Idiocy On Parade: Putin, Trump, and All Their Fan Boys

Vladimir Putin’s long-standing dream of destroying the Western democratic, freedom paradigm is nearly upon us.

There’s a glaring clue in the end-time prophecies that ought to be disturbing Christian right followers of Donald Trump overtime right now, but is not. It’s the identity of a leader called “Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshek and Tubal,” found in Ezekiel 38:2 (NIV). In this and the next chapter, there is a detailed account of his attempted invasion of Israel along with a great host of other nations, every one of which Israel is currently doing its very best to piss off royally right now over Gaza.[1]

For decades, the general consensus in Pre-Millennial Bible prophecy circles, especially the Pre-Trib Rapture people has been that this “land of Magog” is Russia, and is describing an obviously-formidable Russian leader in a war they claim is also found in Revelation 6, that opens up a 7-year Great Tribulation period.

Myself, I agree he’s probably a Russian (others think it refers to a Turk), but I don’t subscribe to the time frame. I believe Ezekiel is describing the Battle of Armageddon (Rev 16:12-16), the other war that bookends this period of time, a period that only lasts 3 ½ years. And if my shorter time frame is right, all the current political leaders on the scene now could be the ones to play this drama out.

I would also think that most Christians paying attention could see Vladimir Putin to be this Gog character. Certainly, he’s the closest thing to a Bond villain you can find on the world scene today. Newsweek recently reported on Putin’s revival of the Stalin-era SMERSH anti-spy terror unit in Ukraine, made famous as the nemesis of James Bond in Fleming’s novels.

The recent and obvious murder of the courageous and popular dissident Alexsei Navalny while sitting helplessly in a Siberian penal colony, is about par for this ruthless, calculating gangster.

The timing of the announcement of his death I don’t think was any coincidence either. It was during the Munich Security Conference. If Putin, known for his sadism,[2] was hoping to send an intimidating message to these EU nations, it didn’t work. Within hours, his now-widowed wife, Julia Navalnaya, did a dramatic impromptu walk onto the stage to address the dignitaries assembled.

“If this is true, then I want Putin and all his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know: they will bear responsibility for what they did to our country, to my family, to my husband…And I want to call the world, everyone who is in this room, people around the world, to together defeat this evil. Defeat this horrible regime in Russia.”[3]

She later told the press her first instinct was to leave the conference and rush home to console their two young children, but “She decided her husband would want her to speak.”[4]

For all you MAGA cynics who might be tempted to think this is all theater, remember—these are Russians. They are tough people, and she had already lived through one assassination attempt of her husband before. She no doubt had been expecting this.

Putin’s Very Good Week

Furthermore, it’s but the latest development in what may be shaping up to be Putin’s boldest attempt yet to infiltrate, manipulate and con the United States and the West out of what truly made us great for over two centuries—democracy, our freedom paradigm, and our rule of law, ousting tyrants like him. And 2024 might be his best bet to really go for the kill, by getting his boy Trump back into the Oval Office.

Just consider the order of recent events. On February 8, Tucker Carlson aired his now-infamous interview with Putin, wherein he basically let him lecture the West about why Ukraine, the largest country in Europe, does not have the right to be anything more than a province of Russia. This he did in a bid through useful idiot Carlson (whom he insulted during the interview and humiliated afterward),[5] by seeking to induce more MAGA dupes to abandon Ukraine.

Then, two days later, at a Saturday night rally, Trump basically sought to make the case for why NATO’s unity should be compromised, and Putin be allowed to attack any member state, specifically mentioning Poland. The excuse was what he always claims he understands best—money. Or as Hillary Clinton once said of him, “Some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

“You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent? No I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”[6]

This from the man who fairly defines the word “deadbeat.”  And of course, this long-time Russian asset/agent couldn’t help but throw in that last, “in-your-face” sentence, because traitors to everything decent like these two, love to train us to be their doormats.

Putin’s calculation that enough members of the Republican Party will follow suit in Donald Trump’s long-held stance that Ukraine ought to be abandoned was not a waste of time. The Republican Congressional caucus is hitting new lows when it comes to paralyzing the people’s business regarding…well, anything now.

