The Birth of the Trump Doctrine Lies in the 1987 Recruitment of Donald Trump By the KGB During His Trip to Moscow That Year

How Trump responded to his recruitment remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that it shaped his entrance into politics and his foreign policy in a way the world now ignores at its peril.

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Introduction

The New York Times reports that the European Union remains uncertain of whether Donald Trump is indifferent to or contemptuous of it. But there’s candidly no reason for such doubt—Trump’s contempt for Europe is at least as old as his fondness for the Soviet Union and then Russia, and it stretches back at least forty years, likely more.

As President of the United States, Trump wants the European Union and NATO to be either neutered or destroyed—goals he shares with Russian president Vladimir Putin—and there’s so little fuzz on this that it should no longer be a topic of speculation in Brussels (the European capital where both the EU and NATO are headquartered).

The Trump Trip to Moscow That Got Us Here

Prior to 1987, Donald Trump had no meaningful investment in U.S. politics. He was a moderately successful businessman who had made his bag via the sponsorship of his father, who decided to name Donald the heir to his real estate empire despite his not being his eldest son (Fred Jr. wanted to be a pilot, and died in 1981). While Fred Sr.’s death in 1999 would bring to Donald Trump the second pillar of his future wealth—a minimum $413 million inheritance Trump would forever after lie about (much like Elon Musk has consistently lied about his own rich father’s largesse in setting him on the path to even greater riches)—in 1987 it was Fred Sr.’s life that all of Trump’s wealth dependent upon.

Therefore, more specifically, Trump’s wealth depended on the philosophy Fred Sr. had taught little Donny from the time he was a boy, a philosophy that remains the biggest determinant of every decision that the now-nearly-octogenarian Donald Trump makes:

“You have to be a killer if you want to be a king.” — Fred Trump

Those who aren’t Trump biographers may scoff at the idea that the words of a father can so direct the life of a son, so it’s important to understand that Donald Trump was not a mere son the way other men are: Trump, as heir to a massive real estate empire and the fortune that came with it, was (a) a subject of his at once kingly, domineering, and bigoted father; (b) dependent on his father from an early age for the things that he valued most (namely money, fame, and influence); (c) bereft of any counterbalancing maternal figure (as Trump’s mother largely ignored him); (d) bereft of many counter-balancing relationships at all (as he wasn’t that close with the rest of his family, with the possible exception of now-deceased brother Robert Trump; he was also incapable of forming lasting intimate bonds with women); and (e) took his father’s Killer Theory to heart so completely—perhaps not surprising, given that he spent almost every day in contact with his father—that he applied it to every aspect of his life.

Proof writes “every aspect” advisedly, here. Trump employed Killer Theory not just in business dealings but in legal ones and even in personal relationships. To Trump in 1987, not only was every dealing with another person or institution in point of fact a zero-sum war-game—even all intimate relationships—but whether one “won” those engagements, and perhaps even whether one did so with some measure of brutality, determined one’s value as a human being (or more specifically as a man; women simply didn’t rate in Trump’s view, maybe because he grew up without a present and engaged maternal figure).

That was who businessman Donald Trump was in 1987, when—every source agrees—the KGB arranged for him to travel to Moscow as part of (unbeknownst to Trump at the time) a now-infamous KGB recruitment drive focused on American businessmen.

The KGB Recruitment of Donald Trump

What the then forty-year-old Trump could not have known at the time, so in thrall did he remain to his imperial pater familias, is that Killer Theory made him a perfect target for the KGB.

All KGB agents had to do was tell Trump that he had, in effect, been a very good boy: he was indeed a “killer,” a real man, and so much so that someone besides his dad and a succession of women whose love he couldn’t keep had finally decided to take notice of this fact and finally treat him as the alpha male he (surely) had always been. And why did Trump need such flattering? Because his dad was still alive, indeed still vigorous, in 1987, despite the fact that Donald had taken over the Trump Organization in 1971.

As long as Fred Sr. was alive, Donald Trump was still “little Donny” on some psychic level. Apart from, as noted, a succession of women who treated Trump as a ravishing playboy but whose opinions didn’t finally rate for him because they were women, it took the entire Soviet Union to treat Trump as the man his dad had ordered him to be.

And 1987 was the perfect year for such an intervention to arrive.

Why? Because what Donald Trump learned about himself throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, as he ran the Trump Organization into the ground, was that he actually had failed at the three things his life had been self-admittedly constructed around: being as great a businessman as his father had been (he was manifestly not); being a “killer” as his father had commanded (which he couldn’t be, of course, if he weren’t a great businessman, and, again, he wasn’t a great businessman); and finding a woman who would actually love him, as his mother didn’t appear to.

Trump’s first of six quick-succession bankruptcies would arrive in 1991, but by July 1987—when he traveled to Moscow at the clandestine arrangement of the KGB—he may not have been fully aware of its sponsorship of the opportunity, but he surely was aware that the Trump Organization was collapsing under his years of mismanagement.

