. It was a brew that appealed to crowds wherever he spoke. The era of political oratory made stars of the unlikeliest speakers, whose photographs or transcripts can barely convey what felt to audiences like an electrical current. Eugene Debs would spend the rest of his life spreading the gospel of this new political religion, and critics and followers alike would frequently compare him to Jesus Christ.

 

The socialist movement Debs joined contained many factions, and plenty of leaders more pragmatic than Debs, like the more intellectual Victor Berger, who built a solid socialist base in Milwaukee, and was unafraid of compromise for the sake of gaining political power. Nobody in the Socialist Party, however, could challenge Debs’s star power. His first of five runs for president came soon after his conversion, in 1900. On a tiny budget, the candidate had to do the work single-handed, riding the rails for months at a time to lecture to audiences large and small, curious, hostile, and indifferent. In 1908, he traveled from Chicago to the West Coast in a train dubbed the “Red Special,” decked out with flags and snowing the stops with leaflets. The itinerary was relentless. A typical September morning saw him leave Des Moines, Iowa, at 6 a.m. with a schedule of four stops, and four speeches (and at least six more impromptu stops), before the train chugged into Kansas City, Missouri, in the middle of the afternoon, ahead of a speech that evening. Debs was generally blunt about his purpose: to spread the socialist gospel, not to actually make it to the White House.

 

In those early years of the new century, the makeup of the country’s workforce changed dramatically, and horrors of industrial labor and living conditions—especially the employment of children—became a widespread concern. Middle-class Americans began to press for regulation and government intervention, for reform within the system. To Debs’s disgust, the bombastic Teddy Roosevelt attracted their attention and votes as a Progressive, despite his coziness with big business. His popularity showed that capitalism had left behind its most rampant phase and was now having to engage in public relations.

 

Yet the promise of reform did little to cool labor energies in the new century. Strikes became bigger and bolder, from the mines of Minnesota to the garment factories of New York City, and the militant rhetoric of the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, founded in 1905, spooked the plutocrats into fierce reprisals. For a brief moment there was an alliance, under the banner of socialism, between well-heeled, reform-minded Americans and fiery rebel workers—potently symbolized by the marriage of WASP millionaire J.G. Phelps Stokes to activist Rose Pastor, a Jewish immigrant cigar worker who became famous as the Lower East Side’s answer to Cinderella. It all pushed Debs and the socialists to the crest of a wave in 1912, the year they garnered almost a million votes for the presidency.

 

Debs was proud that “the Socialist Party was the first party to make the political discovery woman is a human being,” and he was a staunch supporter of women’s autonomy, from their right to vote to their freedom to access birth control. Yet he did not fully grasp the connection between capitalism and patriarchy drawn by activists like Rose Pastor Stokes, the IWW’s teenage star Elizabeth Gurley ­Flynn, and flame-haired Kansas speaker Kate Richards O’Hare, who appear here in brief cameos. It was one thing to fight for higher wages, and quite another for those wages to depend on granting a factory foreman access to your body. (According to Gude, among the abuses that sparked a 1909 walkout at the Pressed Steel car plant in Pennsylvania was a system in which workers had to offer up their wives and daughters as bribes to keep their jobs.) Socialist feminists went further, however, in showing how sexual coercion on the job reflected patriarchal dominance in society at large. Was Debs, with his habit of visiting brothels during his long stretches living away from home, and his emotional dependence on women who were not his wife, really capable of understanding what socialism meant to women? How far was he willing to share power with them—or anyone?

 

Early in his career, Debs moved cautiously on what was known as the “race question,” seeing it, as many Northerners did, as a Southern problem, and one that class solidarity would in time solve naturally. But the brutalities of Jim Crow disillusioned him, and by the time The Birth of a Nation was enthralling white audiences across the country in 1915, he was spitting blood. In a letter protesting the film’s racist distortions of history, he went so far as to call out the sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, writing that, if truly told, Black history “would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning” than those in the film. His outrage was so rare that it was reprinted in a number of Black newspapers, and put him in contact with the rising new generation of “New Negro” activists in Harlem. Gude argues persuasively that this is where the energy and the optimism of socialism migrated after Debs’s death, smack in the middle of the rip-roaring capitalist ’20s—to Harlem, and then into the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

