Arsonist
Summary: The Doomsday Clock sits at 85 seconds to midnight, driven by what scientists call a “failure of leadership.” The pattern is blunt: Trump’s decisions repeatedly benefit Russia while weakening alliances, arms control, Ukraine, and global stability. Three explanations converge—ideological admiration for autocracy, financial entanglements, and possible kompromat leverage. The result is consistent: aid withdrawn, allies abandoned, treaties allowed to expire, and institutions dismantled. From Ukraine to Syria, from Iran to global health, each move erodes structures that constrain Moscow. The outcome no longer reads as coincidence. It reads as policy—one that leaves the world more dangerous and Russia uniquely advantaged.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight last month. Closest in its 79-year history. Closer than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Closer than the Soviet nuclear alerts of the 1980s. The scientists who built the first nuclear weapons invented that clock because they understood what they had made. They called what is happening now a "failure of leadership." They were being diplomatic. They meant one man. Everyone in the room knew it.
But before we get to the destruction, let's ask the question the mainstream press still treats like a live grenade: why?
Why does Donald Trump do what he does? Why does every major decision he makes benefit one country above all others, and why is that country Russia?
There are three theories. They are not mutually exclusive.
The first is ideology. Trump genuinely admires strongmen. He has said so, repeatedly and in public, for forty years. He admires Putin's control. He admires Russian soldiers as masculine and anti-woke — his own supporters said this out loud in 2022. The man who called NATO allies freeloaders and called Putin a genius has been consistent about this since before he entered politics. Some people simply prefer autocracy. They find it clarifying.
The second is money. Craig Unger, in two meticulously sourced books, documented that Trump was $4 billion in debt when Russian money came to his rescue and revived his business career. Trump Tower housed Kremlin-connected oligarchs and Russian mob figures for decades. Suspicious cash from Russian-linked entities flowed into his real estate deals throughout the 1980s and 1990s when no American bank would touch him. The Mueller investigation confirmed that the Trump campaign had 272 documented contacts with Russia-linked operatives and that Russian interference was real and welcomed. Two Putin-connected entities wired $8 million to Trump Media when the company was on the brink of collapse. People do not stay bought forever, but they do remember who bailed them out.
The third is kompromat. Russian intelligence has been cultivating Trump as a person of interest since at least 1987, when he visited Moscow and came home to take out full-page newspaper ads attacking NATO — talking points that mirrored Soviet active measures so precisely that seasoned counterintelligence officers noticed. Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer, says he believes the Russians filmed Trump in Moscow in 2013 and that the material has been used ever since — not to expose him, but to guide him. Three former Soviet intelligence officers, operating independently in three different countries, have stated publicly that Trump was recruited as an asset during that 1987 Moscow trip and given the codename "Krasnov." Former KGB Major Yuri Shvets told the Guardian that Trump proved so willing to parrot anti-Western talking points after the trip that there were celebrations in Moscow. When a Helsinki reporter asked Trump directly in 2018 whether Russia held compromising material on him, neither he nor Putin said no.
Take your pick. Ideology, money, leverage — or all three working together the way they were designed to. Whatever the mechanism, the outcome is the same. Every major decision Trump has made has functioned as a gift to Moscow and a wound to the West. At some point the pattern stops being coincidence and starts being policy.
I coined a word for this. PrumpTutin. One organism. Two names. One agenda.
Now look at what that agenda has produced.
Today is the fourth anniversary of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Putin expected Kyiv to fall in days. Four years later, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia has suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties — killed, wounded, and missing — more than any major power has sustained in any war since World War II. Five times all Russian wars combined since 1945, including Afghanistan and both Chechen wars. Ukraine has suffered 500,000 to 600,000 casualties. Combined the toll is approaching two million and may reach it by spring. Russia's daily advance in its most prominent offensives has averaged between 15 and 70 meters — slower than Allied forces gained during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, already considered one of the most catastrophic military failures in history.
American aid was the margin of Ukrainian survival for three years. The chart below shows what happened next.
Trump cut U.S. military aid to Ukraine essentially to zero in 2025. Not reduced — zeroed. Europe stepped up and replaced most of what America withdrew, which is why Ukraine is still fighting. But Trump has been stalling military deliveries even when Europe is paying, and the administration has threatened retaliation against allies for proposing to buy European weapons — punishing them for reducing dependence on a supplier actively sabotaging their war effort. This is the policy of the United States government on the fourth anniversary of a democracy fighting for its life against a mass murderer. Shame on us.
Ukraine is the largest betrayal. It is not the only one.
The Kurds. Before Trump's first withdrawal in October 2019, the Syrian Democratic Forces had lost 11,000 fighters killed and 22,000 wounded clearing the ISIS caliphate for the United States. Six years of war. They did the dying. We supplied the weapons and the air cover and called it a partnership.
Then Trump took a phone call from Erdogan and pulled American troops from the border. Turkey invaded within three days. Hundreds of Kurdish fighters were killed in the first week. More than 200,000 civilians were displaced. ISIS prisoners began escaping from the detention camps the Kurds had been running on our behalf — the U.S. Defense Department's own inspector general later confirmed the withdrawal allowed ISIS to "reconstitute capabilities and strengthen its ability to plan attacks abroad." The cease-fire that eventually stopped the slaughter was not brokered by the United States. It was brokered by Erdogan and Putin. Trump had handed Putin the seat at the table.