His knew his dad was going to watch him fail. The world was going to watch him fail.

His father was going to see that his son wasn’t “a killer.” The world would see it, too.

It’s against this fraught backdrop that three former top-level KGB agents, speaking at different times and in different places, long after the fall of the KGB, have confirmed that the KGB recruited Trump while he was, at its arrangement, in Moscow in 1987:

1. Alnur Mussayev, a former KGB officer who later became the head of intelligence for the nation of Kazakhstan and says Trump was recruited under the KGB code name “Krasnov,” meaning “beauty” (note that The Daily Beast link here takes ten seconds to fully load, and note also that the KGB assigning Trump an operational title does not mean that Mr. Trump accepted it or was even aware he’d received it);

2. Yuri Shvets, a former Major in the KGB who now lives in America and has no reason to fear Putin, and who served as one of the many sources for revered U.S. historian Craig Unger’s bestselling books about Donald Trump; and

3. Sergei Zhyrnov, a former KGB officer who has “endorsed” the claim that Trump was recruited by the KGB, noting (as The Hill summarizes) that in Moscow in 1987 “Trump would’ve been surrounded 24/7 by KGB operatives, including everyone from his cab driver to the maid servicing his hotel room; his every move would have been recorded and documented, [so] he could have been either caught in a ‘honey trap’ (“All foreign-currency prostitutes were KGB—100% [of them],” Zhyrnov told a journalist recently) or perhaps recorded bribing Moscow city officials in order to promote his idea of building a hotel in the Soviet capital.”

To be clear, there are at least three “problems” with the above, tripled-sourced claim:

1. No one believes former KGB agents—even those who, like the three men above, are no longer associated with Russian intelligence, and and even though U.S. and European historians have made fruitful use for decades of revelations by former-KGB whistleblowers (this despite the conventional wisdom that there is no such thing as a “former” spy);

2. there’s a mountain of further corroborating evidence of Trump’s recruitment, but since no more of it than what is listed above is testimonial (at least testimonial in the first-hand sense), anyone looking to deny Trump’s involvement with Russian intelligence can pretend that only three sources allege it (Proof is referring here to everything from the BBC and CIA confirmation that the Kremlin has “more than one [Trump] tape, audio and video, from more than one date, in more than one place [in Russia], of a sexual nature” to precise knowledge of the man who was with Trump when that material was allegedly collected, a Trump associate and playboy who has since settled down in Russia and not returned to the United States, and who works for a key coordinator of Russian election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Kremlin agent and 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort boss Oleg Deripaska); and

3. no one in the general public seems to really understand what “recruitment by the KGB” actually means, as many wrongly assume it must mean that Trump is an active witting Russian intelligence agent when in fact it could simply mean that Trump is an unwitting and only intermittently used Russian asset—two wildly divergent possibilities that leave ample room for Trump supporters acting in bad faith to paint anyone who references Trump’s seemingly inarguable recruitment by Soviet intelligence in the 1980s to be a conspiracy theorist and leftist fanatic.

But the good news in all this is that we don’t have to go down these long rabbit holes.

There’s more than enough that’s known and uncontested for us to be getting on with.

The 1987 Conversion of Donald Trump

What no one disagrees on is the fact that Russia was still the Soviet Union in 1987.

It was an authoritarian state of the sort we now know Trump admires.

It was a Communist state.

Vladimir Putin was not yet in power.

It was also an enemy of the United States in every conceivable sense, and remained so until the Fall of Communism began two years later, in July 1989. Trump may have had an inkling of that coming collapse in 1987 and seen it as a promising development in the view of the Trump Organization—there’s no evidence Trump ever much cared about the Soviet Union as a threat to the United States or to global security—but that would be speculation. What’s not speculation is that Trump was profoundly enamored with the Soviet Union from the moment he stepped into it, seeing the authoritarian grip in which the Communist Party held its victims as fertile soil for the sort of graft-forward business operations Trump has always deemed himself expert in, to the point that there’s an entire body of literature (that Proof has delved into and cited at length, so will not regurgitate here) relating to Trump’s philosophy that businessmen should be able to bribe governments.

He’s said this openly. Heck, he’s even stopped enforcement of Bribery statutes.

So it’s wrong to say Trump’s love of Russia began with Putin—or began with Russia.

It began with his love of the Soviet Union as an authoritarian state that he could bribe.

More specifically, it began with Trump’s identification of the Soviet Union as a Killer State—a nation-state that acted, in 1987, the same way Fred Trump Sr. had taught his son to act: without regard for laws or norms, and purely on the basis of demonstrated might. Whereas, in Trump’s view, leading democratic states in the 1980s, including the United States, were Loser States (broadly speaking, states that allow themselves and their citizens to be taken advantage of by nation-states that don’t and won’t play by any rules), the Soviet Union embraced bribery as a means of doing business because it was a Killer State well understood the mantra of all evil persons and institutions in human history: the ends always justify the means. Did Trump mind that that was also the ethos of Communism, indeed the very reason the Soviet Union was the archetypal Communist state? It did not.