 

Debs understood capitalism as a scourge that reached beyond America’s borders. He railed against U.S. empire-building and warmongering abroad, whether in Cuba in 1898 or in Mexico in 1914, when President Wilson sent troops, as Debs put it, to die “fighting for Rockefeller and his class.” That was April. By late summer, what was then called the European War had engulfed the foreign policy agenda. Debs joined the chorus protesting “preparedness,” the military buildup that was the pet cause of his old adversary Teddy Roosevelt. But when Wilson, reelected as the peace candidate in 1916, swept the United States into the war the following spring, the repercussions for protesters and leftists were immediate, and crushing. The Espionage Act criminalized dissent, while vigilantes calling themselves the American Protective League hauled off suspected draft dodgers in unmarked vans. The battered IWW was broken, and the thriving socialist press abruptly silenced.

 

In June 1918, Debs gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, in defense of socialism. He denounced war in general as a tool of the oppressors, and urged the crowd to remember that they were human beings, with minds and souls to develop, not wage slaves or cannon fodder. Two weeks later, the 62-year-old was arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 1920, two years after the end of the war, he mounted his fifth and final presidential run from his Atlanta prison cell. After President Harding commuted his sentence the day before Christmas in 1921, Debs used his experience of incarceration to write about the horrors of the prison system, especially the way it robbed poor Black boys of their future. But his health was shot, and less than five years after his release, America’s leading socialist died at the age of 70.

 

Almost immediately, arguments over his legacy began. His ability to inspire listeners in every corner of the country, to connect and convince them that he cared about them and had a balm for their pain, was powerful, but fundamentally at odds with the movement’s democratic ethos. Debs himself worried that socialism could not grow by following a powerful leader, but at the same time he wasn’t willing to give up the spotlight. There was always another audience.

 

Gude grapples throughout his book with this contradiction in Debs, the grandiose visionary and the man who craved constant affirmation, and whose heavy drinking at times meant that he needed a junior party member to get him to the stage on time. After a failed run for Congress in 1916, he plunged into an emotional affair with a married woman several years his junior, with whom he exchanged passionate letters up until the end of his life. In his final years, he embraced alternative health therapies and wrote enthusiastically to his brother from one sanitarium of the powers of such wellness cures as cold plunges, touching grass, and avoiding processed foods. These human peculiarities of Debs resist a clear narrative, and apparently did nothing to undermine his followers’ faith. He didn’t connect with people by confessing his own failings, but clearly his flaws helped him toward his spirit of nonjudgmental humanism, which allowed him to meet his fellow human beings where and how they were.

 

For all his wide knowledge across the vast range of American working lives, Eugene Debs was a Midwesterner at heart, and his politics belonged to Terre Haute, a small town under a big sky, rather than socialism’s urban hotbeds, Chicago or New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York isn’t explained by Debs, although he quoted him in his inauguration speech (“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity”). There’s perhaps a more pertinent line of inheritance from the “sewer socialists” of Milwaukee, who proudly got their name by installing a sewer system in the sanitation-deprived town, to Mamdani’s equally unglamorous, useful project of filling potholes across the city. Action, not oratory.

 

The international socialists who inspired Debs at the start of his conversion were wildly excited at the prospects for American labor. How far might a nation go that had no kings to depose, no entrenched hierarchies to uproot, a country so young and iconoclastic and resource-rich? It was a disillusion as brutal as the mines and the mills, to see how powerful the pushback would be. The promise of American socialism is still unfulfilled, but this is a country in which almost anything can be resisted, rethought, and reinvented. Even politics. Even capitalism. Perhaps the story of Eugene Debs, told as meticulously as this, shows us that reinvention will not come from a single leader, no matter how inspiring, but from the collective resistance, and joyful community, of ordinary people.

