With many Conservative commentators and politicians openly contemptuous of him, showing Trump a decent level of hospitality is going to be difficult without criticism from many sections of British society across the political spectrum and accusations of spinelessness, including from the Tories, that could further corrode the prime minister’s authority.

The Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges called Trump “…..a racist, misogynist and agent of influence for a hostile foreign power that has attempted murder on the streets of the United Kingdom.”

Soon after Trump announced that right after visiting Britain and attending a NATO summit he will meet one of his idols, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the leader of the hostile power Hodges refers to. 

However, it is vital that Trump comes away from his visit to Britain able to pass it off to his supporters as a diplomatic triumph.

That is important not just for Britain’s future but for the entire economic and security structure of western democracies. 

At the disastrous June G7 meeting in Canada where Trump insulted fellow participants, deepened a trade war and lamented Moscow’s absence (banned for invading Ukraine and annexing Crimea in 2014) he particularly snarled relations with the German, French and Canadian leaders.

That has left May as probably the only significant Western leader who can still influence Trump and salvage something from the American president’s wrecking ball foreign policy which has endangered traditional alliances.

She will have to withstand a barrage of criticism from political enemies and to overcome any distaste of her own for Trump, with many of her friends appalled at his routine mendacity, bullying, adulterous dalliances with porn actresses, uninvited groping of women, tolerance of racists, fascists, crooks and admiration for nasty dictators – notably Putin. 

She will have to summon up skills of communication with the public, deemed lacking during the last parliamentary elections, to explain to the British people why she must be nice to Trump.

Britain depends enormously on trade ties with the US and as Brexit looms, their importance increases. On the positive side, when May visited him in Washington last year, Trump said that he wanted to increase those links once the UK was unencumbered by EU restrictions on bilateral trade deals outside the union.  

Another vital sphere of US-UK relations is defence. Even if May relents in the dispute with her own party and provides the larger defence budget the UK needs, Britain will still depend on the US to keep it in the top tier of military nations. This allows London to pack a hefty punch for its size on the international stage. That might prove useful when we exit the EU’s common foreign policy. 

The extent of US support isn’t widely known in Britain which, since the end of the Cold War, has considerably eroded its military capacity. 

An American Defense Department official told Reaction that when a British politician or senior military officer turns up at the Pentagon they know London is going  to ask for something – “We’re the gift that keeps giving”.  

The UK needs the US to base its F35 combat planes with US pilots aboard its two new giant Royal Navy aircraft carriers as Britain hasn’t got enough of its own planes. Britain receives many other “gifts” and bargain deals in terms of equipment, technology-sharing, training and cooperation from the US.

On the other side of the equation Britain is rightly treated generously, even affectionately, by the US because the UK, unlike most other American allies, has supported the US in its conflicts except Vietnam. Britain has earned the right to special treatment by Washington through the sacrifices and lives of its military fighting alongside its US ally.

Britain is also a key member of the American-led intelligence gathering and sharing quintet involving Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 

These factors, along with Britain’s excellent abilities to impress those who like pomp and fanfare – as Trump obviously does – all add up to a strong hand for May.

If exploited skillfully she stands a fair chance to persuade Trump to back away from an all-out trade war but to resist blowing up the NATO summit the way he did the G7 conference.

May will also have one of the final opportunities to sway Trump, ahead of his meeting with Putin, not to give too much away in his eagerness to please Russia’s criminal strongman.

That is going to be tricky as many are unclear about why Trump is so keen on buddying up with Putin.  Although much has emerged from the investigation  by special counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s Russian connections that points to business dealings that resemble money-laundering.

Such connections could make him susceptible to blackmail by Moscow and hence pliable to the Kremlin’s wishes although Trump will justify his coziness with Putin with platitudes about the need to reduce tension with a nuclear-armed Russia. 

