Remember When Trump Was a Russian Agent?

By Rich Lowry

Monday, August 04, 2025

 

Trump must be a double agent.

 

The purported Russian asset is now rattling the nuclear saber against Moscow, saying that he has repositioned two nuclear subs in response to bellicose statements by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and that the U.S. is “totally prepared” for nuclear war.

 

This is highly unusual conduct from a U.S. president who we were assured for years must be compromised by Russia and, just a few months ago, was supposedly dumping Ukraine to fall into the arms of Vladimir Putin.

 

If all of this were true, the Kremlin now has reason to consider Donald Trump its greatest betrayer since the legendary Oleg Gordievsky, the longtime top KGB officer in London who was actually working for British intelligence.

 

At the height of the insanity about Trump and Russia during Trump’s first term, Jonathan Chait notoriously speculated in New York magazine that Trump might have been a Russian asset since 1987.

 

Chait wasn’t laughed out of the room. Instead, many left-of-center opinion makers thought he had a point.

 

Tom Nichols wrote a piece in Politico, “What Jonathan Chait Gets Right About Trump and Russia.”

 

Max Boot called Chait’s piece “invaluable” in a humdinger of a January 2019 column in the Washington Post, headlined, accurately by my count, “Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset.”

 

Boot turned the knife after going through his exhaustive catalogue:

 

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence:

 

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I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.

 

What would be the case against Trump now? That he wants the U.S. to get into a nuclear war with Russia that he’ll deliberately lose? That he’s serving Russia’s interests by engaging in nuclear brinkmanship that will convince Americans that it’s too risky to support Ukraine? That it’s all a ruse to take people off the scent of his untoward relationship with Putin?

 

Tom Nichols endorses something like the latter option. He argues that Trump’s nuclear threats “maintain the fiction that he wants to be tough on Russia,” and the back-and-forth with Medvedev allows him to “thump his chest without any danger of getting into a real fight with someone who scares him,” namely, Vladimir Putin.

 

This ignores the fact that Trump has indeed criticized Putin, and that giving Ukraine more weapons, as Trump has in recent weeks, is not a measure specifically aimed at Dmitry Medvedev. Nor are nukes on U.S. subs targeted at the former Russian premier rather than Russia proper.

 

It was always pretty obvious what was going on in 2016 and its aftermath, when Trump was so defensive about Russian hacking and said warm things about Putin: Trump got his back up because people tried to minimize his 2016 victory by attributing it to Russian interference, and launched an investigation of him based on will-o’-the-wisp evidence of coordination with Russia. At the same time, he was deferential to Putin because he respects strength and thought he could get more from the Russian leader with honey rather than vinegar.

 

You can criticize these impulses and how they were expressed, but that’s different from accusing Trump of being an agent of Russian influence.

 

The fact is that Trump’s actions in his first term did not advance Russia’s interests. He gave Ukraine lethal weapons. He inveighed against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He hit Russian mercenaries in Syria. He launched a cyberattack against the Russian Internet Research Agency. He spent more on the U.S. military, unleashed U.S. energy production, and urged NATO to spend more.

 

None of this screamed “Russian plant!”

 

In the second term, the alarm about Trump has been that he was on the verge of throwing in with Putin on Ukraine.

 

In early July, Anne Applebaum warned in a piece in The Atlantic, “The U.S. Is Switching Sides.” She claimed that “the American realignment with Russia and against Ukraine and Europe is gathering pace — not merely in rhetoric but in reality.”

 

This always seemed overwrought, although at least there was evidence for the proposition. As it happened, though, Applebaum was writing at the high tide of the administration’s pressure on Ukraine. Within days, it’d be clear that Trump was taking a different tack.

 

The more reasonable interpretation of Trump’s initial actions on Ukraine was that he was attempting to get a peace deal and erroneously considered Zelensky the problem — or more of a problem than he was — and would readjust if Putin remained recalcitrant.

 

That is indeed where we are. Now, it easily could change. I’m still not sure why Putin wouldn’t credit Trump’s diplomatic canny for bringing him to the table and try to negotiate a favorable deal that would allow him to retool and take up the fight again a couple of years from now, unless he’s on a more expedited timetable for personal reasons or assumes that he can simply outlast Ukraine and the West.

 

That might not be a crazy calculation, but it has nothing to do with Trump’s being his tool, no matter how much supposedly serious people have deluded themselves otherwise.