“Killer” or “loser”—“king” or “victim”—those were the two options Fred Sr. taught his son to see. Any vacillating between those options was a sign of terminal weakness.

The Newspaper Ad That Changed Everything

We don’t know exactly what happened when Trump spent days and days and days in Moscow surrounded by KGB agents who specifically wanted to recruit him to become a politician in the United States.

We only know that when Trump returned from a Killer State (the Communist Soviet Union) to the very Loser State (the democratic United States) that had given him and his family everything they ever had, he immediately became political and in a way that many regarded as bizarrely anti-American.

Nor did this happen slowly, or gradually, or over years and years. It was immediate.

One of the very first things Trump did upon returning to the States was something he never did unless it was mission-critical to him: spend a lot of money on something.

Specifically, in the August after his July trip he spent $94,801 in 1987 dollars (that is, over a quarter of a million dollars in 2025 terms—specifically, $263,248) to place a single ad in just three newspapers: the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

The ad, addressed to “the American people,” was the most nakedly political act the forty-year-old Trump had ever undertaken in his entire life, and there’d been no sign whatsoever it was coming before he went to the Soviet Union to be wined and dined by the KGB.

Here’s the ad:

The subject of the ad, readers will notice, was advocating for the number-one foreign policy goal of the Communist Soviet Union: getting America to end the Marshall Plan.

The Marshall Plan was America’s post-World War II foreign policy agenda. It deeply invested America in the well-being of Europe and Japan in part as a way to stave off Soviet geopolitical advances and a recurrence of the German-Italian-Japanese Axis.

But as a man more familiar with Killer Theory than actual geopolitics, Trump offered up in his bizarre ad a minimally erudite case for unwinding the Marshall Plan. Rather, he identified Japan, along with unnamed European and Middle Eastern nation-states, as Loser States that were taking advantage of America and, in so doing, preventing it and its citizens from becoming the “killers” they were born to be. Thus (emphasis in original):

For decades [since the Marshall Plan launched after WWII], Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States. The saga continues unabated as [America] defends the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States….why are these nations [America’s allies under the Marshall Plan] not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?

….

The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.

….

Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to their countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others [including Europe] pay for the protection we extend as allies.

This is all so telling that one hardly knows where to begin. But what it clearly adds up to is exactly the same Trump Doctrine we see today. True, it’s not a “doctrine” in the sense of being intelligent, well-considered, workable, or even ethical, but it’s coherent.

The Trump Doctrine

As articulated in his first major political announcement, the Trump Doctrine is this:

(1) One of the major things a nation must seek to avoid is being “laughed at.” This notion may at first blush seem almost preternaturally puerile and even “high school-ish”… because it is. But if you want to distinguish between the Killer States and Loser States and you’re a forty-year-old Donald Trump with a very limited understanding of geopolitics, and if you also have the emotional maturity of a teenager, you put the matter in such stark terms as this: Killer States laugh at other nation-states as they abuse and/or control them, while Loser States get laughed at as they are controlled and/or abused by Killer States.

By this measure, Trump repeatedly identifies the United States, in his September 1987 ad, as a Loser State. His own successes there—made possible by the very nation he’s exhibiting contempt for—are simply taken for granted, as his focus has already moved to consideration of how he believes America writ large is seen in the world, not how it uniquely made the successes of the Trump Family possible.

But here’s the catch—as Trump frames it, it’s really not a matter of how America is seen by the entire world, is it?

That is, there’s never been any evidence whatsoever that America’s allies are “laughing at us.” Indeed, merely stating that without any evidence suggests a deep discomfort with our allies on Trump’s part, a presumption that they must be hiding something and actually have America’s demise in view. In Trumpist terms, either they’re Killer States in disguise—abusing America ceaselessly—or they’re all fellow Loser States that America has no business allowing itself to be abused by. At base, in implying that America’s allies are and have always been “laughing at” it, Trump would be exhibiting a deep mistrust of our friends that we’d have to deem borderline pathological. We might even argue—and probably should—that Trump is here militating against there ever being trust between nation-states per se.

But if Trump has no actual evidence America’s allies are laughing at us, what exactly is he talking about here?

Well, he appears to be speaking, instead, about the enemies of America—for instance, the very people who were wining and dining him all about Moscow as he conceived, apparently, of this jeremiad against America’s foreign policy in the 1980s. No doubt the KGB, aware that Communism was on its last legs, projected strength to Trump during his visit, and did it in part by playing on his core emotional immaturities and particularly his vanity: a fear of being laughed at that was graver and more imminent, than anything else in view. That Trump would have been able to see, by 1989, that he’d been played in 1987, and that the real joke had been on the KGB and the Soviet Union, and that the winner of the Cold War was actually America, goes without saying. But Trump appears to have been oddly insensate to that victory, perhaps in part because it wasn’t his. It was Ronald Reagan’s, it was George H.W. Bush’s, and it was attributable to a Republican establishment he wasn’t part of—an establishment he’d spend the next twenty years privately seething at until he ran for office in 2016 and made sure all America understood how much he hated it (especially the blue-blood Bush Family).