May will have to be resourceful in making a case for Trump not to forgive Putin for all the immense harm he has caused to the US or to eliminate sanctions for Moscow invading and waging war on Ukraine, poisoning people on UK soil, tolerating or assisting in the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and using “hybrid warfare” to distort and undermine the very notion of truth in the news and information sphere.

On a juvenile, emotional level Trump craves Britain’s approval much more than that of France, Germany, Japan and the other major Western states because even he is aware of a “special relationship” between the UK and US which has been forged by war and mutual shared culture. English is the only language he has at least partially mastered. And he likes to boast about his Scottish roots and golf club. He also knows that a huge number of Americans, likely a majority, including his own “core” supporters, admire much about Britain.

Although most of those opposed to welcoming Trump are completely genuine in their criticism some such as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Stalin-admiring propaganda chief, Seaumas Milne, will criticise her hosting Trump from a position of utter amoral cynicism.  

They are the type of diehard, lefty leaders who have seamlessly transferred apologist allegiance from a Communist Kremlin to its current fascistic iteration. 

She should remind everyone how they tried to shield Putin from accusations over the nerve agent and ask how they reconcile their defense of Putin with his support for Trump.

Trump will pass but Britain needs the goodwill of the US over these turbulent and dangerous years.  This is also an opportunity for London to demonstrate to an often scornful, perhaps even spiteful Brussels, that even outside the union Britain has an invaluable role to play as a bridge in relations with Washington.

The message for ordinary British people concerned at the morality of welcoming Trump is that the UK has, out of necessity, played a courteous host to many other odious visitors without staining its honour and on this occasion too Mrs May must close her eyes, lie back and think of England… the UK, the EU and the Western world.

Trump had heaped scorn on previous US administrations for failing to halt North Korea developing nuclear missiles or being duped into giving aid to Pyongyang in return for promises to do so that were subsequently broken. Surely he wouldn’t show up for a meeting which would yield only yet more unenforceable pledges of future disarmament by the North?

But, despite following closely Trump’s erratic behavior since he became president, I still under-estimated his capacity for mendacity and illusion and I believed that more serious figures in his administration would rein him in from pressing ahead with the Singapore summit fraught with risks to seriously harm America’s interests.

However, in recent months Trump has booted out some of the key wise heads that used to do that – like national security adviser general HR McMasters and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. 

The remaining “adults” at the White House were helpless to prevent Trump blowing up last weekend’s G7 Conference in Canada, edging the world closer to a major trade war. 

While having no compunction about insulting fellow G7 leaders and damaging relations with some of America’s closest allies, Trump again displayed his admiration for two of the world’s most odious dictators. He called Kim Jong-un, who has butchered countless numbers of his own people and trampled their human rights, a “ man of honor”. 

And he lobbied for Russia’s re-admission to the G7. Moscow was kicked out for invading Ukraine, thereby shattering the world order forbidding aggression that the US had painstakingly forged since WW2.  

Trump referred to Ukraine’s invasion as “something” that happened a long time ago (2014) and rather than blaming the perpetrator, Vladimir Putin, he suggested it was the fault of former President Barrack Obama for not opposing it. As if Moscow had asked Washington’s permission to launch the invasion.  

Tomorrow’s Singapore Summit may well prove to be Trump’s feverish ascent of, within a mere few days, the second of twin peaks of diplomatic insanity.

He is so desperate for something to present as a major triumph to his diehard followers that he seems willing to do that regardless of further damaging America’s international reputation or endangering some of her allies.  

Trump became known to millions by hosting TV reality shows, which in fact are about a made-up (alt-) reality, as in the real world people do not conduct their love-life or present business schemes under the gaze of TV cameras and media stars; they know they aren’t going to die in their quest for desert-island survival yards from a film crew. But this appeal to an alt-reality enabled Trump to become president and he has used the method to substitute a roller-coaster of outrageous trash-talk and transient thrills for consistent policy and substantive achievement. It seems to work for his core supporters and that’s enough for Trump.