 

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Joanna Scutts is the author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It

 

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2026-10-13/rise-and-fall-americas-most-tireless-socialist

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

 "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

US imperialism in the Philippines/Documentary AMERICAN DOCTOR

 You are cordially invited to "Plundering the Philippines: How U.S. Imperialism Is Stealing Land, Life, and Livelihoods in the Philippines" with Manny of BAYAN DMV and Mya Zemlock of Katarungan DC. They will discuss how U.S. imperialism has affected the land, life, and livelihoods of people in the Philippines on Fri., Oct. 2 at 7:30 PM at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, 503 Rock Creek Church Road NW, DC 20010. Email Kathy Boylan at kathyboylan5@gmail.com

The film AMERICAN DOCTOR returns to the Parkway, 5 W. North Ave., Baltimore on Thurs., Oct. 1 at 7 PM.  Do not miss this documentary if you are interested in witnessing an ongoing genocide.  

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 "The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Trump is coming to town/unpublished letter about the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank

 Many activists are quite concerned as Donald Trump plans to visit Baltimore on Tuesday, October 6 at 4 PM. He is going to honor Anduril Industries at 1660 Shipyard Road at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point.  The company develops autonomous weapons systems and other military technology to fit into Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s Autonomous Warfare Command.  One awful example of the use of autonomous weapons was the U.S. strike on a school in Iran in February.

 

There will be a protest starting at 3 PM.  If you are unable to attend that protest, consider joining the Baltimore Nonviolence Center’s vigil against Trump’s unconstitutional policies every Tuesday from 4:30 to 5 PM at 33rd and N. Charles Streets.

 

The letter below to The Baltimore Sun was not published.  It is difficult to get The Sun to publish a letter condemning the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank: September 28 --Letters to the Editor

 

THE SUN

 

Talkback@baltimoresun.com

 

To the editor:

 

I was stunned to read “Palestinian death toll in Gaza war passes 74,000; other Mideast news” [September 28, 2026, The Baltimore Sun]. Of course, we may never know the actual number of dead as Gaza is now a land of concrete rubble.  It was also devastating to note the number of wounded Palestinians was 175,068.

 

 The article appeared a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations assembly. More than 100 concerned citizens were arrested outside in protest of the prime minister who is facing war crimes allegations, and some representatives of around 100 countries walked out as he took the podium. He made the preposterous claim that Israel is fighting against the barbarians who threaten global civilization. 

 

I appreciate that my local paper printed the article by the Associated Press. However, the author made two points which I question.  First, it is unfair to use the term “ceasefire.”  The article points out since a declared ceasefire, “over 1,100 [Palestinians] have been killed.”

 

My other concern is the use of the term Israel-Hamas war. In a war, there are casualties on both sides.  In 2023, there was a war.  Today, however, it rare to read of any Israeli casualties. The BBC reported this on September 2, 2026: “The IDF says five of its soldiers have been killed in combat since the ceasefire and one contractor was killed in an "’operational accident.’"

 

Max Obuszewski

 

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

Trump bloviates in Baltimore

 Friends,

 

I opened up the Baltimore Sun on October 6 and was floored to see an ad by Anduril, the AI weapons manufacturer: Page 2 in bold carried this message: "Who Dares Strike at Liberty" followed by "Rebuild the Arsenal."  The next full page was dominated by this ominous statment "The Shipyard is the Weapon."  This was in your face warmongering.  Of course, this ad appeared as President Trump was speaking, along with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, at the shipyard. 

 

I watched the CBS Baltimore local newscast that evening and saw that there was a gathering supporting Trump and one of the group protesting the warmongering.  However, a speaker at this protest was given maybe 15 seconds to make his point.

 

Janice and I do a Tuesday protest at 33rd & North Charles Streets in Baltimore from 4:30 to 5 PM.  So that is where we gathered with our signs: "Stop Trump before he kills again" and "This administration is fascist."  We received a significant number of honks from vehicles and kudos from Johns Hopkins University  students. One honk was from a food truck driver, and another from a driver for Allied Security.  While Janice and I did our civic duty, I do not think we stopped any killing or caused the Trump administration to deviate from its push to turn this country from a flawed democracy to a fascist state.

 

It is essential, however, to look for some hope. I found some in the National Catholic Reporter [August 14 - 27, 2026 edition.] There was an editorial "Calling war 'always evil.' the US church targets American militarism." It included a photgraph of Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark attending a news conference at the North American College in Rome, May 9, 2025.

