"I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions." -- Robert Anton Wilson
What Is Going On With Trump and Russia?
Hanged if anybody knows!
For a brief recap:
U.S. president Donald Trump is suspected of having colluded with Russia in exchange for Russian interference in the 2016 election, arranged with Russian president Vladimir Putin, which won Trump the office. Now entering his third year in office, an investigation is underway by U.S. Attorney General appointee Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, which could lead to Trump's impeachment and removal from office.
So far, the Mueller investigation has indicted numerous Trump cabinet officials, campaign officials, and associates. This includes a signed confession from Trump's foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, a guilty plea from Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn, a guilty plea from Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen, an F.B.I. raid on Trump adviser Roger Stone, and a 25-count indictment of Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort, including - quote - "conspiracy against the United States." To name just a few!
Recap's done...
So no matter what else happens in this story, we are officially out of "conspiracy theory" territory and into the conspiracy proper. We have verification from the highest legal authority in the United States that a conspiracy, in fact, did happen.
Now the only question left is how deep does it go? Here's the legendary Keith Olberman sizing up the situation in March 2017, way before the indictments even started:
This has happened before.
In spite of the silly nature of the wildest conspiracy theories out there, real-life conspiracies get caught out all the time. Just in recent history, there's been Project MKUltra, Operation Northwoods, and the Iran-Contra Affair.
Not to mention the resignation of former U.S. president Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, in the face of inevitable conviction, when it was proven that he orchestrated a robbery of the campaign offices of his opponent in order to get re-elected and then covered it up, in an affair we all know as Watergate.
That's worth bringing up here because recall that Roger Stone character a couple paragraphs ago? He actually has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back:
...which he makes no secret of, nor of being a Nixon fan, since he mimicked Nixon's trademark gesture upon getting arrested:
It's stupid details like this that keep creaming our brains.
For those of you outside the United States saying "none of this makes any sense!" - from inside the United States, this American will tell you that it's a ka-ka goo-goo crazy pills buffet for us every day as well. Even the cheesiest action thriller scriptwriter would know better than to have a villain have a prominent tattoo of an even more infamous villain.
John Oliver pegging it in May of 2017 as "Stupid Watergate":
That sums up the whole "Russiagate" experience nicely, in spite of how dated these videos are now. It's kept going like that week after week ever since. It's like having a jackhammer construction crew and an endless police chase going on in your brain at the same time.
The trouble with real-life conspiracies is that they make it so much harder to sort out the truth from the fiction. And as the Trump-Putin story swings along to its increasingly improbable conclusion, every lead, no matter how ridiculous, becomes a possibility.
And then, of course, the stupider the real story gets, the more insane the conspiracy theories get because they're trying to make sense of a chaotic story that at this point has broken all narrative logic and almost risks defying the laws of physics.
We're not out to say here what's truth and what's fiction at this point.
We're just inviting you to put on your snorkel gear and dive into the crazy for a while.
Here are just some of the speculative stories about either Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin we can track down. In each case, we give you a link to check out and a quick summary.
We report; you decide.
The Trump family is alleged to have access to time travel technology.
Once upon a time, there was a scientist known as Nikola Tesla, who was both brilliant and innovative and also eccentric to the point of crazy, especially at the end of his life. Tesla claimed to have invented stuff like a death ray and the time machine.
When he died, the U.S. government sent over a specialist to weed through Tesla's effects in case he really had a death ray (remember: brilliant!). That specialist was John G. Trump, the paternal uncle of Donald Trump.
Officially, no crazy scifi gadgets were found in Tesla's laboratory, but it was all rusted away to a secret containment facility anyway. Then later a novel surfaced which seemed to allege that the Trump family has been using Tesla's time machine ever since.
Putin is allegedly mobilizing an aquatic army of mutant squid as a military force.
A scientist came back from a Russian scientific expedition to a subterranean lake in the Arctic, where he claims to have found a squid-like creature armed for bear. The squid - we use the term loosely, because it's described as a mutant monster straight out of The Thing - allegedly killed two scientists on the expedition. This is suspected to be a secret weapon being developed by the Russian military.
Trump supporters during the election spread the rumor that Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, was running a human trafficking ring out of pizza restaurants.
The theory took on a viral life of its own as "Pizzagate." Briefly, Clinton was supposed to be in charge of a child sex trafficking ring based primarily in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant called "Comet Ping Pong."
Though the theory is widely debunked now, it still remains a strange case that such a stupid story got so popular and widespread on its own. Not to mention naming a restaurant "Comet Ping Pong," a place we refuse to admit exists until we physically investigate the premises.
Somebody took it seriously enough to shoot out the restaurant.
And then Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, claimed the sex slave children were being hidden on Mars, as in the planet, which finally prompted NASA to come out and make a public statement that no, idiot, no child sex slaves on Mars, though they put it more politely.
This photo:
There, of course, is the aforementioned Michael Flynn, dining with Putin in 2015. There are several other Russian dignitaries there, which is unsurprising.
And from what we know of Flynn's guilty plea, yes, he was there on dirty business.