This most spectacular episode of the diplomatic reality show began 18 months ago with Trump and Un hurling juvenile insults at one another and threatening to obliterate each other’s countries. The idea of holding a summit emerged serendipitously as a way for both leaders to save face without resorting to violence.  

All good shows require surprises, twists and setbacks. And thus Trump cancelled the summit when North Korea started balking at the US insistence on junking the nukes. As that was the whole purpose for the summit and North Korea egregiously insulted US Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser John Bolton, it was proper to ditch the meeting at that point unless Pyongyang stated unambiguously it was ready to give upon its weapons.

But because Trump had accepted Kim Jong Un’s proposal for a summit without consulting his own State Department or security officials and “owned” the process, he realized the cancellation might become a high-profile loss of prestige for him. So a few days later Trump announced the summit was back on.  He said the summit might now be the start of a process – ie not what he had previously promised. But the stakes were immense to make the outcome appear a momentous success. 

So what we are likely to witness in Singapore is the summit of cynicism. Instead of any clear agreement to scrap North Korea’s nukes something else will be dressed up as a victory for Trump. One strong possibility is that in return for easing western sanctions against Pyongyang Trump will secure an official end to the Korean War.

The Korean conflict ended in 1953 with the division of the peninsula into North and South but with no formal peace treaty – only an armistice agreement. 

Trump didn’t know much about the Koreas at all before he started his tweet war with Kim Jong-un. By his own words he seemed surprised to discover recently that South Korea was an important trading partner of the US.  He has also said that he hasn’t done a lot of prepping for the summit because he considers it’s mostly about “attitude.” Rather than, say, knowledge? 

History is certainly not his strong point and it is highly likely he only learned about the lack of a formal peace treaty within the last few weeks.  

Trump has repeatedly portrayed his mission to the Singapore summit as one to save the world and has suggested he deserves a Nobel Peace prize for his efforts. 

So although a formal peace treaty will alter little if anything in the real world, in the alt-reality world of Trump and his supporters flourishing an important-looking document that secures “peace in our time” is probably a top priority for Trump. 

What he might cede to Kim Jong-un for his signature worries many US officials and Western governments. It terrifies South Korea and Japan – the two countries most immediately affected by North Korea’s nuclear capability.  

They see that Trump’s eagerness to deal with Kim Jong Un has already rewarded the dictator handsomely in PR terms and tightened his tyrannical hold over his own people.  They fear that in order to secure the appearance of a triumph at the summit Trump may scale back the American forces and weapons based in South Korea that act as a vital deterrent to North Korean aggression.

However, Trump’s reality show is only bent on winning the immediate ratings war. It’s about illusion to convince his supporters he’s conjured something historical and great for them.  What actually happens next will be decided on the hoof in another bizarre episode.

I was a teenager when I first heard that chilling term uttered by a British politician in 1971 referring to the low intensity war in Northern Ireland between the British Government and IRA terrorists. The conflict had erupted in 1968 and would last for 30 years with a steady stream of bombings and shootings leaving a trail of dead and maimed children, adult civilians, British soldiers and Catholic and Protestant terrorists.  

But, apart from occasional “spectaculars” killing and wounding dozens of victims, the violence seemed to barely register with Britons on the mainland. The deaths of a couple of British soldiers in Belfast sometimes made just a few paragraphs in the newspapers.  Many in Northern Ireland understandably felt forgotten as if the rest of the world had become bored with their ghastly situation.   

The then Home Secretary Reginald Maudling even declared the conflict was at “an acceptable level of violence” – which many took to mean that London had given up on trying to end the killing and was resigned to keeping it within reasonable parameters.

The Russians invaded, then annexed, Crimea in February 2014 and by spring had stirred up conflict in parts of eastern Ukraine as a pre-cursor to snatching more Ukrainian territory. Fighting flared with large battles, which sometimes saw hundreds dead in a day.

