An alternative to the “Russian asset” theory regarding Trump’s approach to Ukraine

Edit: I know that there is a bunch of evidence which connects Trump to Russia. What I’ve not seen is proof that Trump is taking orders directly from the Kremlin.

I see lots of folks claiming (without evidence) that Trump is doing Putin’s bidding because he’s being paid or blackmailed into doing so by the Kremlin. The idea is that he’s “compromised” and a “russian asset”.

Trump is unquestionably behaving the way that he would if he were compromised in that way, and it’s quite possible that he is compromised (again, there’s no actual evidence for this, but it’s possible). I do think there’s a simpler explanation though.

It’s at least as likely that Trump is behaving this way simply because he’s a very stupid man. Specifically, he’s the same as every other terminally online boomer: He believes everything he sees on social media as long as it confirms his biases.

Trump clearly has a large amount of respect for Putin for being a “winner”. Trump likes winners, likes to see himself as a winner, and likes to align himself with “strongmen”. Because of this, he’s predisposed to believe anything he reads which plays into the “strong people like me are good and right” narrative.

When Trump makes idiotic claims like “Ukraine should never have started this war”, he’s doing so not because he’s taking orders directly from the Kremlin, but because he subsists on a diet of deranged rightwing social media nonsense. He’s just as much a ripe target for Russian disinformation campaigns as your racist uncle on Facebook.

The sad fact is that the Kremlin doesn’t need to blackmail Trump into hurting Ukraine, they can much more easily influence Trump using the same social media disinformation machine they use on everyone else. They can do this because he’s a fucking moron.

There’s no real need for a grand conspiracy theory here, the fact is that the US elected the dumbest fucking guy as president and he’s governing based on whatever slop his Twitter feed is filled with.