Trump's explanation was that the Turks and Kurds had been fighting for hundreds of years and it wasn't America's job to "interject" in tribal wars. Eleven thousand dead allies. Tribal war. That was the eulogy.
He did it again. Back in office, the administration designated the Kurdish partnership "largely expired." Under American pressure and the threat of total military collapse, the SDF was forced in January 2026 into a 14-point agreement that dissolved the Kurdish military as an independent force entirely — integrated into the Syrian national army, Kurdish-majority provinces handed to Damascus. The people who cleared the caliphate no longer exist as a fighting force. The ISIS detention camps they ran are now someone else's problem. Watch that space.
Note who brokered the first cease-fire. Note who filled the vacuum the second time. Russia and Iran were the winners of both withdrawals. A strong autonomous Kurdish force in northern Syria was a permanent obstacle to Russian and Iranian influence in the region. Turkey, appeased and fractured from NATO coherence, was a gift to Moscow. Syria's new government consolidating without American-backed counterweights in the north was exactly what the Kremlin wanted. Trump called it America First. The Kremlin called it Tuesday.
Iran. In 2015, six major powers produced a 159-page agreement that verifiably froze Iran's nuclear program. The IAEA confirmed compliance repeatedly. Trump tore it up in 2018 because Obama made it. Iran went to work. By 2024 its uranium stockpile was 6,000 kilograms — thirty times what the agreement permitted. Inspectors blocked. Cameras disabled. Now Trump is weighing military strikes to stop the nuclear program he personally unfroze. He is proposing to bomb his own homework. Every expert agrees a strike would set Iran back two or three years, after which Iran rebuilds with no constraints and every justification to accelerate. We will spend American lives to purchase a brief delay on a crisis we manufactured. The Doomsday Clock scientists cited Iran specifically when they moved the hands in January.
USAID. Trump ended the agency that had saved 91 million lives over two decades at a cost of 17 cents per American per day. A Lancet study projects 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if the cuts hold — 4.5 million of them children under five. A Boston University tracking model puts the current death toll at over 762,000, more than 500,000 of them children, from HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, pneumonia. A ten-year-old in South Sudan named Peter, kept alive since birth by PEPFAR medication after his mother died, lost that medication in February 2025. He died. The health worker who cared for him said: "If USAID would be here, Peter would not have died." Elon Musk posted that zero people had died. He has since moved on to other projects.
The economy. Trump's tariff campaign has produced one of the most significant tax increases on ordinary Americans in a generation. Seventy-five percent of Americans, including 56 percent of Republicans, believe tariffs are raising prices. The manufacturing sector has shed over 100,000 jobs. Canada, Mexico, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have all negotiated new trade agreements with each other — and with China — pointedly excluding the United States. We have united our trading partners in a common project: replacing us.
The arms treaties. New START expired in February 2026. For the first time in over fifty years, nothing limits the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. Both countries are modernizing. The diplomats who would manage this are gone. The institutional memory that would allow new negotiations has been scattered, retired, or fired.
The climate. Trump exited the Paris Agreement again. Withdrew from the World Health Organization again. Declared in the National Security Strategy that the administration rejects "climate change and Net Zero ideologies." China now builds 74 percent of all large-scale solar and wind capacity on earth. The United States builds 5.9 percent. We handed the clean energy race to our primary strategic adversary, giftwrapped.
The alliances. An eighty-year network assembled at enormous cost is being treated as a protection racket that has been undercharging. The countries that depended on American security guarantees are rearming independently. The countries that resented American power are watching with quiet pleasure. The one leader who speaks with Trump frequently and warmly is in Moscow.
Now ask the question again: why?
Because NATO is the one structure that contains Russia. Because USAID built American influence in every country Putin wants to destabilize. Because the Iran deal was multilateral architecture the Kremlin spent decades trying to prevent. Because a strong Kurdish force in northern Syria blocked Russian and Iranian expansion. Because a prosperous, united Europe is the only economic bloc large enough to resist Russian energy leverage. Because arms treaties constrain Russia's nuclear blackmail. Because a rules-based international order is the only thing standing between smaller nations and the appetite of larger ones.
Every fire Trump has set burns something that constrains Russia. Every institution he has gutted served as a check on Russian power. Every ally he has abandoned was a wall Putin wanted down. The pattern is not subtle. It does not require a conspiracy theory. It only requires looking at who benefits.
Vladimir Putin has not had a year this good since 1945. His territorial ambitions are being accommodated. His adversary's alliances are fracturing. The weapons keeping his army at a stalemate are being withheld. The Kurds who blocked him in Syria are disbanded. The international institutions that constrained him are abandoned. His adversary is torching the trade relationships that funded NATO while cutting taxes for billionaires and running up debt. He has not had to do a single thing. The chaos is self-generating, and it is free.
The clock is at 85 seconds to midnight. The scientists called it a failure of leadership. What they meant was: the most powerful government on earth has been handed to a man who is either a useful fool or a knowing instrument — who breaks everything that protects us and calls it strength, who serves one master while pretending to serve another, who has made the planet measurably more dangerous for every person on it —
except one.