It was confirmed today that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by a Russian military unit over Eastern Ukraine in 2014, leaving 298 people dead.

But by the autumn of 2015 a parlous ceasefire called the Minsk Agreement depressed the death rate dramatically. Ukrainian soldiers and civilians still died every week. But they died in dribs and drabs instead of job lots.  Press attention shifted to the mass slaughter in Syria and many Ukrainians felt their country’s conflict plight had been consigned to the back burner in the way the people of Northern Ireland must have though with “troubles” simmering away at an acceptable level of violence. Acceptable as a cynical statistical model unless, of course, one of your relatives or friends featured in that week’s statistics.

So it was fitting that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who shattered the postwar world order by invading and sparking conflict in Ukraine marked the ignominious anniversary last week (May 15) by opening a bridge connecting Russia with occupied Crimea.

Putin himself officially inaugurated the bridge, hailed as Europe’s longest, by driving the first vehicle to make the 19 kilometer journey from Russia across the Azov Sea’s Kerch Strait.

Known for his “Village People” propensity for dressing up in tough-guy costumes – he’s previously appeared as an air force pilot, biker, rally driver, diver and hang-glider – a Truckin’ Putin, wearing jeans and wind-cheater jacket rolled into the occupied Crimean peninsula.

However, as he purposefully shifted the gears of his big truck, it must have been difficult for him to maintain a smile when he considered that the bridge, far from being a monument to martial triumph, is a stark symbol of the Kremlin’s failed plans to rebuild a new Russian empire.

After seizing Crimea, Putin tried to snatch a huge crescent of Ukraine from its eastern borders, sweeping south and to its western frontiers. That would have created a land corridor from Russia to Crimea, which received most of its utilities, including water, food, fuel etc by road and rail from the Ukrainian mainland.

But that didn’t happen because, to Moscow’s astonishment, vastly outnumbered Ukrainian volunteer battalions managed to hold back pro-Russian forces and limited them to occupying a portion of the country’s eastern Donbas region.

Most of the world does not recognize Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula and has stopped trade with it. Everything to keep Crimea going had to be expensively brought in by ferry or plane from Russia so that the cost of living soared for those on the peninsula. Tourism, a vital slice of Crimea’s economy, crashed.

So the bridge became an obsession for Putin who devoted billions of dollars to the project and called the structure “a miracle” when it was completed six months early.

The EU, US, Canada and many others condemned the bridge as an attempt to tighten Moscow’s illegal occupation.

Despite the hoopla surrounding its “opening”, the bridge, Potemkin village style, isn’t very useful yet as the roads leading up to it on both the Russian side and in Crimea won’t be ready until at least 2019. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, tweeted: “Both ends of the bridge lead nowhere.”

In similar fashion the Minsk Agreement, intended to bring peace to eastern Ukraine, isn’t going anywhere fast either. It calls for not only a ceasefire but also for the withdrawal of Russian troops and pro-Moscow forces from the occupied areas, return of control of all its borders to Ukraine, and elections for a political arrangement in the region that reflects the interests of the local population, many of whom are ethnic Russians.

There has only been one day without fighting since the agreement was signed in 2015 and the rest of its provisions have stalled because Moscow’s armed forces – whether regular or Kremlin-armed proxies – remain in the occupied Donbas area and control the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Kurt Volker, the US special envoy charged with trying to help settle the conflict, was not very optimistic about the future as he hasn’t heard from his Russian counterpart for more than three months since floating a plan to bring in UN-mandated peacekeepers to control both sides of the conflict line and create the conditions for bringing normality back to the region.

Volker said he has not seen any signs that Moscow is willing to engage “seriously” to resolve the conflict despite the fact it has nothing to gain from continuing it. “There won’t be recognition of territory taken by invasion and Moscow will only suffer more in terms of sanctions and lost lives”, he said.