What breaks everybody's brain is: What was Jill Stein doing there? Stein was a Green Party candidate in that same 2016 U.S. election. The Green Party, for those who don't know, is environmentally focused and several degrees to the left of even the Democrats.
Now, look at Putin's and Russia's environmental record. Anybody from the Green Party should be their mortal enemy. There is no possible reason for her to be there, unless you go on the theory that she, too, was a paid pawn of Putin intended to water down Clinton's votes and tie up the win for Trump.
The U.S. and Russia might be cooperating because they're colluding to hide space aliens.
Fine then aliens, what the hell. Russia is allegedly putting pressure on the U.S. to reveal its secret alien something-or-other, according to the World Economic Forum.
Before you assign too much credibility to that source, be advised the WEF is basically a non-profit run out of Switzerland, which hosts the swinger's party for world billionaires at Davos, which you've just seen in the news. They have as much credibility as a 4chan message board.
A member of the Democratic National Committee was gunned down on the streets of Washington D.C. just months before the election.
That's not a theory itself, but cold hard fact. The event triggered a whole set of theories about the member, Seth Rich, having ties to Pizzagate this and Hillary's emails that.
Officially it was a robbery gone bad. Unofficially, the chief source of Seth Rich rumors come from Julian Assange, leader of Wikileaks and at least a person of interest in the Russiagate affair. The timing of the murder is suspicious, though perhaps the motives were exactly backward from anybody else's story.
Meanwhile, high-profile Russians keep dropping dead after Trump's election.
By August of 2017, the body count was nine Russian dignitaries, including some diplomats, who died while swimming, or was shot, or had sudden heart attacks, or was simply found dead. In each case, foul play is not suspected except for the one case where the assassination happened in an art museum in broad daylight by a gunman who was photographed at the scene, where they had to admit, "well, OK, maybe that guy" but no matter, Turkish cops shot the assassin too, so the matter's all tidied up.
Oops, almost forgot QAnon.
QAnon, the cousin to Pizzagate, is another web of Trump-supporter intrigue claiming "deep state" acts against Trump.
It was started on 4chan itself - smile for the camera, boys! It's triggered a number of domestic terrorism incidents, including an armed attacker being intercepted at Hoover Dam, threats made against the lawyer of a porn star Trump allegedly had an affair with, and numerous harassment campaigns. That porn star is Stormy Daniels, who nearly ran for Senator of Louisiana herself. Don't run away, it gets much sleazier than this.
We had a Trump-motivated mad bomber running around for a while.
Dubbed the "MAGABomber" after Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan, Cesar Sayoc is still rumored to be a false flag, plant, made-up, etc., even after he's been caught. Sayoc sent mail-bombs to George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and a number of other frequent targets of Republican rage, including CNN's world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
All of the devices were intercepted and disarmed. It's noteworthy for the fact that we had a mad bomber for a couple weeks mailing bombs to influential people in the U.S., and we've all since forgotten this guy ever existed because there are too many other Russiagate wrinkles torpedoing our attention span.
Oops, almost forgot the "Russian peeing hookers."
Remember, we warned you it would get sleazy! Of all the Putin-Trump stories, this is the one that finally makes you jabber with insanity and pray for it to be over, anyway, anyhow, just please end this.
Wonkette tells this kind of story best, so we give them the floor. In as painless a detail as possible:
- Trump stayed at a hotel in Russia.
- Russia supplied escorts in Trump's alleged favorite fetish flavor, the "omorashi" special.
- Hookers and Trump had a wet, merry romp.
- Oops, Putin was recording the whole thing!
- The story is the stand-out detail in the Steele Dossier, an investigative document on Trump which has so far been verified 100% true in everything else we've checked out.
- Putin holds this over Trump's head in what they term "kompromat."
- Russia demanded Trump's oath of loyalty to Putin or they'd tell about the pee-pee girls.
- Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, also compromised by Russia, traveled to Russia with a recording of Trump agreeing to play nice with Putin. Presumably on a USB drive hid up his tight little butt.
We admit we could have made that last detail a bit less painful.
What Is Truth?
We don't know.
We may never know.
In just the cited, proven facts we've mentioned on this page, we have enough to investigate until the end of the century and we still may not uncover everything. This kind of thing happens sometimes. Crazy attracts more crazy. The JFK assassination, being a fully documented, fully investigated, the world-famous incident caught on film, still has loose ends and unsolved mysterious incidents tied to it.
As the U.S. and Russia seem poised to enter a new Cold War, the rest of the world, already alarmed at Putin's shenanigans even outside the U.S., has all the more reason to be concerned about the outcome of Trump's reign. Yet the mire of cross-firing scandals, indictments, and attempts to shut down the investigation make fog of war, only it's an information war.
And what can anybody say?
These are interesting, crazy times that are moving far too fast for anybody to keep track of.
This is how world wars happen. A pile-up of stupid decisions that leave us with no easy answers when future generations ask us "why?"
"In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time." -- Robert Anton Wilson