 

We met him in Baltimore at St. Vincent dePaul church several years ago when he attended the Bishops conference. Also he was present outside the federal building in Newark when we risked arrest during Trump's first term to condemn the policy of separating immigrant children from their families. That day the police chief was emphatic he would not arrest us. 

 

That NCR issue also carried an article: "Cardinal Tobin: War is 'always evil' and church stands on the side of peace." The hopfulness contined with another article--"The US has entered a national era of cruelty"--which was about Trump's nefarious treatment of the immigrant community.  The peace with justice community, nevertheless, is continuing to protest the utter cruelty of this policy and occasionally winning the struggle.

 

  Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 - CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org/ -

Russia Expands Its War

Posted By John Feffer On September 28, 2026

 

European leaders are now fretting about Vladimir Putin in much the same way that everyone worries these days about artificial intelligence.

 

Until recently, AI agents remained within the virtual spaces where they’d been developed. Rather than free range, they were confined to their “sandboxes.” But there have been a number of cases of these AI agents lying, cheating, and hacking their way out of their designated spaces. Now, even AI experts are talking about the not-insignificant odds that the technology they designed will run amok and kill all of humanity.

 

Putin, too, was at the beginning of his reign confined to his Russian sandbox. Then he intervened in Georgia. He lied and cheated his way into Crimea and the Donbas. In 2022, he expanded Russian operations significantly when he tried to take over all of Ukraine.

 

Still, from the European point of view, Russia was flexing its muscles within the post-Soviet space. Now, Russian agents are increasingly operating outside this sandbox as well to launch attacks elsewhere in Europe. They have hired single-use operatives to commit arson, which would likely include such recent attacks as the one on WB Electronics, a Polish manufacturer of drones for Ukraine. An attack drone, which failed to detonate, was found last month at the Leipzig airport near a Ukrainian transport plane. There have been an estimated 150 Russian-linked cases of sabotage throughout Europe between 2022 and 2026, and the pace of the attacks is accelerating.

 

Russia is already involved in what NATO calls “out-of-area operations.” So far, however, these operations remain within a grey zone of sort-of plausible deniability. But European leaders are concerned that Putin, too, has the capacity to run amok and trigger a world war, if not a nuclear apocalypse.

 

The most recent cause for concern was the military exercise that Belarus conducted last week near its borders with Poland and Lithuania. This is the infamous Suwalki Gap, the narrow wedge of territory that separates Belarus from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and that connects the Baltic countries to the rest of NATO. During the Cold War, NATO ran various war games in anticipation of a Soviet attack on Poland through this 65-mile gap. Now, NATO leaders worry that Russia, perhaps alongside Belarus, will manufacture some excuse to “defend” Kaliningrad by occupying part of Lithuania or Poland.

 

After that, as former presidential envoy Brett McGurk imagines the scenario, “Russia would also claim through non-official channels that a NATO response risked nuclear war. The purpose is less about the Gap and severing NATO’s Baltic flank, than undermining NATO and its mutual defense commitments altogether.”

 

European leaders are freaking out. Polish leader Donald Tusk has reported on intelligence assessments that Russia is planning an attack on NATO in the next months. Emmanuel Macron recently brought together all French party leaders and prospective presidential candidates to discuss this threat. Finland has tested its civil defense shelters for the first time in 30 years (though the Finnish prime minister has also cautioned his European colleagues not to overreact to Russian actions).

 

Even the otherwise Russia-friendly Trump administration is getting a little worried.

 

Though Trump has threatened to pull U.S. troops out of European countries for their failure to support his various military ventures—and removed 5,000 troops from Germany in the spring—he is moving forward with establishing a new U.S. military base in Poland, which the Poles tout as vital for countering Russia. One reason for the dispatch of CIA chief John Ratcliffe to Moscow last month was reportedly to warn the Kremlin not to attack NATO members. And the Justice Department has charged five Russian intelligence operatives with belonging to a network that “paid and attempted to pay individuals within the United States and elsewhere to conduct pre-operational surveillance and carry out targeted killings, and commissioned associates to commit and attempt to commit acts of terrorism against civilian and military infrastructure in European countries that are aligned, or perceived to be aligned, with Ukraine.”

 

Putin’s Plans

 

At a certain level, none of this makes sense.