So Trump’s point, in his 1987 ad, was actually that the United States should care what its enemies think of it.

Which is another way of saying we should act as our enemies would… to impress them.

Which is another way of saying America’s allies are holding America back from matching the “killer” instincts and readily demonstrated powers of its enemies.

So all of that is… crazy? America needs to be wary of its enemies, but certainly need not seek to impress them. America defeats its enemies by not being like them, in fact.

Our allies are why and how we defeat our enemies, not a hindrance to that ambition.

Indeed, Trump’s constructions are so counter-intuitive and borderline nonsensical—certainly they take no part in any American intellectual tradition—that the simplest solve for the question of where they hail from is to guess they’re of foreign extraction.

Are they from Russia? Who knows. But we know they echo Soviet (and then Russian) thinking precisely, and were partly formed while Trump was in Russia trying to seal the most lucrative business deals of his life with Kremlin agents—something he was still trying to do in signing three separate deals for a Trump Tower Moscow between 2013 and 2016, a period during which he knew he would be running for POTUS (see the New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion, Simon & Schuster, 2018).

(2) Lies about how much money allies owe America can be used to make it impossible for us to ally with anyone. In falsely saying, in the late 1980s, that America’s allies owed it “hundreds of billions of dollars”—which would be the equivalent of well over a trillion dollars in 2025—you could be forgiven for hearing an echo of what Donald Trump just told our European ally Ukraine at a time when we have given it about $100 billion in aid over the last decade: that the figure is actually $350 billion and that Ukraine now must pay us $500 billion, in consequence of that. Huh? How does demanding five times what we’ve given Ukraine make any sense? For that matter, how would even demanding $100 billion make sense? A $100 billion bill would suggest the United States got no benefit from all the work Ukraine has done to forestall an even larger Russian invasion of Europe, one that would quite possibly incite World War III.

In other words, in asking for $500 billion Trump is (a) lying about U.S. foreign aid, (b) pretending that there’s no value at all to the U.S. in any foreign spending it makes, and (c) demanding between 600% and 700% of what America could credibly say it’s owed if we assume all diplomatic relationships are purely mercantile rather than values-based.

In other words, Trump is setting an amount he knows that Ukraine can’t possibly pay.

So what Trump was doing in 1987 he is still doing today: (a) lying about how much aid the U.S. gives other nations; (b) lying about whether that aid advantages the U.S. at all; (c) setting a “payback” amount that he knows our allies cannot meet, which then gives him the excuse he’s clearly looking for to abandon them altogether.

(3) America has no identifiable interests abroad. Throughout his 1987 declaration, we find Trump at pains to—and preposterously, it must be said—frame America as a self-sufficient nation-state that needs no one else.

Perhaps you’re wondering where that idea comes from? Once again, Fred Trump Sr.

A “killer” is self-sufficient, of course; he needs no one else to survive, nor even to thrive, which is how you know someone is a killer and a king rather than a loser.

The problem of course, is that besides being wrong on a human level, the late Fred Sr.’s ideas are positively deranged as a matter of foreign policy. No nation-state can go it alone—not in this century nor the last one, at least. To say that America needs no oil, benefits nothing from helping protect its allies, has no interests to safeguard in Japan or Europe or the Middle East, is to so juxtapose the sort of man Trump wants to be with the sort of nation America (or any nation) is that it’s… well, simply delusional.

Or to a point, at least.

There did used to be nations that, for long stretches, made claims of self-sufficiency.

Yes, these nations did business with other nations, but if another nation-state had something they desperately needed they simply invaded, overran, and occupied it.

Such nations were called empires.

Most of human history has been defined by empires rather than mere nation-states, so in this sense there’s actually some history—albeit a very dark history—lying behind Trump’s way of thinking. That way of thinking also happens to have been the Soviet Union’s way of thinking after World War II (see, e.g., its dangerous and morally vile involvements in Korea, Vietnam, China, Afghanistan, nations in Africa and South America, et al.), and which also happens to be the way of Vladimir Putin’s thinking in this century.

Just as Donald Trump wants Greenland, and Canada, and Mexico, and Panama, and (lest we forget his long-held invasion plans) Venezuela, Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine.

Both men want to be emperors. Both men think in terms of empire.

Both men want to pretend that the two world wars didn’t happen, that therefore we learned nothing from them, that therefore we can just return to the Age of Empires.

What’s bizarre about that is that we know why Russia wants to ignore the world wars: because by the end of the 1980s it had lost its former republics, most of its wealth, and indeed had continued geopolitical influence only for the worst reason imaginable—an aging nuclear arsenal it could use to destroy the entire planet at will. That excepted, it was just, as late U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) once famously said, “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

But America? America helped win not just one but both world wars, and prospered in their aftermath(s). Why would any American want to abandon the Marshall Plan? Why would any American want to try to go it alone, become an empire, and see no Allied Powers foreign interests as meaningful or shared?

