The Ultimate Useful Idiot

“Russia! Russia! Russia!” is back in the news in a weird way.

With a Russian thug bankrolling part of Don-Don’s self-aggrandizing wedding celebration, Jared promising to help Moscow hit its goals in his Ukrainian “peace” deal, and Trump begging Zelenskyy to spare Russian refineries over skyrocketing diesel prices, we’re all left pondering the same old question: What does Putin actually have on the Orange Caricature?

While I mourn the passing of the pee-tape conspiracy theory as much as anyone, I’ve come to a simpler conclusion: Putin has nothing on Trump.

Sure, he might could have kompromat, but he doesn’t even need it. It’s as if Putin flipped open an Acme catalog, ordered a Western-democracy-destroying device, and had Trump delivered fully assembled. All Vlad had to do was wind him up, point him in a direction, and let him loose — making him the quintessential useful idiot.

Let’s unpack this by looking at what we know about El Gran Jefe Estúpido and how he actually operates.

The Master Plan of a Shallow Oaf

First, the Blundering Oaf is as transparent as he is shallow. He always blurts out his jenius master plan because what’s the point of being a jenius if nobody knows about the plan? Duh!

Take his ban on MS NOW, CNN, and Politico. He projects his own chronic, compulsive lying onto them, then justifies banning them by claiming no country should tolerate being lied to like that. It’s not strategy, it’s a cry for help. It’s a classic Freudian parapraxis: he’s practically begging us to call him out on his own compulsive lying.

That’s who Trump is at his core, but it gets worse.

The One-Trick Pony

He’s a gaslighter. It’s the only trick in his entire playbook. He lies like he changes his shirt, and the second he faces pushback, he browbeats, blusters, and bullies.

He trotted this pony onto the world stage at the UN a few weeks ago, repeating for the umpteenth time that he had to choose between making a deal with Iran or obliterating them. Because he’s repeated this line so often — putting the nausea in ad nauseam — it can only be described as pure gaslighting. He’s trying to convince us of something that is patently untrue to even the most casual observer. He might bomb Iran again, but he’s not obliterating them unless he drops a nuke — and even then, full annihilation is unlikely.

Worse, he’s trying to gaslight Iran itself, which doesn’t work. They called his bluff, exposing him as the gas-filled dancing balloon outside a used car lot that he is. But since it’s his only tool, he pulls it out and waves it around anyway, threatening them with munitions everyone knows he no longer has — the literal definition of an empty threat — delivered with all the grace of a blunderbuss.

We woke up and realized it’s been TACO Tuesday all year.

Everything Is for Sale

People love to say he’s a mob boss, but he isn’t. He’s a Central Park grifter desperately searching for a mark for his three-card Monte scam and a buyer for his Florida swampland.

From day one, it’s been obvious that Trump sold off the Executive Branch to the highest bidders:

• Domestic Policy: Sold to the Heritage Foundation to implement Project 45. Trump doesn’t give a damn about trans athletes or anti-choice moral panics; his only condition is that they keep him paid off while tearing down the federal guardrails that limited his payoffs in Trump 1.0.
• Foreign & Trade Policy: Sold to bad actors. He permits the proliferation of NVIDIA chips while hypocritically whining about Chinese AI threats. Meanwhile, he’s become a paid sponsor for Putin’s war crimes in Ukraine — monkey-wrenching satellite services, blocking Patriot missile transfers, and waiving sanctions. All just to claim he’s a junior member of the Strongman Club.
• Everything Else: Climate policy was sold to fossil fuels industry, DC to contractors, immigration to Stephen Miller, fiscal policy to crypto bros and oligarchs, and elections to Musk (for government contracts) and MAGA (for all the unchecked racism and misogyny they can stomach).
• And Trump just keeps getting richer only not in the same league as Putin, Xi, Musk, or the tech bros. Let’s face it. He can’t even do that right.

The Bottom Line

Neither Trump, his Cabinet, nor the Republican Party have any interest in actually governing. They are thrilled to let the country drift into chaos as long as they can grift, insider-trade, and position themselves for 2028… oh, and so Lil’ Marco can finally fulfill his childhood promise to his mother of becoming President of Cuba one day.

This is all Trump is. He sold us out to line his pockets with a few billion dollars and construct cheap monuments to himself that won’t outlast the next president. He’s the ultimate small-minded, unimaginative, mean-spirited street hustler stumbling from one con to the next — and he has nothing left to offer.

Image Attribution

The image was found on James Vaughn’s Flickr page and has a Creative Commons license.