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Donald Trump has finally gotten what he has desired for years: a deal with Vladimir Putin.

The arrangement he reached with the Russian dictator—the United States will temporarily put aside sanctions on Russian-exported diesel fuel and Russia will supply millions of tons of diesel to the global market—has widely been dismissed by oil industry experts. The amount of diesel involved is a mere drop in the worldwide bucket, and its sale is unlikely to do much to lower the price of diesel in the United States, which is a net exporter of diesel. Trump’s idiotic war in Iran remains the main cause of higher oil prices.

But this agreement is tremendously significant, for it marks the culmination of both Trump’s decade-long effort to embrace Putin and Moscow’s decades-long effort (or operation) to cultivate Trump as an ally and useful idiot. Moreover, it has brought about a moment that was inevitable: Trump fully siding with the Russian tyrant and taking steps to betray Ukraine, a democratic ally.

The president of the United States has now bear-hugged an autocrat and accused war criminal who has been assisting Iran’s efforts to kill American service members and who for the past 10 years has been waging his own shadow war of disinformation and influence operations and cyberattacks against the United States and the West. Trump is helping this foe collect more oil revenue, and, at the same time, he’s denigrating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and pressuring him to surrender to Putin. Trump is providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

This is no shocker.

Since the late 1980s, Trump has sought to strike a deal in the Soviet Union or Russia, as Russian money flowed into assorted projects of the Trump Organization in the United States and elsewhere. Soviet and Russian officials dangled the possibility of joint ventures before Trump in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, yet nothing materialized. Then in 2013, Trump held the Miss Universe contest in Moscow. He netted about $2 million from the venture, while his partner—an oligarch close to Putin who underwrote the pageant—lost about $10 million. Essentially, this was a transfer of wealth from one of Putin’s plutocrats to Trump. More important, when Trump announced the contest would be held in the Russian capital, he asked if Putin, a repressive thug, would become his “new best friend.” From that point on, Trump repeatedly signaled he yearned to be a Putin BFF.

Following the Miss Universe contest, Trump once again tried to score a big development project in Moscow—but Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea got in the way of that endeavor. Yet that did not stop Trump. While campaigning for president in 2015 and 2016, as he spoke positively of Putin, he secretly pursued a massive Moscow Trump Tower project, negotiating with Russian........

© Mother Jones