Not even funding for our national sacred cow Israel, so they can continue to dismember Palestinian bodies matters lately apparently. After a bipartisan effort in the Senate and White House to come up with a $95 billion aid package to fund the blood-crazed Israelis, along with the Ukrainians who are in dire straits now, because the Republican Party is betraying their valiant efforts. MAGA Mike Johnson, our new House Speaker, just sent his lazy caucus home for a two-week vacation before bringing it up for a vote. Why? Because he works for Donald Trump’s pleasure, who works for Vladimir Putin’s pleasure.

In The Driver’s Seat

I don’t know about you, but it really galls me just how much the worst people on the planet get away with the things they do. After a lifetime of crime and skirting the law, Donald Trump still commands the trust of millions of Americans, and has a good shot at getting back into power, magically making all his legal comeuppances go away. Benjamin Netanyahu was on the verge of getting thrown into jail himself, then amazingly, this “unforeseen” October 7 attack happened.  

Vladimir Putin likewise, made this stunning miscalculation in attacking Ukraine two years ago. He was in danger of being carried out of the Kremlin in a body bag. Yet the word is, he worked around the sanctions, rebuilt his war machine, put a lot of Russians to work, and is busy turning that valiant little nation into a hellscape.

I’m also not sure how many Americans appreciate just how deeply-entrenched Vladimir Putin now is in our country. Indeed, he seems to be on a roll, with a covert control over the West, especially the insane United States, greater than ever.

Back in 2020, a five-volume Republican-led no less, Senate Committee Report on the scope of Putin’s effort to intervene in the 2016 election on Donald Trump’s behalf was completed.[7] It was more full-spectrum than we even knew. Putin has agents all over the US now, largely facilitated by Trump’s time in office. He is also still pumping out disinformation and made-up stories on the internet, and is doing everything in his power to bring us to another Civil War via the southern border crisis, just for examples.

As if to show how confident he is in fooling Americans, he had the gall to tell a Russian interviewer, post-Tucker, that he hopes Joe Biden will be re-elected! Right. Joe Biden is doing all he can to defeat him in Ukraine, in spite of Republican opposition, while Trump just promised to give him all of Europe!

This makes sense only when you remember what a spymaster this guy is, and his Jedi Mind Tricks. He knows that endorsing Biden is the kiss of death on him, because it will enable all those right-wing agit prop-ers here to howl about how afraid he is of Trump and how much weaker Biden is. He also knows we can’t return him the favor because they don’t really have free and fair elections there. He’s in no danger of Americans trying the manipulate their system.

But does he ever have a friend here! The day before he left office, Trump had a 10-inch-thick binder full of Russian intel-gathering data fetched from a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility)[8] so he could “de-classify” the contents.

The day before he left.

How thoughtful.

“The Russian intelligence was just a small part of the collection of documents in the binder, described as being 10 inches thick and containing reams of information about the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. But the raw intelligence on Russia was among its most sensitive classified materials, and top Trump administration officials repeatedly tried to block the former president from releasing the documents.

The day before leaving office, Trump issued an order declassifying most of the binder’s contents, setting off a flurry of activity in the final 48 hours of his presidency. Multiple copies of the redacted binder were created inside the White House, with plans to distribute them across Washington to Republicans in Congress and right-wing journalists.”[9]

The CIA still can’t account for the original, unredacted copy. It wasn’t found in the Mar-a-Lago searches. As the intrepid Thom Hartmann so insightfully put it:

“This is the sort of thing that Putin would pay billions for, and maybe has.

This should surprise nobody: during his presidency, Donald Trump was having regular secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election).

There are, after all, credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted when the story leaked two years later:

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”…

— The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

— Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted American spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised by then-President Trump himself.“

Getting the drift?

The Deeply Disloyal Super-Patriots

When Bill Clinton travelled to Moscow in 2000 to meet Yeltsin’s choice to succeed him, Putin sat opposite the outgoing President in his usual cocky, contemptuous-of-all-things-American manner, offending Clinton deeply. Before going home, Clinton went back to his friend, poked at his heart and said, “Boris, he doesn’t have democracy here,” a conclusion Yeltsin himself soon came to agree with.

