The most important takeaway from the Trump-Russia investigation so far is how many people at the highest level of the U.S. government are linked to Russia by a money trail. They include not only those already under investigation, such as, apparently, disgraced ex-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and presidential son-in-law/senior advisor Jared Kushner, but many who are not (or not yet), such as U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and a variety of Trump lawyers and supporters – not to mention Donald J. Trump himself and members of his family.

Reports on Russian donations are also circulating about a number of Republican elected officials.

It would seem that the Russian government, which is not widely known for its competence in most matters, has mounted an extraordinarily successful foreign intelligence operation to suborn pretty much the entire Republican Party political establishment, helping its Manchurian candidates win elections and control the U.S. government.

This success story would easily overshadow everything the Bolshevik spymasters had achieved in their glory days of the 1920s and 1930s, when they managed to build extensive spy networks around the world that penetrated the highest rungs of Britain’s counterintelligence and stole atomic secrets from America’s Manhattan Project.

It takes two to tango, however. In the early decades after Vladimir Lenin’s revolution, Soviet spymasters had plenty of willing communist sympathizers in the West who believed they were working not so much against their own country as for the bright future of all humankind. The same is true of the Republicans today: they are eager participants in Russia’s subversion schemes, actively seeking Russian support for their ideological program because in many respects they share Putin’s world view.

In its early days, communism proposed a radical social realignment. It encouraged workers to reject their false national identity and to embrace class identity that united them with foreign workers across national borders.

A similar realignment is under way today. The new international class of the super-rich has emerged over the past three decades and, in the United States, some of its members have been openly promoting their class interests. In particular, they have been subverting American democracy with massive infusions of money into politics and propaganda.

Their strategy has been two-pronged: to feed primitive fascist populism to the masses and assert traditional values, self-reliance, Americanism, military strength and anti-intellectualism, while more subtly pushing their free-market, low-tax, corporate-welfare agenda.

With the election of Trump this class scored a decisive victory – not only because it put at the apex of world power one of their own who has proven to be a consummate populist, but also because he is backed by a cleverly gerrymandered Republican majority in Congress and has the power to remake America’s judiciary.

Just last week at one of his election-style rallies in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump (who seems unable to stop himself from blurting out everything that pops into his head) confirmed what happened in the United States in 2016, declaring that he wouldn’t want “a poor person” to run the economy. In fact, he clearly wants only the super-rich to run most departments in his government, since his cabinet is stuffed with billionaires.

At the same time, the super-rich are starting to realize that they have a lot more in common with Vladimir Putin and his Russian oligarchs than with the regular guy Joe Six-Pack or with liberal upper middle-class Americans.

Indeed, they speak the same language of money. They share the lackey international of highly trained professionals – lawyers, accountants, advisors, bankers, doctors, personal trainers, security experts and gofers dedicated to serving them, their families and their boats. They have the same fear of and disdain for the hoi-polloi.

For all their make-believe American patriotism, they’d much rather spend time with a brother-billionaire even if he happens to be a KGB general or former communist factory director than with a steelworker from the Midwest who’s poor and overweight and whose tastes don’t run much above frankfurters and a Bud.

It never used to be like that in a more egalitarian America of the 1950s or 1960s, when a great majority of people were in broadly comparable income brackets. They drove the same types of cars, ate similar foods and spent vacations not far from each other. There were certainly rich people and income differentials, but Americans as a nation had no trouble understanding each other.

The ever-widening gap between the rich and the rest of society is what is triggering national disintegration.

Americans who fund right-wing causes and propaganda outfits pursue roughly the same goals as Putin’s propaganda machine: to pit ordinary people against the “liberal elites” and to make the political and business elites into patriots defending national honor.

Not surprisingly, the Trump Administration is uncannily similar to Putin’s government in Russia. It lurches from one screw-up to the next and from one scandal to the other, fielding a bunch of incompetent Keystone Cops as its front. But it is very different when at issue is enriching the principals. Putin’s kleptocracy likewise has no equal in competence and efficiency whenever it comes to raiding Russia’s resources for private gain.

It can be argued that while Russia is a straightforward kleptocracy, American oligarchs create value, spearhead technological progress and create jobs. True enough, but they also steal, albeit inadvertently and indirectly, from America’s future.

Here is how: the United States is a country which combines huge private and corporate wealth with a government that is a heavily indebted pauper. Wealthy individuals and corporations are grossly undertaxed. Fabulous private fortunes are being created in this low-tax environment comparable to those created by robber barons in the late 19th century and the early 20th – when there was no income tax. At the same time, corporate profits and cash reserves are at record levels.

Undertaxation is a key reason for the massive debt pile of the federal government. Keeping budget deficits manageable has been mainly done by curbing government services, support for science, education and the arts – i.e., at the expense of society at large. While the fortunes built in a low-tax environment will remain in private hands, society as a whole will eventually be forced to bear the burden of repaying its debt.

Note that the Republicans, who represent the rich, have mostly lost their interest in fiscal discipline since Trump’s election. They have become highly tolerant of fiscal deficits because now they stem from tax cuts for “job creators” and corporations. It’s a tried and true method of personal enrichment widely practiced in Russia: you privatize gains and socialize losses.

This explains why American elites have become suddenly so enamoured of Putin and why their propaganda machine is creating a positive image of Russia’s thuggish strongman among America’s radicalized right-wing masses. And of course why so many at the top of the Republican Party have suddenly started to reek of Russian money.

A word of caution is in order, however. America is a powerful country, but when it comes to oligarchy it is Putin who holds a better hand. To use the sexual innuendo Putin is so fond of, when you get in bed with someone like Putin, you’re more than likely to end up on the bottom.