Why do people find Trump’s behavior puzzling?

The reasons for it are remarkably clear.

The “stooge” strategy has been a mainstay of mafias since before the Borgias: find a prominent but indebted businessman, bail him out, own him and have him bring your agenda into the mainstream.

The Russian mafia bailed Trump out of massive debts accumulated from his many failed businesses from the mid-90s through 2008, making him a mafia stooge. A mafia stooge does what his mafia boss tells him to – or else. (The “or else” is another old mafia tradition.)

Since before Peter the Great, Russia’s leadership has been obsessed with jealousy of the West. Acting out on that jealousy has occasionally brought them to emulation of the West, but more often it has brought them to try to destroy of the West. (They used to paint this effort the colors of ideology until their purported ideology shifted from communism to oligarchic capitalism, whereupon they had to admit to themselves that mafias don’t do ideology.)

Russia does four things well: ballet, aircraft engineering, brutality and goebbelsology. Goebbelsology 6.0, crafted by the (presumably) late Yevgeny Prigozhin, is a masterful set of methods to get any audience to thoroughly believe whatever you want them to believe. Having a stooge with Trump’s prominence is huge goebbelsology amplifier.

So let’s look at the stooge strategy in action.

Vladimir Putin is sensitive to criticism from beyond the borders within which criticism can be prevented. For example he is irritated by accusations that Russia, unlike other nations, has not outgrown its appetite for conquest and empire. And so he tells his stooge to threaten to conquer Canada, Greenland, and Panama, blunting that criticism. Mission accomplished.

I’m sorry, but is this all not obvious?

What is it about puzzlement at Trump’s behavior? Is it explained by Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” If that’s the case, then perhaps the open, non-secret facts will become more credible when there’s nothing left of the West.

I know, every conspiracy theory ends with an admonition for readers to wake up, so I won’t use that bit of goebbelsolgy here. Do you think this is just another conspiracy theory? If so, please give your reasons and evidence. The debt bailouts are well documented.

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About the author

In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.

Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.

Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.