Here again we must return to Fred Trump Sr. It’s not that Trump had any geopolitical sensibilities in the 1980s; he simply had a nose for weakness and an eye for dominance and correctly sussed out that—while by no means sustainable or ethical—empires can for a time exhibit much more of the latter and far less of the former than democracies.

In Trump’s view, echoing Killer Theory, that makes empires better than democracies.

(4) There are Killer States and Loser States, and the Killer States must divide the world among themselves while turning the Loser States into vassal states. If the vision of geopolitics Trump shares with all fascist governments now extant and all Communist governments now extant is that it’s better that there be a small number of empires (Killer States) and a large number of vassal states (Loser States), it follows that no Killer State can ever be subservient to any other Killer State and that therefore the Killer States must carve up regions of influence in the way Spain and Portugal did in 1494.

The implications of this are terrifying—especially if you understand which nations Trump has identified as Killer States because they either have autocratic governments or could have them (as is the case with the United States, under his current leadership):

• North American Killer State: the United States

• South American Killer State: Brazil

• Middle East Killer State: Saudi Arabia/UAE

• Oceania Killer State: China

• Southeast Asian Killer State: India

Notice anything important missing? Well, several things are missing here, of course.

First, Trump sees all of Europe as Loser States, with the exception of a small number of potential vassal states that are Loser States attached to (or that could be attached to) a Killer State. Hungary is effectively a vassal state of Russia; Belarus is undoubtedly a vassal state of Russia; Ukraine is an incipient Russian vassal state, in that Trump believes it can and will fall to Russia without American foreign aid; and then there are a series of likely near-term Russian vassal states (at least in Trump’s view of how the next twenty years could unfold in Europe): Moldova, Georgia, Montenegro, and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). Europe also has several Kremlin client states or potential client states, including Italy, Greece, and Turkey (a small portion of the last of these is in Europe); these states still have self-respect, in Trump’s view, but they’re also smart enough to aid the Russians as and when they can in recognition of Russia’s presumptive status as a Killer State.

When you consider that Russia is itself considered a European country—in part—and that Switzerland is perpetually neutral, and that several of the 44 countries in Europe are so small and/or poor as to be beneath Trump’s notice (e.g., Monaco, San Marino, The Vatican, Malta, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Andorra, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia) and several others have far-right parties Trump and his co-president Elon Musk believe can soon take over (in Germany, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, and France), you can understand the terrifying reality: Trump believes that Russia may well be the premiere Killer State left in Europe, and he’s fine with that because he sees the EU, as he has said repeatedly, as the enemy of the United States and therefore will rejoice if it collapses.

So the premise that scares Europe to no end—that Putin wants all his Soviet republics back, including the Baltics (and no one doubts this) and wants several other nations he believes he can infiltrate in the near-term (e.g., Montenegro)—is of no concern at all to Trump because he sees it as inevitable that America’s one-time European allies will fail due to (a) their limited defense spending, (b) their lack of nuclear weapons (in most but of course not all cases), (c) their openness to immigration, and (d) their self-avowed “social democratic” political philosophical bent. He doesn’t see the point in the U.S. saving these Loser States from being overrun by Russia, a Killer State, because, as he likes to point out, there is a “big, beautiful ocean” between Europe and America and therefore we don’t share (to borrow from his 1987 declaration, here) “their” interests.

Trump deems America’s sole sphere, at present, to be North America. And his claims about what he wants to do during his second term manifest this. Do we have evidence he wants to annex Canada? Yes. Do we have evidence he wants to annex Greenland? Yes. Do we have evidence he wants to start firing missiles into Mexico, which would put America on a collision-course with that nation in terms of a military engagement and could well end in an American “victory” that allows for a partial annexation? Yes.

Has Trump mused about using a blockade to control Cuba? Yes. Has he dismissed the other Caribbean nations as “shitholes” not worth America’s time or interest? Yes.

In South America, Trump spent years trying to forge a relationship with the man he believed would use a coup to take permanent tyrannical control of Brazil—the villain Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Eduardo still appears at every CPAC for a speech and was meeting with Trump agents just before the January 6 insurrection—but also mulled plans to invade, as noted above, the only other nation on that continent that could be a realistic counterbalance to American power, Venezuela (which has oil and close ties to Russia). He’s already developed close ties to the current chief Killer State in Central America, El Salvador, via its far-right dictator Nayib Bukele—yes, the same one Elon Musk openly adores and amplifies near-daily—and the remaining South American Killer State aspirant now that Brazil and Venezuela appear to be in lasting political chaos: Argentina, led by an obviously disturbed far-right demagogue in Javier Milei.