Volker recommended, after his first visit to the front lines last summer, the US supply Ukraine with Javelin anti-armor missiles and earlier this month 210 Javelin missiles and 37 launchers, arrived in Ukraine, something which has enraged the Kremlin. 

The arrival of the state-of-the-art Javelins won’t cancel out Russia’s vast advantage in men and material over Ukraine, but will even up the odds and has boosted morale considerably.

He hopes that Putin, after being inaugurated earlier this month (May 7th) as Russia’s leader yet again,  might feel confident enough to make “a constructive response” to the UN peacekeeper plan.

But he’s not holding his breath and said if Russia continues its adversarial course the US and other western countries will continue to stand by Ukraine as he believes that is necessary to “re-establish the fundamentals of the world order”.

He said “Russia has torn up the rules as in the case of Ukraine and that has very injurious consequences.” If Moscow behaves aggressively in Ukraine without being penalized, what’s stopping it from doing the same elsewhere?

Meanwhile the violence at “acceptable levels” continues. Another two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and  four wounded on Monday.

What shouldn’t be a surprise is that North Korea has reverted to its traditional, erratic behaviour ranting against the US and placing the summit process in danger of unraveling.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Trump at the White House Tuesday ostensibly to ensure they have a unified position at the summit, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.  

However, their agenda was dominated by trying to decipher what North Korea’s  outbursts signify and to figure out if there will be a summit at all.

Trump’s profound ignorance of even recent history, allied to aggressive shunning of advice from experts, allowed the US president to convince himself that Kim, the third-generation pedigree of a despotic dynasty that has reviled America for 70 years, had suddenly decided to make nice with the US.  

Not only that, but just as North Korea had demonstrated it possessed an intercontinental ballistic nuke,  Kim was going to discard the nuclear arsenal his family had labored so long to construct and which is his sole, but terrifying, bargaining chip.

Further prodding Trump to suspend reality, has been his desperation to gain a spectacular diplomatic triumph to deflect attention from the meager achievements of his 16-month presidency, plagued by sex scandals and an investigation of his alleged shady, perhaps criminal, connections to Russia.

Trump’s drama with North Korea began with a ludicrous and juvenile exchange of insults and threats to nuke each other.  In Trump’s narrative his tough tweets were so intimidatingly effective they drove his foe to the negotiating table and an agreement to hold a summit. 

When Kim announced that he was going to dismantle his country’s nuclear testing facilities as a good-will gesture even before the summit, that should have rung some alarm bells. Nuclear experts and spooks said the testing site, at a complex of mountain tunnels was collapsing from the stresses of six nuclear blasts and redundant as Kim’s scientists had already gained all the data they needed.

So Kim parleyed a pile of nuclear rubble into a grand gesture he knew Trump would claim as further proof of his diplomatic skills and for which Kim expected to be rewarded.

Trump duly touted the version of events with himself as hero to his core supporters boasting that he was “saving the world”.  

He left out the fact that most of the difficult, politically perilous work to lay the foundations for the summit was conducted by South Korea’s President Moon. Trump has shamelessly snatched all the credit. He has wondered aloud if he shouldn’t be in line for a Nobel peace prize.

So when things started to go awry last week Trump began to worry that the summit could turn into a massive embarrassment. 

The harsh change in tone was triggered by US National Security Adviser John Bolton who always believed the summit had little chance of success. Before he took up his post he advocated that the US should give North Korea a deadline to abandon its nukes and then use military force if it didn’t.

So North Korea was already sensitive to Bolton’s pronouncements when last week it was reported to Kim that the National security Adviser advocated a “Libyan model” for North Korea.

What Bolton meant was that, like Libya’s late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Kim should be brought in from international isolation and offered economic aid in return for abandoning his nuclear program. Indeed for eight years after Gaddafi agreed, that is what happened. Until his people revolted against their brutal tormentor. 

That was the part of “Libyan model” Kim was focusing on, particularly the bit when a mob captured Gaddafi, filmed him being tortured and summarily executed him.

