There is a story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full.
When I poll people on this, I find myself in a stubborn minority. Most are sure. The largest share will tell you flatly that the man is a Kremlin agent, that to deny it is to refuse the evidence of one’s own eyes — if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. I do not rule the possibility out. I cannot prove it false, and I would never pretend to. But for me, recruitment is the explanation of last resort, the one I reach for only when nothing else will fit. And here everything else fits beautifully.
What an agent actually is
Start with what the word “agent” means, technically, when intelligence professionals use it. An agent is not simply a person whose actions happen to benefit a foreign power. An agent is a person who has been cultivated, who at some point was made an offer and accepted it, who signed a statement of willingness to cooperate. After that signature comes the apparatus: a file is opened, the person is entered into the records, assigned an operational pseudonym, and from then on is tasked — given assignments, expected to file reports, all of it documented and stored, on paper or electronically, defining the relationship.
That is the machinery the theory quietly assumes exists. A signed paper. A dossier. A code name. Tasking and reporting, year after year. Now ask the practical question that the theory never quite answers: where is it, and how has it stayed hidden? We are talking about a man surrounded for years by the full attention of American intelligence and, behind it, the intelligence services of the entire Western alliance. These are not sleepy institutions. An asset of that magnitude — the recruitment of a future American president — is precisely the kind of secret that does not keep. The pressure to leak it would be enormous; the number of people who would have to stay silent, impossible. If such a file existed, the overwhelming likelihood is that we would already know. The fact that after all this scrutiny no one has produced it is not proof of a brilliant conspiracy. It is the ordinary sign that the thing does not exist.
The kompromat that would change nothing
The retreat position, when the formal-agent theory wobbles, is kompromat — not a signed recruitment, just some compromising material, a tape, a secret, a hold. And here the theory runs into a different wall, one peculiar to this particular man.
Picture the kompromat actually surfacing. What would it have to contain to matter? This is a figure who has already been accused of essentially everything — sexual misconduct, fraud, financial crime, in some cases with actual judgments against him — and through all of it his standing with his own people has not moved. Nothing sticks. His reputation is Teflon. So imagine the supposed Moscow file is opened tomorrow and the worst of it spills out. His supporters have already metabolized every prior scandal; one more tape would be absorbed the way all the others were, as noise, as enemy fabrication. The blackmail logic depends on the target fearing exposure. But you cannot blackmail a man with the threat of a revelation his base has pre-forgiven. The kompromat theory smuggles in an assumption — that there exists some secret whose release would break him — and for this man, that assumption is simply false.
The simpler explanation that fits everything
Strip away the folder and the tape, and you are left needing to explain the behavior some other way. The good news is that you can, and the explanation is not exotic. It is sitting in plain view, in the things both men say about the world.
He and the man in the Kremlin are, at the level that matters, the same kind of figure. Not identical — I will come to the differences — but twins at the core. They share a single conviction, the oldest and crudest in politics: that the strong are entitled to rule the weak, that might confers right. Russia is a powerful nuclear state; in their shared grammar, that makes it the natural partner. Ukraine is smaller and has no such arsenal; that makes it the party to be handed over. From inside that worldview, an alliance with a “strong” Russia against a “weak” Ukraine is not betrayal — it is common sense. It requires no recruitment. It requires only the belief, sincerely held, that the powerful are in the right because they are powerful.
On top of that shared first principle sits a shared enemy. Both men despise liberalism — the liberalism that defines Europe, the open, democratic, rights-based order they regard as decadent and contemptible. One dresses this contempt in the language of a “Russian world” and imperial restoration; the other in the language of national greatness. The vocabulary differs; the animus is the same. And so both are, in their bones, against Europe, against the liberal-democratic project, and against Ukraine precisely because Ukraine wants to belong to that project. The hatred of Ukraine is not really about any “Nazis” they pretend to see there. It is about an alignment of values turned inside out — Ukraine is hated for aspiring to the very order these two men want to tear down.
Then there is the personal layer, and it is not subtle. The American is driven by money, by an enormous and fragile ego, and by a genuine weakness for strongmen — and the man in Moscow plays all three like an instrument. Dangle a “deal,” and watch him bite, because the word itself flatters him. Mention rare earth metals he barely understands, and Russia will suddenly discover vast reserves it does not really have, just to keep him interested. His sympathies lie with the stronger side; that much is obvious. What constrains him is not loyalty to Ukraine but the simple fact that he heads a democracy and cannot say out loud what he feels. So his support for the aggressor comes out sideways — as suspended weapons, as restored diplomatic ties, as “friendly” criticism of strikes on a capital city that amounts to telling a murderer he has merely chosen a tactless hour for the killing. None of this needs a handler. Self-interest, vanity, and a worldview do all the work.
Allies without a conspiracy
History gives us the cleanest model for this, and it is worth holding onto because it dissolves the whole mystery. At the start of the Second World War, two dictators stood on the same side. They divided territory between them and acted, for a time, in concert. No serious person claims one was the other’s recruited agent. Their interests aligned, so they moved together, and when their interests diverged, they tore each other apart. Alignment is not agency. Two predators can hunt the same prey without a contract between them; they need only to want the same meal.
That is what we are watching. The coordination is real — the pressure on Ukraine to surrender Crimea, the synchronized framing in which Kyiv is blamed for refusing terms designed to be unrefusable, the moment when one of them publicly congratulates the other for the supposed “concession” of not swallowing the entire country. It looks orchestrated because in a sense it is, but the orchestration flows from convergence, not from a command channel running out of Moscow. On the substance of Ukraine, their goal is genuinely identical: the disappearance of an independent Ukrainian state. Not necessarily every border erased on a map, but the end of Ukraine as a sovereign actor with a will of its own. They differ only in rhetoric, and in the fact that one of them must navigate domestic constraints the other does not have. Behead the conspiracy theory and the body keeps walking, because the engine was never a secret pact. The engine is two men who happen to want the same world.
Why the distinction matters
One might ask why any of this matters, if the practical result — a man acting, again and again, in the aggressor’s favor — is the same either way. It matters because how we explain a thing shapes how we fight it.
If the problem were a single recruited agent, the remedy would be exposure: find the file, publish it, and the spell breaks. But there is no file, and so people who pin their hopes on one are waiting for a rescue that is not coming. The real situation is harder and more sobering. We are not dealing with a compromised individual but with a worldview that has taken root — a homegrown contempt for liberal democracy that would outlive any single figure who carries it. Remove the man and the orientation remains, because the man is its expression, not its source. There is no key to him in Ukraine and none in Europe; the only forces that can check him live inside his own country. Calling him an “agent” is, in a strange way, the more comforting story, because it locates the danger in one person and one folder. The truth is that he and the man in the Kremlin reinforce each other not because anyone signed anything, but because they read the world through the same lens and reach, independently, for the same victims.
So I keep my place in the minority, not out of contrarian pride and not from any illusion about who this man is. I am as certain as I am of anything that he stands, in this war, on the side of the aggressor. I simply refuse to mistake the convergence of two fascists for the obedience of one. Apply the oldest rule of honest reasoning — do not multiply entities beyond necessity — and the secret folder turns out to be the one thing the story does not need. Strip it away, and everything the recruitment theory was built to explain is still fully explained. Two men, one worldview, the same prey. Twin brothers, as it were. There is nothing more to say on that.