Donald Trump’s peculiar relationship with Russia and its regime is getting some renewed attention and deserves to get even more. Some recent journalism underscores the seriousness of previous indications that Trump may have reason to act in the interests of Moscow and not necessarily those of the United States.

Bob Woodward’s latest book reports that after leaving office in 2021, Trump had a series of private phone calls with Russian president Vladimir Putin. For a former U.S. president to communicate with foreign leaders still in power is neither unusual nor nefarious. It may even do some good—as long as the incumbent U.S. administration is kept in the loop. One thinks, for example, of how Jimmy Carter—who has compiled a record of more public-spirited contributions since leaving the White House than any other former U.S. president—helped to keep a lid on tensions with North Korea in the 1990s.

But Trump kept his conversations with Putin secret, shooing an aide out of the room at Mar-a-Lago so he could talk in private. As I noted when addressing the Trump-Russia relationship in The National Interest last year, even when Trump was president, he kept the content of his dealings with Putin private. Trump excluded his own staff and U.S. officials responsible for Russian affairs, and he either confiscated his interpreter’s notes or used Putin’s interpreter with no American present but Trump himself. Such procedures were highly unusual, and there was no reason to use them if Trump were acting in a manner consistent with U.S. interests.

Woodward also writes that during the early months of the pandemic, Trump secretly sent COVID-19 test machines—at a time when such capabilities were in short supply—to Putin for his personal use. Putin reportedly said to Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”

Putin was right that if word of that gift had gotten out at the time, public reaction toward Trump, not Putin, would have been sharply negative. This little secret thus constituted compromising information that Putin had on Trump, and compromising information can be a basis for coercing someone into doing favors. Thanks to Woodward and his source, this secret is now out, but it leads one to wonder what similar secrets shared by Trump and Putin have yet to be revealed.

Investigative reporter Bob Dreyfuss, in a new article in The Washington Spectator, describes a long and tangled web of financial dealings involving both Trump and Russia. Some of the individuals involved are shady enough that the deals reached can easily involve additional compromising information.

Potential for blackmail is not the only way in which such transnational financial ties can be a basis for coercing favors. Financial dependence on foreign entities is by itself a problem. That is why the presence of such dependence can disqualify an applicant for a security clearance even if there is no suggestion of blackmail.

Trump’s dependence on the Russian entities and wheeler-dealers Dreyfuss describes—for completing business objectives such as building a skyscraper in Moscow or just to obtain access to capital—implies an expectation for quid pro quos. It also implies gratitude, to be added to any gratitude (with Trump, perhaps “transactional awareness” might be a more accurate term) that Trump feels for Russia’s help in getting him elected in 2016.

Such considerations are at least as likely to apply to Russia and involve the policies of the ruling regime as they would to other countries. In Putin’s system, staying in good graces with the dictator in the Kremlin is important for making any significant transnational business or financial deal succeed.

Many of Trump’s policies and positions taken when he was in power and since then have served the Russian regime’s objectives at the expense of U.S. interests. These include, among other things, a disparagement of NATO and calling the U.S. security guarantee to Europe into question, hostility toward the defense needs of Ukraine, and a persistent discrediting of American democracy. It is impossible to separate how much of this stems from Trump’s relationship with Russia or his tendency toward demagoguery. Most likely, it is a mixture.

Trump is undoubtedly an asset to Putin’s regime. The least malign possibility is that he is a type of useful idiot—someone who serves the foreign regime’s interests and is seen as worth backing with things like election interference even though the individual is not consciously working for the foreign power that is manipulating him.

Another type of asset that is even more worrisome is the agent of influence. That is someone who—whether motivated by greed, implied blackmail, or something else—intentionally does favors for the foreign regime.

A continuum exists between useful idiots and fully enrolled agents of influence, and Trump may be somewhere along that continuum. In the chaotic mind of Donald Trump, he may realize at some level that his relationship with the Russians has led him to do favors for Putin’s regime, but a blurred concept of public and private interests and an inclination to believe some of his own lies and rhetoric have led him to conclude that what he has done is not treasonous.

Dreyfuss describes how investigators on Robert Mueller’s staff were not able to follow the money trail and get to the bottom of Trump’s financial dealings with Russia—a critical part of fully discharging Mueller’s responsibility to learn all about what was behind Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The investigators saw enough smoke to convince them that there was a fire, but they were not permitted to trace the smoke all the way to the fire.

That shortcoming was due not only to pressure from the Trump White House but also larger resistance from Republicans. Primarily, this is a matter of Republicans rallying around the party flag to discredit any suggestion that Russia had anything to do with Trump’s election in 2016. Partly, it involves, also on the political Right, substantive sympathy with the “anti-woke” characteristics of Putin’s regime. Resistance has been further aided by some on the Left who reflexively oppose any line of analysis that paints Russia as a bad actor, lest this escalate to something worse in U.S.-Russian relations.

In an earlier era, before the Republican Party fell into the pit of Trumpist demagoguery, even the information now public would have been considered a disqualification from high office. At a minimum, there would have been strong pressure from across the political spectrum for the fullest possible investigation. 

Next month, the nation will go to the polls without a full investigation into one presidential candidate’s extensive relationship with a major foreign adversary. The exact nature and extent of that relationship will remain unknown.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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