 

To date, Russia has scrupulously avoided any engagement with NATO forces for fear that the latter, if they intervened directly in the conflict, would tip the war in favor of Ukraine. Now more than ever, Russia can’t afford such a confrontation. The war inside Ukraine is not going well for Russian forces. So far in 2026, Ukraine has clawed back 375 square miles, which includes 60 settlements. Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure is having a serious impact on the Russian economy, with refining capacity cut nearly in half, billions of dollars in lost export revenues, and gas prices soaring at home. The war is now having a direct impact on Russian wallets, and that could mean political problems (at some point) for Putin.

 

The Russian president doesn’t harbor ambitions to take over Europe. Nor does he want to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. Even reestablishing control over the relatively small Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia—would pose enormous challenges either in the form of a NATO response or guerrilla resistance to Russian military rule.

 

Instead, what Putin wants is to control the fates of the regions surrounding Russia. In the Kremlin’s best-case scenario, Russian incorporates the predominantly Russian-speaking areas of the “near abroad,” like parts of eastern Ukraine and eastern Latvia. Putin has also drawn together semi-autonomous regions like Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Georgia into a League of Unrecognized Territories. He has locked down the allegiances of fully independent governments—Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and the current government in Georgia—that look to Russia for trade and protection. The Kremlin invested a lot of money and time into backing a pro-Russian party in Moldova that, if it had won in the election this year, could have dragged the country in that same direction.

 

But Putin would also be content with dividing, politically paralyzing, and economically devastating the recalcitrant states on its borders to make sure that they aren’t cohesive enough to join NATO or, more importantly, the European Union. Putin is currently pursuing that fall-back option in Ukraine.

 

Ukraine hasn’t yet knuckled under. So, Putin is simultaneously pursuing another option. If Ukraine can’t be divided and conquered then perhaps pressure can be brought to bear on the other side of the equation. And so, Putin is testing the cohesion of both NATO and the EU. The grey-zone attacks against NATO targets is one way of testing how resolute the alliance really is, especially now, when the Trump administration has expressed doubts about the Article 5 collective defense mechanism.

 

The recent victories of the Alternative for Deutschland in the Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern regional elections—and the party’s commanding lead in national polling—point to another way for Putin to compromise the EU now that his finger puppet Viktor Orban is no longer in charge in Hungary. The AfD has not been shy in touting its pro-Russian policies. It is already preparing for talks with the Russian government in early 2027 to lay the groundwork for restarting German imports of natural gas.

 

Putin, meanwhile, has consolidated his power on the home front. In elections this month, Putin’s United Russia party won a record number of seats in the Duma. Putin has sidelined—silenced, arrested, exiled, killed—all serious political opposition. Like Stalin, he has gone after critics on the left and the right. He has also rejected all ceasefire proposals and appears to be on the verge of calling up another several hundred thousand new recruits for the war in Ukraine.

 

Despite Ukrainian successes on the battlefield and its drone war against Russian infrastructure, Putin feels fully in control. At least until 2027, he is likely to continue to wage war in Ukraine to secure all of the Donbas, and he will also continue to pursue grey-zone operations in Europe.

 

International condemnation of Russia hasn’t been even a speed bump for Putin. Military assistance to Ukraine has leveled the battlefield, to an extent, but it also hasn’t stopped the Russian leader. Sanctions have wreaked havoc on the Russian economy, but they haven’t brought down the country’s military industrial complex.

 

Trump, meanwhile, has tried maximum appeasement, from the red-carpet treatment in Alaska extended to Putin to the incorporation of Russian talking points in the peace plan presented by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Ukraine has refused to go along with this strategy.

 

That leaves three options.

 

Western Options

 

The West could maintain its current policy of refusing to provide Ukraine with a significant military advantage. The war will continue to take its terrible toll without either side able to declare definitive victory. Maybe that will produce an armistice, along the Korean War model. Maybe it will just produce a forever war along with an uptick in mysterious attacks on European targets.

 

Or the Trump administration could put maximum pressure on Ukraine to buckle diplomatically and accept Russian terms in an unequal peace deal. This would not be a just solution and, given Ukrainian obstinance to date, it probably wouldn’t work either.

