There’s no need to soften it: Donald Trump is a cuckold. Politically. Morally. Spiritually. His relationship to Vladimir Putin is not one of equal statesmen, not even of wary adversaries. It is the posture of a broken man, bent low, with his pride shoved into the dirt, waiting for the approval of a tyrant. And he relishes it.
Trump postures as an “alpha,” the swaggering strongman who alone can save America, yet his every interaction with Putin has been the opposite of dominance. He is deferential. He is submissive.
He is pitiful.
From Helsinki in 2018, when he stood shoulder to shoulder with Putin and publicly sided with Russia over his own intelligence community, to his more recent slobbering praise for Russia’s “strength,” Trump has proven again and again that his patriotism stops where Putin’s shadow begins. He mouths “America First” while acting, in every way that matters, as Russia’s most loyal errand boy.
This is not toughness. It is not strength. It is the humiliating loyalty of a vassal to his lord. A cuckolded president, stripping off America’s dignity for a nod from Moscow.
The only wall Trump ever completed was between himself and American dignity.
And history has seen his kind before. Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian traitor who sold his country to Hitler in 1940, was remembered so completely for his cowardice that his very name became synonymous with treason. Philippe Pétain, the French general who once had the honor of Verdun, reduced himself to Hitler’s lapdog as head of Vichy France, overseeing the humiliation of his people and the deportation of Jews. Even the emperors of ancient Rome knew this type: leaders who pretended to strength but lived on their knees before foreign powers, remembered not for greatness but for shame.
Trump belongs in that lineage of disgrace. He is not merely weak. He is willingly weak. He is not merely compromised. He is happily compromised.
Why? Perhaps Putin has kompromat: blackmail, debts, leverage. Or perhaps Trump needs no coercion at all, only the warm validation of an actual autocrat, the kind of ruler he dreams of being. He looks at Putin and sees not a rival but a role model. He envies the iron fist, the rigged elections, the silenced journalists, the poisoned opponents. He sees in Putin the man he wants to be.
And so he bows.
And while he bows, America bends with him. Our enemies laugh, our allies recoil, and the so-called leader of the free world willingly abdicates his role for the chance to play the Kremlin’s favorite jester.
There is nothing more degrading than a man who brags of his virility while prostituting his dignity. Nothing more disgusting than a president who screams “traitor” at his enemies while behaving as the most abject traitor of all.
Trump is not America’s strongman. He is Russia’s weakling. He is not the defender of our republic but the cuckold of Putin.
Every time Trump praises Putin, America loses another inch of spine. Each day he clings to power, our humiliation deepens. This is not a partisan quarrel anymore, this is a question of whether we will accept living on our knees.
Putin gains strength from Trump’s obedience, and every red carpet rolled out for him is a banner of our disgrace. It is long past time for all of us to stop accepting cowardice as leadership. If we don’t defy this humiliation, then we are no longer citizens of a free republic. We are pathetic and willing subjects of a foreign crown.