In the latest issue of The Atlantic, editor Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed former National Security Council official Lt. Col. (ret.) Alexander Vindman, who was asked about the connection between Russian thug and assassin Vladimir Putin and his biggest fan Donald "Tovarich" Trump:
"'President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,' [Vindman] says. Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms.The Russians don't need "dirt" on Trump, who has done a masterful job of dirtying himself over the past decade in public. Multiple women that he's sexually assaulted, the Stormy Daniels affair, his fraudulent foundation and Trump "University," and dozens of other scandals. What's more likely, and typical of Trump, is that they have a financial "deal" with him, and that's why his taxes and financial documents are so dangerous to him. Whether in generous "loans" to keep his properties afloat or in the promise of lucrative, multi-billion development deals in the future, whichever way they "employ him," he gives them the "free chicken" of undermining NATO and our intelligence community, and of diminishing and embarrassing the United States on the world stage.
But do you think Russia is blackmailing Trump? 'They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it,' he says. 'They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.'
Vindman continues, 'In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.''" (our emphasis)
BONUS: Tovarich Trump's former National Security Advisor John Bolton agrees with Vindman's appraisal of Trump as a "useful idiot" for Putin.