The point here is that Trump has plans to (a) abandon Europe and Oceania, (b) lock down power in North America, and (c) forge close ties to potential Killer States in South America that could in time be transformed into American vassal states. The Trump Doctrine sees no value in America seeking to maintain influence in Europe, no value in seeking to maintain influence in Asia, and focuses, rather, on the creation of a North American empire that can expand northward (into The Arctic, which Trump correctly deems the next major global military theater due to the natural resources to be found there as climate change alters it landmasses—something Trump wants rather than fears, hence his lack of interest in tackling climate change) and southward (via a takeover of or a firm influence with Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, and/or Argentina).

The Trump Doctrine is KGB—and Now FSB—Nirvana

For years Americans have struggled to understand why Trump favors intelligence that comes from the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, rather than U.S. intelligence.

One simple answer is that Trump doesn’t share the goals of U.S. intelligence. Rather, he shares the geopolitical vision of the Kremlin and the FSB. To be clear, this in no way necessitates him being a Kremlin agent; he may simply, because of his father or because he believes he can get richer in an Age of Empires than he can in an Age of Democracies, “earnestly” want the future of Earth to look different than—say—those who love America’s democracy do.

Indeed, if you look at the components of the Trump Doctrine as itemized above, you realize that all I’ve written about it could just as easily be said of what the Kremlin now wants, and therefore the Trump Doctrine of 1987 could have just as easily been written by the head of the KGB and the Trump Doctrine of 2025—which is identical to the Trump Doctrine of 1987—could have just as easily been written by the head of the FSB. It doesn’t matter if the KGB directly, indirectly, aggressively, or passively convinced Trump in 1987 (or at any time since, via the FSB) that its view of the world was preferable, and it doesn’t matter if Trump came around to its view because of his familial philosophy or his venality or his vanity or a belief that only in an autocracy can a man like him rise to power, or any combination of the foregoing. The upshot is, he did come around. His views are those of the Kremlin, and unabashedly so.

Not just the Kremlin of 1987, either. The Kremlin right now, this very day, in 2025.

Trump’s 1987 political declaration was so central to Russian thinking at the time that—and this is truly remarkable—it not only reflected the view of the Kremlin back in the 1980s but still today, forty years later, in the 2020s, at a time the Kremlin is part of a totally different national entity and Soviet Communism literally no longer exists.

Those Proof readers who have read the New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019) know that Putin’s chief foci after Ukraine right now are (i) battling the United States for influence and authority in the Persian Gulf, (ii) getting the U.S. out of having any involvement in Europe, and (iii) asserting dominance in East Asia through a partnership with China that attempts to limit American influence in that part of the world, which American influence historically has run through Japan.

In other words, in all his public political statements for forty years Donald Trump has, wittingly or unwittingly, been carrying water for Russian intelligence and doing so so competently that we still today would say his foreign policy is exactly what the Kremlin is angling for. We might also note that Trump focuses his attention on foreign nations which, because they’re autocracies, can be bribed; that is, to the extent Trump’s foci are pecuniary rather than geopolitical, it would still make sense for him to placate and aggrandize Russia, China, India, and Brazil as he is already doing daily because (a) those are the world’s largest business markets, (b) those are the markets that are least interested in regulation related to foreign corruption, and (c) all those markets will subsist and thrive if the world is broken up among the Killer States. So Trump, in his view, has every reason to work with (and even, indirectly, for) the whims of the largest autocracies on Earth, and in his mind there is no need to waste time with U.S. allies in Europe because, again simply in his view, they are Loser States destined to become vassals.

Does it make sense that Trump, even in this benighted view of Earth, is abandoning the continent of Europe to prospective (partial) Russian domination in the long term?

No. In fact, Trump’s doctrine not somehow extending to the United States contesting with Russia for influence in Europe or the Middle East—or for that matter with China in Oceania—is the reason many presume Trump has some sort of agency relationship with those nations. But there’s a far simpler explanation for this apparent oversight: Trump has needed Russian and Chinese aid in order to acquire power in America, and may well eventually need their support to hold it should he seize a third term illegally, so he has good reason to placate these nations and perhaps cede far more geopolitical territory to them than we might otherwise expect. After all, better the bird in the hand (America, which Trump currently runs) than pleasing 44 European nations in the bush.

{Note: We can also note that another part of the world, Africa, has no obvious Killer State, so it may be Trump’s view that once he and eventually his MAGA successors seize control over the Western Hemisphere, they’ll still have a whole continent to plunder—even if Europe has in part entered the shadow of the Kremlin. Moreover, at that point any remaining European nation-states might well still align with an autocratic America, along with much of Africa.}

Conclusion

Given all the foregoing, we can understand that it almost doesn’t matter what the result of the 1987 KGB recruitment of Trump was. We know for sure that after Trump spent days being wined and dined by KGB agents he adopted, and has maintained for the rest of his life, a foreign policy that (a) could easily be the Kremlin’s, but also (b) offers him plausible deniability as to its origin given that it dovetails perfectly with Fred Trump Sr.’s theory of success as applied to nation-states. Just as Fred Sr. would surely have said that a “killer” doesn’t allow anyone to get something from him for nothing, he’d surely have advised his son that a nation-state can’t be a “killer” if it’s ever taken advantage of, including by its so-called “friends.”

