Losing My Perspicacity March 3, 2025

Good Morning and Happy Monday! Thanks for being here today.

I just finished watching The Oscars — what a snoozefest. It probably didn’t help that the only film I saw that was nominated was Conclave, which I liked a lot, but didn’t pack the punchy ending it was aiming for, IMO. I had no strong feelings about anything this year, and that seemed to be the case with the Academy members, too, as no one film stood out as the heads-and-shoulders winner.

Actually, I take that back: I had strong feelings about being really, really tired of seeing promos for Wicked in my eyeline for many, many months. So much pink and green. I am done. Pink and green are on my donezo list.

I was also a little shocked that the show wasn’t more political than it was. Was it me, or were those the least political Oscars we’ve had in years? It felt weird, given where we now find ourselves. I guess we’re all exhausted and just wanted to watch Hollywood play dress up for a few hours.

I went into the weekend with one goal in mind — to dive into all the stories about Donald Trump being a Russian asset. So that’s where we’re going to spend most of our time together today, before we engage in our daily ritual of laughing at Elon Musk.

Here we go.

Is Donald Trump a Russian Asset?

We’ve all heard this rumor ad nauseum, right? The story has a lot of different pieces to it, but they all have the same basic framework. A young Donald Trump, fresh off wild success and bitter financial ruin, is approached by the Russians (if the story goes as far back as some claim, it would have been the Soviet KGB), who promise to pull him out of bankruptcy and help him rebuild his empire if he’s will to do some small favors for the good ole USSR/Russia. Sometimes the rumor is about financing some hotels, sometimes it’s about money moved through Deutsche Bank (sometimes via former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s son). They all end with a man indebted to the Russians up to his eyeballs in the White House, doing the bidding of his handlers in Moscow.

If you’re like me, you rolled your eyes at these rumors the first 100 times you heard them. After all, wouldn’t the CIA know if a guy running for President was compromised to that extent? For a long time, the entire thing seemed like a good yarn looking for a reason to exist; something that explained through spycraft and subterfuge what was probably more readily explained by greed and narcissism.

The entire story has reared its head again, and given what we’ve seen for the first six weeks of Trump’s administration, suddenly it doesn’t seem so far-fetched, particularly with Trump seeking to dismantle the US intelligence community and halting offensive cyber operations against Russia. All of that, of course, is before we even get to Trump insisting Ukraine started its war with Russia. And then there were all those pesky classified docs he stored in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. What, exactly, did he plan to do with those?

So, where did the rumors that Trump is a Russian asset come from, and do they have any credibility?

The story is back in the news due to a Facebook post from Alnur Mussayev, who worked as a high-level security official for both Soviet Russia and, later, Kazakhstan, where Mussayev eventually headed up the country’s intelligence service. Mussayev posted this on February 25, 2025:

Here’s the Facebook translation:

Much of Mussayev’s Facebook page is in Russian, so I’m relying on Snopes here for some fact-checking. But as far as anyone seems to be able to tell, Mussayev is a legitimate former intelligence officer who once worked for the KGB. Kazakhstan was part of the USSR until it declared independence in 1991, so at least that part of Mussayev’s timeline checks out.

It’s also well-known that Trump visited Moscow in 1987 with then-wife Ivana. This might not seem like anything to hang our proverbial hats on now, but those who were alive in the 80s remember very well that Americans, even businessmen, did not just “go” to Moscow in those days. Billy Joel went that same year, and it was a big deal, sort of like Americans going to Cuba in the 1990s or early 2000s. It didn’t happen much.

Ivana Trump, formerly Ivana Zelnickova, was from the former Czechoslovakia and married Trump in 1977. According to Luke Harding’s book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, the Czechoslovakian spies kept close tabs on the couple when they lived in Manhattan and possibly saw in Trump something they could work with. Here’s what Harding says:

Now is probably as good a time to talk about the difference between an “asset” and an “agent.” According to Kyle Cunliffe of the University of Salford:

It’s probably easiest to do this by reference to American pop culture. If you watched The Americans, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings were agents. They were flat-out spies with covers, backstories, safe houses, etc. But all those who gave them information along the way? All those little notes and drops and people passing along flash drives? Those were assets. Carrie Mathison is an agent, all the people who leave her keys in hidden places are assets. The main point here is this: A useful idiot is an asset, not an agent. So, is Trump just a useful idiot?

Back to the story: According to Trump, the “idea” to go to Moscow came up when he just happened to sit next to the Soviet ambassador at an event held by the son of makeup mogul Estée Lauder. According to Harding’s book, there’s a lot more to it than that.