 

The last option is not very palatable. In response to grey-zone attacks, NATO could present Putin with an ultimatum backed by a credible threat of force (for instance, a no-fly zone over Ukraine). I’m no fan of NATO, and I worry about escalation to the nuclear level. But given that Putin seems to understand only the language of power, some show of force by the West could make the Russian leader think twice about further expanding his war. It might also push Russia to the negotiating table.

 

Putin thinks that he has time on his side. He has near-absolute control over his country and can sacrifice pretty much everything to the war effort. If he waits long enough—and continues to use his asymmetric advantage to bomb Ukrainian infrastructure—the West might succumb to its many divisions and lose both the will and capacity to support Ukraine. Or Putin’s out-of-sandbox operations, like the recent misdemeanors of AI agents, has the potential to unite the world against the rising threat.

 

The super-intelligence of AI, the middling intelligence of Putin, and the sub-intelligence of Trump: the world now faces an unholy trinity of supervillains.

 

Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org/

 

URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/28/russia-expands-its-war/

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

US out of Venezuela/Honor Casa Baltimore/Limay

 FREE NICOLAS MADURO & CILIA FLORES! U.S./ISRAEL OUT OF VENEZUELA! Join this vigil on Sat., Oct. 3 noon at N. Charles St. & University Parkway, Baltimore. On Jan. 3, 2026, the Trump administration carried out one of the most brazen acts of imperialist aggression seen in Latin America in decades. U.S. forces invaded Venezuela and seized its elected president, Nicolás Maduro, along with Cilia Flores.

 

Show your opposition to any violation of sovereignty — from bombings, to kidnappings, to occupations, to outright genocide. Cilia Flores is seriously ill in detention. Her lawyers say she may have already suffered a minor heart attack and warn that another cardiac event could be life-threatening. The Baltimore Club, CPUSA joins this action/MD@CPUSA.org.

 

You are cordially invited to a Casa Baltimore/Limay event to recognize 40+ years of friendship between Baltimore and San Juan de Limay, Esteli, Nicaragua on Sat., Oct. 3 from 2 to 5 PM in the Peabody Room, Episcopal Diocesan Center, 4 East University Pkwy., Baltimore. At 2 PM, join an informal reception, and enjoy light refreshments. At 3 PM the formal program begins with a presentation & slideshow. At 3:30 PM, there will be a Zoom connection with Limay friends with interpretation.

 

Learn about the revival of its projects in Limay --agroecology, college scholarship aid, and food packets for 200 elderly and disabled.  Honor the memory of a longtime Limay friend, Leonidas Silva. There may be Zoom space for out-of-towners to join during the formal program. If you are interested, email Barbara.Larcom@gmail.com. 

 

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

U.S. imperialism in the Philippines/AMERICAN DOCTOR at Parkway

U.S. imperialism in the Philippines/AMERICAN DOCTOR at Parkway

You are cordially invited to "Plundering the Philippines: How U.S. Imperialism Is Stealing Land, Life, and Livelihoods in the Philippines" with Manny of BAYAN DMV and Mya Zemlock of Katarungan DC. They will discuss how U.S. imperialism has affected the land, life, and livelihoods of people in the Philippines on Fri., Oct. 2 at 7:30 PM at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House, 503 Rock Creek Church Road NW, DC 20010. Email Kathy Boylan at kathyboylan5@gmail.com

The film AMERICAN DOCTOR returns to the Parkway, 5 W. North Ave., Baltimore on Thurs., Oct. 1 at 7 PM.  Do not miss this documentary if you are interested in witnessing an ongoing genocide.  

 

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subj

Probing the Trump-Putin Bromance Mystery

 Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)

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Probing the Trump-Putin Bromance Mystery

https://portside.org/2026-09-25/probing-trump-putin-bromance-mystery

 

Michael Isikoff

 

September 15, 2026

SpyTalk

 

The scene at a U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska last year is barely remembered today, but it remains illustrative of one of the confounding mysteries of Donald Trump’s presidency: How to explain his coziness with Vladimir Putin?

 

Trump had invited Putin to Alaska last summer after briefly threatening to impose punitive new sanctions on Russia— including a 100 percent tariff on countries that buy Russian oil-—if he didn’t agree to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine within “ten or twelve days.”

