by Tom Maertens
Tom Maertens worked on Soviet and then Russian affairs for 12 years, inside the State Department, at the U.S. Consulate General in Leningrad, and as Minister-Counselor for Science, Environment and Technology at U.S. Embassy Moscow.
In 1862, Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside ordered 14 separate charges up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg despite pleas from subordinates to stop the slaughter. His army suffered 13,600 casualties — 1300 killed — for which the Washington press labeled him “criminally stupid.”
This is a fraction of the casualties the U.S. has suffered from the coronavirus while our criminally stupid president claims that we wouldn’t have so many cases if only we didn’t test so much.
The Trump pandemic has infected more than 4 million Americans and killed almost 160,000 people since he labeled the virus warnings a hoax by the Democrats. Americans are dying at the rate of 1,000 per day while Trump touts crackpot cures like disinfectant and hydroxychloroquine.
The country is simultaneously going through a pandemic, an economic collapse and racial protests — the worst series of crises in modern times, exacerbated by the lethal incompetence and duplicity of Donald Trump, who has no “strategy” except to lie about everything, including his completely fabricated health-care plan.
The U.S. economy suffered its greatest drop in history last quarter, greater than during the Great Depression, dropping at an annual rate of 32.9 percent, while Trump was claiming “the recovery has been very strong.”
We are also going through a social revolution where even the majority of whites now support Black Lives Matter. At one point, there were demonstrations in support of BLM in all 50 states. Our racist president, in contrast, is attempting to appeal to white suburban “housewives” by promising no more low income housing in the suburbs.
He also sent his unidentified brownshirts into Portland and elsewhere to put down protests, just like Putin’s “little green men” in Crimea. John Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE, labeled it an abuse of DHS… “the president’s trying to use DHS as his goon squad.”
Trump added to the distraction by suggesting that the elections should be postponed. He doesn’t have the authority to postpone elections, but he is getting desperate.
Dr. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, has accused her uncle of embracing “cheating as a way of life.” We know he will try to rig the election and accuse the other side of what he is actually doing.
In July, he ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database at HHS where it is no longer accessible by the public. We must assume the purpose is to hide or falsify the data.
We also know Trump will attempt to suppress the minority vote. He has said publicly that if more people vote, Republicans will never win another election.
And he will likely make up information about civil unrest: Fox and the pro-Trump media have been using edited/counterfeit footage to amplify the recent violence, such as 2014 footage from Ukraine.
You can also expect an October Surprise announcement of a coronavirus vaccine, even though experts say one is extremely unlikely to be ready by then.
More ominously, it is now unmistakable that Trump is a Russian asset, serving Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests by undermining NATO and other Western institutions while attempting to destroy public confidence in our democratic system. Among other things, he has unilaterally ordered a withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany, one of Putin’s goals, without consulting Angela Merkel.
Brianna Keilar, CNN, showed a tape of 37 times Trump fawned over Putin, while simultaneously denigrating U.S. intelligence agencies, even comparing them to Nazi Germany.
He is destroying confidence in our elections by constantly claiming that because of vote-by-mail fraud and counterfeit ballots the outcome won’t be legitimate. There is no evidence for this; deployed U.S. service-members have voted by mail for decades, and the Trump family recently voted by mail. The mail-in voter fraud rate is an infinitesimally small .00006%.
As the intelligence community told Congress, Trump is only reinforcing Russia’s disinformation campaign. The Washington Post reported more than 2 million Russian tweets in just three weeks, pushing misinformation about the coronavirus and electoral fraud.
Three former CIA directors and the former head of KGB operations in the U.S., General Oleg Kalugin (now a U.S. citizen) have said publicly that Trump is a Russian asset.
Based on my long experience in Soviet/Russian affairs, and, inevitably, with their security services, I have no doubt that Trump was compromised and is controlled by Putin. If he were in any lower position, he would be interrogated and polygraphed and likely face charges.
It’s no mystery that Trump is Putin’s pawn.
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