What followed was the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, playing the wide-eyed yokel from the old country while Trump swaggered around his Manhattan skyrise and ate up all the attention and praise Dubinin was giving him. That, in turn, led to Trump’s trip to Moscow, where he stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel and was lavishly entertained, all on the USSR’s dime.

If you’re waiting for the smoking gun, the one that says, “Here’s proof the Soviets recruited Trump in 1987,” you aren’t going to get it. But Mussayev and Harding are not the only ones who have alleged that Trump was compromised by the Soviets in the 1980s. In his 2022 book, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery, journalist Craig Unger made similar claims. In fact, Unger says he’s “certain” Trump is a Russian asset. Unger says Trump has ties to the Russians going back to 1980, when he purchased televisions in bulk for one of his hotels.

Unger also claims that Trump Tower was a sort of home-away-from-home for the Russian mafia, with at least 13 members of the bratva lived under Trump’s roof at one point. Unger also harkens back to the first time Trump ran for President, in 1988.

At least when it comes to that 1987 trip to Moscow, Unger and Harding seem to have similar information. And it’s worth noting that, within days of Mussayev’s Facebook post, another former KGB agent, Sergei Zhyrnov, backed up Mussayev’s claims wholeheartedly. However, in a recent interview with The Kyiv Independent, Unger said that while he was aware of Mussayev’s post, he couldn’t corroborate the story.

Snopes also has doubts, particularly as part of Mussayev’s timeline doesn’t add up.

Alone, it’s not a huge issue. And I would imagine in the KGB, as with any large organization where people move around, perhaps lines blur as people move from role to to role. I know I’ve talked about things that happened when I was in one department of the Chicago Tribune, but later realized it was actually a year earlier, when I worked in another department. And hell, 1987 was nearly (gulp) forty years ago. But when you combine Snopes’ and Unger’s points about Mussayev, what he was doing, and what the KGB was doing at the time, it does raise some questions about Mussayev’s post.

It turns out, though, that Mussayev has been making this claim about Trump since at least 2018, when he said the following on Facebook, as part of a larger post:

So, what do we make of all this? Unless Harding and Unger have the same sources, which doesn’t seem to be the case, it seems safe to say that Trump was, at the very least, on the Soviets’ radar at a time when they were (allegedly) actively looking into recruiting American businessmen (Armand Hammer, Armie Hammer’s grandfather, was another wealthy businessman accused of having ties to the Soviets).

The Soviets were able to get Trump to Russia, where no business deal ever panned out. To this day, Trump certainly seems to feel more of an affinity with Vladimir Putin and Russia than he does with his own country. And his floating for NATO and our European allies is pretty damn inexplicable. For whatever reason, Trump seems to perform for Putin, as evidenced by the shitshow in the Oval Office on Friday when a member of Russian state media managed to get into the room for the meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy before being kicked out.

Beyond that, it’s really anyone’s guess. I hate to say, “there’s no evidence" that the KGB ever successfully recruited Trump as an asset, because we have four people who have told us, two directly and two through journalists, that Trump was successfully recruited by the Soviets. And Trump’s behavior when it comes to Russia and Putin certainly begs the question. But, like I said, no smoking gun. Or at least none that the public knows about.

Is Trump an asset? Is he a useful idiot? Or is he just a narcissist who doles out favors to those who are smart enough to keep the praise coming? I don’t know, but I’m not sure it matters. The fact that Trump is behaving enough like a KGB-era plant to make people ask the question is the real problem, and one we desperately need to find a solution to. Quickly.

Tell me some more how brilliant Elon Musk is

I came across this on Bluesky, and dismissed it. Then I looked it up, and it appears to actually be true.

Here’s the tweet the dipshit couldn’t not comment on.

Notice the time on Musk’s tweet: 11:36 PM. It’s better, I guess, than when we were seeing tweets from him at all hours of the day and night, but imagine firing off a stupid retweet at half til midnight and losing $7 billion in the process. Where is Kara Swisher to explain Musk’s brilliance to me?

America is so great, our subs are out of gas

I’m going to keep this story in my back pocket and pull it out every time some right-wing jagoff asks, “Why can’t we just tell the rest of the world to fuck off? This is America!”

This is why:

Dumbasses.

The High Note

Each day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

Look, I could have done without the James Bond tribute. It seemed out of place at the Oscars, especially as no Bond film was nominated for anything. At the very least, they could have used the moment to announce the new Bond. But no.

However, I’m here all day for Doja Cat covering Shirley Bassey and absolutely killing it.

Between her and Adele (and honestly, Raye was pretty good, too), I feel we’re in a good place for Bond theme songs going forward. Well done.

Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.