 

But as journalist David Corn* reconstructs their encounter in his new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight For America, Trump’s tough-guy bluster melted the moment Putin got off the plane.

 

After Putin strolled down the red carpet that had been laid for him by American soldiers, “the American president extended his hand first. A grinning Putin grasped it. The men shook hands, and Trump patted Putin’s upper arm,” Corn writes. The two authoritarian-minded pals, chatty and smiling, then strolled off together toward a stage bearing a large sign: “Alaska 2025.” Video of the warm encounter went viral.

 

To state the obvious, the “Alaska 2025” summit was hardly a turning point in the savage war in Ukraine caused by Putin’s unprovoked 2022 invasion. After nearly three hours of talks that day at the Alaska air base, Putin emerged to tell the world the meeting had been “constructive.” Trump, for his part, claimed “great progress.”

 

“I’ve always had a great relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir,” Trump told reporters.

 

In fact, the “constructive” Alaska summit was a bust, quickly vanishing down a memory hole filled with failed attempts to stop a war that, barely a year later, only seems to be escalating—and getting more deadly—by the day. One more of these fruitless fool’s errands came just this month when Trump dispatched his two personal negotiators, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to Moscow to revive peace talks in what turned into a mini-replay of Alaska. Putin warmly greeted the pair, asking them “to convey my best wishes and words of gratitude to the president of the United States.” Witkoff gushed to Putin about the “incredible stories and incredible memories” that they will all someday share together, “and yours will be right at the top of it all.” Then, after a stop-over in Kiev to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky (where progress was once again proclaimed) Witkoff and Kushner left the region evidently empty-handed, after which Putin gave his grisly response to the whole charade: a nighttime bombardment of drones and missiles on the Ukrainian capital in what the country’s foreign minister called a “massive and horrific attack.”

 

“His ballistic missiles speak louder than his words on diplomacy,” the minister posted on X.

 

These Groundhog Day performances of getting played by Putin again and again only deepen the riddle of the Trump-Putin bromance, a maddening mystery that poses an endless challenge for diplomats, journalists and historians trying to understand why an American president would be forever accommodating to the brutal dictator of a hostile foreign power.

 

“I’ve always had a great relationship with President Putin, with Vladimir,” Trump said.

It should be stated from the outset that, eight years after questions along these lines first arose during the 2016 presidential election—when Putin’s agents stole Democratic Party emails and then dumped them via Wikileaks to embarrass Hillary Clinton and boost Trump—no credible evidence has emerged that Trump, as some in the counterintelligence and media worlds initially suspected, was some sort of Manchurian candidate who must have been blackmailed or compromised by FSB kompromat. Nor has an allegation that Trump was a recruited KGB asset passed the smell test. Yet suspicions persist about financial entanglements between Russians and Trump and his family – questions that are only likely to intensify in light of the stunning revelation by Propublica this week that an oligarch close to Putin (and who accompanied the Russian president on his recent trip to China) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party in the Bahamas last May.

 

While nothing involving the dark arts of espionage can ever be completely ruled out, there are just as plausible, if less conspiratorial explanations.

 

Trump, the real estate mogul, was always motivated (beyond simply enriching himself) by his insatiable narcissistic desire to build giant monuments to himself. And, as a businessman with a mob boss mentality, he years ago saw forging an alliance with Putin as the most direct route to getting the green light for his decades long dream of erecting a glittering Trump Tower in Moscow.

 

“Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow— if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump famously tweeted in June, 2013 after announcing he was bringing his beauty pageant to Russia where he was angling to cut a deal with a pro-Putin oligarch to advance his Trump Tower project.

 

After that odd sentiment, we’re in the realm of psychology: Trump, the putative tough guy, is enamored of Putin, the real life tough guy who rules Russia the way he would like to rule America. (The same goes for his seeming affection for Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping.) A CIA behavioral profiler might also point out that Putin— with his take-no-prisoners, always attack, never back down persona—is the modern global master of the dark arts Trump learned from his most influential mentor, Roy Cohn (with whom Putin, in stature and visage, bears a more than passing resemblance). Does Trump, deep down in the recesses of his muddled mind, see Putin as the reincarnated Roy Cohn who, in times of stress, he has always yearned for?