And indeed, he doesn’t. Putin has and always will have, the heart of a KGB spy master with a contempt for democracies as inherently weak. He is wrong in this, as he is about almost every other measure of what makes for “success” in God’s universe. It’s the deliberate spreading of power around, keeping it from becoming concentrated in any one person, that gives democratic nations that right combination of stability, prosperity and freedom people like Putin will never understand.

And never want to. Like all tyrants in history, at the end of the day they are all parasites, feeding off the labors of others, conquering nations that didn’t cross them, claiming greatness where none exists. Putin’s problem isn’t NATO knocking on his door; it’s the fresh air of freedom.

No wonder Trump envies Putin; their narcissistic, mutual bromance resonate like two tuning forks. Former Trump lawyer and right hand man Michael Cohen has written of his former boss:

“Everyone other than the ruling class on earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world,” he writes.

“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swath of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”[10]

On the other hand, Trump was blown away by Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on Russia:

The first reason, Cohen wrote, is money. Though Putin’s exact wealth is impossible to verify, the president pinned Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple,” The Post reported.

He also admired how Putin had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organization, in fact,” as The Post quoted.

Cohen characterized Trump as mesmerized by Putin’s all-encompassing control over Russia — and how he could leverage his own power in the US, according to CNN.

“Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits — Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president,” Cohen wrote, according to the network.[11]

“Bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits”? Is that why I saw a photo with the phrase, “US President Donald Trump” with a “trademark” insignia after it? Is that what’s next? Suppressing dissent by crushing people financially?

If you think any of this toxic male rivalry/dominance culture has anything to do with the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, let me know. I’d be glad to hear your explanation.

Back To Gog

Most Christians base their politics on Bible prophecy, at least sub-consciously, whether they realize it or not. Thus, it’s left to demagogues and con men like Trump to provide them with an apocalyptic scenario.

In other words, it’s back to “American Carnage,” everything’s a “disaster” or a “catastrophe,” and “I alone can fix it!” But it’s hard to sell that when the economy is humming along, the US military has never been stronger, and NATO is still standing. And when the violent crime rate is actually at a 30-year low. Most mass shootings are being carried on by white right-wingers and street gangs, who really couldn’t care less about politics.

Moreover, he has to provide a villain, so of course it’s those “godless liberals, all those secularists, other religions and other races that are coming to persecute you and throw you in camps, and I alone am standing between you and them!”

Which brings us back to Gog. The one thing you believe about this Gog guy, and that’s that he’s a Russian and he attacks that obsession of Christian Zionists, the care and feeding of a largely international pariah. Ukrainians, Palestinians, starving and oppressed people all over the world—they all can get in the back of the line.

It’s bad enough that Vladimir Putin wants to destroy America. A vote for Trump is a vote for the guy who attacks both your own country and Israel.

The question is, Why would you do it?

Notes:

[1] By their brutal treatment of the Palestinians. By the way, in case you’re offended or alarmed, the eponymous term “piss” and cognate forms are “Biblical,” at least in the King James version (I Sam 25:22,34; Isa 36:12), etc. Even God gets into it a couple of times (I Kings 14:10; 21:17-21), etc.

[2] As Adam Serwer put it so succinctly, for Trump and the MAGA movement, “The Cruelty is the Point.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

[3] https://thehill.com/policy/international/4472349-navalny-wife-speech-munich-security-conference/

[4] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240218-yulia-navalnaya-kremlin-critic-s-heroic-wife-to-attend-eu-foreign-policy-meeting

[5] He blew Carlson’s “wannabe spook” cover that he has tried to hide from his audience by mentioning how he failed to be accepted by the CIA after college, then complained to the world that he wasn’t a good interviewer (he isn’t). https://www.newsweek.com/putin-humiliates-tucker-carlson-after-interview-too-soft-1870167

[6] https://apnews.com/article/trump-nato-foreign-aid-russia-2b8054a9fe185eec34c2c541cece655d

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_presidential_election

[8] A highly-secure room where our nation’s “Above Top Secret” information is kept. Only people with top clearances can go there to view it. They are not allowed to copy any of it or remove it from the room. Just removing it from the room shows you the contempt Trump has for our country and its traditions and measures.

[9] https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/

[10] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/michael-cohen-explains-why-trump-likes-putin-what-trump-really-n1239470

[11] https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-admires-putin-rich-runs-russia-like-company-michael-cohen-2020-9