Trump appears to have added to such sociopathic thinking additional addenda, such as the idea that the media plays a major role in whether a man becomes a “killer” or not. Thus his apparent relationship with the free press: if/when he is a businessman and playing media like a fiddle by various means (including a fake Trump “publicist” named “John Barron” who was in actuality Trump himself), his actions prove him a killer; if/when he’s a politician and lets the Associated Press keep having access to him after it refuses to acknowledge his illegal renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, he’s a loser.

See how that works?

The idea that nations can be analogized to men in the purely Machiavellian world the late Fred Trump Sr. unfolded for his impressionable son could lead to the end of all life on Earth soon enough. There is, quite simply, no faster path to a world war than every nation realizing it can only avoid becoming a Loser State by getting nuclear weapons. (Consider, to that end, that this report hasn’t yet mentioned the nuclear powers North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, or—soon enough—Iran, as these are neither Killer States nor vassal states but nevertheless can have a place in Trump and Putin’s new world purely on the basis of their nuclear arsenals; so too, frankly, could the UK, France, and Germany even if Europe’s cohesion crumbles in the next fifty years. So too could Egypt if it gets American nuclear technology via the “Middle East Marshall Plan” Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner devised, as discussed in Proof of Conspiracy).

Trump will not live to see the fruition of his vision. He’s simply gotten too late of a start in politics. But given that he’s “only” 78 years old and his parents lived into their late eighties or early nineties, and given that he intends to rule the U.S. until a natural death still as many as fifteen years away, he can reasonably anticipate that a land-grab or two—Greenland, Panama, maybe a few Pacific or Atlantic islands, maybe denying potential applicants for American statehood that privilege but instead attaching them to existing states in ways that prevent them from harming Republicans in any future state or federal elections—will give him a chance to develop an “American Empire” in his lifetime. Then some venal family designee can continue the work after he’s gone.

What’s clear is that Trump is not, as long as he lives, going to change his view—one he’s held at least since 1987, so about forty years—that the United States after WWII wrongly allied itself with “losers” to its own detriment, with the predictable result being, in Trump’s mind, that we’ve turned into losers ourselves and are now being laughed at by the “jocks” at the “main table” in some notional high school cafeteria: Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. While he’s wrong that America is being laughed at by our allies, he’s probably not wrong, and indeed knows from first-hand dealings with the monsters who run the aforementioned five nations, that they do see America as weakened by its democracy, not strengthened by it.

What’s likewise clear is that Trump will spend the rest of his natural life working toward a mafia-like congregation of autocracies—a New Axis of Evil—that America is a co-equal part of (rather than a leader in, as Killer States don’t allow themselves to be subservient to anyone). He’ll continue America’s evident shift away from future inextricable entwinings with “losers,” in other words democracies writ large and most particularly the ones in Europe. He’ll also, however—and this is critical—seek out new vassal states in the way China has done (with North Korea), Russia has done (with Belarus), and to a lesser extent India is doing (with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal).

Trump’s minerals deal with Ukraine is a deal with a temporary vassal state. He may not do the unthinkable and try to annex any part of Canada, but he can certainly try to make it and Mexico into semi-vassal states (as both already do rely considerably on the United States). He can forge relationships with lesser powers in Central America and South America, such as El Salvador and Argentina, that position them as distant vassal states, and indeed the agreement he’s apparently already signed to use the former nation to imprison American citizens literally frames it as a U.S. penal colony.

But autocracies specifically, and Killer States generally, aren’t solely defined by their foreign policy. Internally, such nation-states tend to have a class of oligarchs who are beholden to the chief autocrat for their continued wealth and therefore, when and as it’s demanded of them, and deploy that wealth on behalf of the State’s interests (which are coextensive with those of the “killer” head-of-state). Thus we see Trump quickly establishing an oligarch class alongside the aforementioned stable of potential vassal states: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andresseen, Miriam Adelson, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and their ilk are Trumpist oligarchs, just as Greenland may become a U.S. vassal state if Trump wills it, boots on the ground or no.

If you understand the foregoing, you understand everything the second Donald Trump administration is doing right now. That includes actions that are otherwise almost historically indecipherable. Meeting with Russia and Saudi Arabia when you’re supposed to be negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine? It makes sense if you understand that Trump sees Ukraine as a vassal state—a Loser State that is due to be consumed, literally or metaphorically, by either Russia or the United States—and therefore one that deserves no place at a table with three “killers” (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States). Implying that China won’t get any pushback from the United States if it invades Taiwan? Why not? Taiwan, under the Trump Doctrine, is a Chinese vassal state. Beijing can therefore do whatever it likes with it. Are you still confused about how Trump speaks of Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and Panama? Don’t be: he deems all of these as “should-be” American vassal states worth being treated with open contempt at worst and benign condescension at best. Why does Europe not have a seat at the table in Trump’s “Russia-Ukraine” negotiations? For the very same reason Ukraine doesn’t: the nations of Europe are Loser States to Trump, and thus are destined to fall apart. He has no interest in helping them forestall that eventuality, and probably deems himself to be magnanimous for giving them the “advice” to at least try to become “killers” (as that’s how we should read his admonishment of them for not doing enough to take care of their own protection from global bad actors like Russia).

Trump’s view is that America “owns” Ukraine geopolitically due to its investments there, and that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden therefore wrongly allowed a U.S. vassal state to dictate the terms of America’s foreign policy. He’s decided that that must end now. He simply has no interest in what Ukraine wants anymore. His attitude is that Ukraine is so in hock to America that it’ll never get out of debt, and therefore must shut up and remain respectful as the “killers” meet to determine how to make themselves whole and hand out the parts of Ukraine as they feel entitled to.

Trump has zero interest in punishing Russia for its war crimes and kidnappings and brutal executions because in engaging in such actions Russia is acting—in Trump’s view—exactly as it should: like a “killer.” And just as one mafia don doesn’t deign to police how another mafia don handles his business, Trump sees no role at all for the United States in dictating ethics to Russia or China or India or Saudi Arabia or Israel or the United Arab Emirates, and indeed sees a great deal to be lost in overstepping his bounds and inadvertently telegraphing to these killers that he doesn’t understand the rules of the game. Trump would equate caring about how the Russians or Chinese or Indians act within their borders to weakness—a feminine hand-wringing that’s far beneath the alpha male he deems himself to be, his orange makeup and his absurd ties notwithstanding.

So that’s how far Donald Trump is from judging Putin for his crimes, whether it’s the war crime of invading Ukraine or the domestic crime of ordering the assassination of Alexei Navalny and an untold number of Russian journalists. That’s how far Trump is from stopping Benjamin Netanyahu—a killer if ever there was one—from continuing to turn Gaza into a parking lot. Just so, Saudi Arabia can do what it likes in Yemen, and Trump may even join the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a war against Iran if he thinks that will lead to the support of those nations down the line for an American Empire in the Western Hemisphere (which, incidentally, it almost certainly would).

One final note about the Trump Doctrine: it’s not an encompassing worldview. Yes, if we add up all the Killer States and Loser States and in-between “vassal states” of the Killer States, and if we then add in a handful of known Neutral States, it seems like a pretty comprehensive view of the universe of powerful and impactful nations now on Earth, but the fact remains that probably fifty to a hundred nations don’t meet any of those definitions. Why? Because for now they’re too poor to rate geopolitically, at least in the view of a mercantilist like Donald Trump. So most of America, most of Central America, large swaths of Oceania, and even certain parts of South America are outside Trump’s consideration simply because they haven’t even joined his real-world version of Game of Thrones yet.

{Note: Many of these nations have ample natural resources, however, so once Donald Trump has established his American Empire, we can be reasonably certain he’d move quickly to begin pillaging certain of these nation-states through “trade negotiations” conducted at the barrel of an implicit or even an explicit gun.}

As we can see from all the foregoing, Trump removing America from NATO is more or less a foregone conclusion, as is removing the EU from negotiations over Ukraine.

Less obviously but no less forcefully, Trump’s apparent intention of withdrawing from the world for the purposes of creating hemispheric hegemony will require the U.S. to assert itself abroad in more clandestine ways—via private mercenaries rather than full-scale military encroachments—which is why we can be certain that Erik Prince will soon reappear, along with the rest of the absolute worst people on Earth, to offer up to America their services as actual killers, foreign pillagers, and election ratfuckers.

Is all this rather bewildering? Yes, sure.

But there’s no time for anyone to be confused about any of the above, as it so entirely explains so many aspects of what Donald Trump is doing right now with respect to American foreign policy that failing to understand it simply isn’t an option anymore.

The statement President Biden once made about this century—that it’s a long war between autocracies and democracies—is correct, and essentially determinative of what the medium-term outcome will be with NATO, Gaza, Panama, Greenland, Mexico, the European Union, Ukraine, Taiwan, and basically everywhere on Earth everyone is awakening to America being unambiguously a bad actor in league with bad actors.

To put a still finer point on it, anything that you think Vladimir Putin would do is something a “killer” would do and is therefore something Trump would do and is hoping to do inside the United States if and when anyone anywhere gives him an excuse to declare martial law. This includes arresting his political opponents on obviously manufactured evidence, taking out media outlets by fiat, arresting his fiercest critics and troublesome journalists en masse, prohibiting mass protests, ignoring court orders, suspending the U.S. Constitution, and even going as far as to—making no bones about it—name himself a king over a nation that promised in 1776, in writing no less, that it would have no more of them.