 

But as Corn’s book makes clear, none of this ultimately matters. What does matter is that, time and again, at virtually every key juncture, Trump has coddled and appeased Putin while turning a blind eye to, if not cooperating with, the Russian tsar’s relentless campaign to stir discord in the American body politic and weaken the United States on the global stage.

 

Starting with the 2016 election, Trump brazenly and quite openly sought Russian assistance (“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails [of Hillary Clinton] that are missing,” he said) — while bringing surrogates into his campaign with their own curious connections to Moscow.

 

True enough, special counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find the evidence needed to bring criminal charges of conspiracy between the Russians and Trump or his acolytes. And there was unquestionable overreach by Democrats—playing up, for example, the deeply flawed dossier by ex-British spy Christopher Steele (paid for by the Clinton campaign)— giving Trump all he needed to denounce the whole business as “the Russia hoax.”

 

The Helsinki Moment

 

But political theatrics aside, the most important point is that Trump’s soft spot for the Russian strongman never wavered. Whatever historians ultimately write about Trump’s first term, there will surely be a prominent chapter on the jaw-dropping moment at the 2018 Helsinki conference when, after his pow wow with Putin, Trump told reporters he accepted the Russian dictator’s denial of interfering in the 2016 election over the unanimous conclusion of Kremlin culpability reached by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

 

“He just said it’s not Russia,” the American president said, credulously taking the word of a slippery ex-KGB agent over his own intelligence briefers. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” As Corn notes, Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, was so “gobsmacked” that she “thought about faking a seizure to end this humiliating moment.”

 

What was most significant about that episode however, is that it essentially gave Putin a permission slip to continue his meddling with American democracy. After all the public commotion over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, there was virtually no Trump administration pushback when Putin’s agents continued their cyber attacks and information warfare campaigns right through the 2020 election and beyond.

 

“President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies” to spread claims about criminal wrongdoing by then Democratic candidate Joe Biden and circulate “narratives about voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting,” while “conspiring to intensify their efforts” in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the National Intelligence Council wrote in an Aug. 2020 report entitled “Foreign Threats to 2020 U.S. Federal Elections.” That report, along with a tranche of other documents, was declassified and placed on the White House website just two months ago to back up Trump’s nationally televised speech from the East Room in which he warned about the dangers posed to “election integrity.” He called out the threats from China, Venezuela and voting by non-citizen migrants—and conspicuously said not a word about the far more serious and aggressive efforts by Putin and his minions spelled out in the White House’s own documents.

 

Go Betweens

 

Corn offers up a rogues gallery of the Kremlin cut-outs who have been doing Putin’s bidding inside the United States, groups like “Storm-15016,” an army of cyber warriors affiliated with the Russian Presidential Administration which planted phony stories and videos on YouTube about nefarious Ukrainian plots, and the clandestine operations of two employees of the state-funded RT (formerly Russia Today) who funneled nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based media company that paid MAGA influencers to post content in sync with what the Biden administration’s Justice Department called “the publicly stated goals of the Government of Russia and RT.”

 

Yet in his second term, Trump has pretended that none of this actually happened—thus taking the whole question of Kremlin disinformation off the table. Then, last year, more than a dozen officials of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency office which tracked foreign influence operations that threatened U.S. elections, were fired. Likewise, the State Department office set up to counter “foreign information manipulation” was shut down. The Foreign Malign Influence Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was also targeted for extinction.

 

“If Trump were purposely doing Russia’s bidding, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently,” Corn quotes Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) as saying at the end of his book.

 

It’s a good question, one of many imponderables that will be stumping scholars for decades to come.

 

* I was the co-author with David Corn of the 2018 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.

 

Michael Isikoff is an award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author who has reported for The Washington Post, Newsweek, NBC News and Yahoo News. He is now a contributing editor to SpyTalk.

Michael Isikoff is an award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author who has reported for The Washington Post, Newsweek, NBC News and Yahoo News.

 

SpyTalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. You can take out a free trial here.

 

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2026-09-25/probing-trump-putin-bromance-mystery 

To be continued

 

Donations can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212.  Ph.: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/.

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs