Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that US President Donald Trump, “the supreme leader of the world’s greatest superpower, objectively, is a Soviet or Russian asset.” .
The Portuguese head of state added: “Europe has downplayed Mr. Trump and Trumpism.”
Rebelo de Sousa’s statements were delivered on Wednesday, Aug. 27 in Castelo de Vide, Portugal, at the PSD (Socialist Party of Portugal) Summer University, an annual initiative aimed at young party members, and broadcast by CNN Portugal.
The Portuguese president assessed that Trump’s management of the Russo-Ukrainian War has not been beneficial to Ukraine: “Objectively speaking, the new US leadership has strategically favored the Russian Federation.”
An example of this, he elaborated, is that “terrible threats” from the United States regarding the “application of sanctions” against Moscow emerge daily. Yet none of these promises have been fulfilled under the new American leader’s administration.
The Portuguese president also said, as cited by the Lusa News Agency, that Trump is trying to play the role of a mediator who only intends to negotiate “with one side,” while Kyiv and the European states need to “impose themselves” in order to effectively participate in the final negotiations.
Rebelo de Sousa sustained that all of this has only happened because “Europe downplayed Mr. Trump and Trumpism,” as well as the “possibility of a sudden shift in the balance of power” following the recent US elections.
In Portugal’s semi-presidential system, the president is largely a ceremonial figure, unlike the prime minister, who wields power over the ruling government.
In 1987 the KGB recruited a 40-year-old businessman Donald Trump under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov.’
In recent weeks, Trump has stepped up his diplomatic efforts to end the full-scale war that has lasted three and a half years. He invited his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to a face-to-face meeting in Alaska on Aug. 15, after which the US president said that negotiations on a possible ceasefire were being put aside in favor of the possibility of a swift, comprehensive peace agreement.
The decision to forego a ceasefire was seen by many analysts as a favor to Putin, who appears determined to continue attacking Ukraine. It has also been interpreted as a ploy to defer threatened US sanctions on Russia if Moscow did not cease fire.
Samantha Vinograd, former senior advisor to the US National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon, commented on CBS Mornings TV that the Alaska Summit was “a diplomatic slam dunk for Vladimir Putin.
Shortly after Vinograd’s comments, National Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked Winograd’s security clearance, along with 36 other current and former intelligence professionals “who have abused the public trust by politicizing and manipulating intelligence, leaking classified intelligence without authorization, and/or committing intentional egregious violations of tradecraft standards.”
Gabbard herself has repeatedly been accused of being a Russian asset. In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential elections former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to Gabbard as “the favorite of the Russians.”
Accusations of Trump’s dubious relations to Moscow’s security services and oligarchs have hovered around him for decades.
Earlier in the year, Alnur Mussayev, the former head of Kazakhstan’s security services, said that Trump had been groomed 38 years ago as a potential Soviet asset. Mussayev had been a KGB officer in Moscow at the time.
In a Facebook post, Mussayev tried to shed light on Trump’s often baffling willingness to mollify Putin: “In 1987, I served in the 6th Directorate of the USSR KGB in Moscow,” Mussayev wrote on Feb. 20, explaining how “the most important direction of the work of the 6th Administration was the recruitment of businessmen from capitalist countries.”
He added: “It was that year that our administration recruited a 40-year-old businessman from the United States, Donald Trump under the pseudonym ‘Krasnov.’”
Well-worn accusations
In “American Kompromat,” a 2021 book by Craig Unger, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets claims that Trump had been recruited by Moscow in the 1980s.
“Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset… and proved so willing to parrot anti-Western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow,” Shvets told the Guardian in 2021.
Shvets was a KGB major during the 1980s with a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Soviet news agency TASS. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He worked as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006, according to the Guardian.
In the book, which relies heavily on Shvets’ recollections, Unger describes how Trump first came to the Russians’ attention in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. In 1979, once she married Donald Trump, already a notable American real estate mogul, the Czech Secret Service spied on Ivana at home and abroad, and reportedly questioned her father about the couple after his trips the United States. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later, Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue, nearby.
Shvets told the Guardian that Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denied that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St. Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said Trump was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.
A 2017 Politico article by Luke Harding sustains that “according to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.”
Harding adds that there was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, when they visited Ivana’s family.
Unger, however, has been quick to point out that the Trump recruitment process was almost fortuitous. “He was an asset,” Shvets said of Trump. “It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started… the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”