Trump tried to mollify North Korea but messed that up and gave Kim there impression he would be “decimated” if North Korea failed to agree to US demands to give up all its nuclear weapons, rapidly and verifiably.

North Korea responded by saying it was  changing its mind about giving all of its nukes up swiftly.

Although Pyongyang is blaming Bolton for spoiling the atmosphere, it’s possible China has also pressured Kim to curb his enthusiasm. China is North Korea’s most important patron and keeps Kim on a tight leash – something he no doubt resents. Kim may have thought if he created any sort of independent relationship with DC that would give him more leeway with China. And that would not be to China’s liking.

Kim knows that Trump is so eager to present to his supporters the appearance of success that he might be coaxed into promising concessions that scale back America’s military presence on the peninsula and jeopardize South Korea’s security.  

On Tuesday Trump acknowledged preparations for the summit had run into difficulties but still believed it could happen: “There are certain conditions we want to happen. I think we’ll get those conditions. And if we don’t, we won’t have the meeting.”

The horrible truth is that Trump could promise North Korea much for something he could dress up as a success even if it lacked substance.

So senior officials in the White House know their task now is to guide Trump away from making any catastrophic concessions while managing expectations about the summit in such a way Trump’s faithful won’t see what transpires as his failure. 

One solution might be to blame Moon, who acted as messenger and paved the way for the summit, for sending overly-optimistic signals to DC.  

Whereas Trump was reluctant to give Moon any credit for the peace process when it seemed on track, he will almost certainly give the South Korean leader all the credit for any failure.

In the years following the 9/11 attack, Ms Haspel was deeply involved in the hunt for the terrorists who organized the attack and ran one of the CIA’s secret foreign “black sites” where captured suspects were interrogated and subjected to what was euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

But the public portion of her confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee panel on Wednesday (May 9) needn’t have been overwhelmingly about torture if it wasn’t for Trump’s disquieting enthusiasm for the use of brutal methods.

Ms Haspel, 61, has been with the agency for 33 years. And despite her deceptive Miss Marple-ish appearance, she honed her skills at the gritty end of undercover intelligence work in often dangerous Third World countries for much of the time operating against the Soviet KGB. She joined the CIA’S Counter-Terrorism Center the day before the 9/11 and rose to become deputy, then acting-head of the male-dominated organization.

If confirmed, she will be the first woman CIA director. Apparently the vast majority of her colleagues want her as their leader because she would also be the first chief in decades that was one of them rather than an outside appointee with limited intelligence experience.

Certainly many suspected terrorists were subjected to – effectively torture. The most notorious was waterboarding – simulating the sensation of drowning for the victim. Other tortures included long periods of sleep deprivation, soaking suspects in freezing water and using hoses to pump water through a detainee’s rectum.

The US Department of Justice gave legal clearance to the techniques but many Americans never accepted methods normally associated with sinister, human rights-trampling regimes out to be used.

Most Americans though felt limited torture was a justified evil if it could prevent other tragedies like 9/11 or in a ticking-bomb scenario. However by 2007 the CIA had ceased using the methods and in 2009 President Barack Obama banned the practice. A 2014 Congressional report condemned the techniques as not only contravening American values but it turned out they were of questionable effectiveness in eliciting correct information.

Many Trump nominees have faced intense scrutiny because of the bitter party political divisions with Democrats opposing for the simple reason that a Republican president had proposed them.

In Ms hassle’s case both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that she is supremely well qualified. But Trump’s gleeful advocacy of torture meant that questioning repeatedly centered on whether she would reinstate torture if ordered to by the president.

During his election campaign Trump frequently contrasted Obama’s objection to the use of torture to his strident advocacy of it to portray his opponents as soft on terrorism and to convince his supporters he was not some rich milksop from New York City who had five times dodged military service in Vietnam on spurious medical grounds.

He reveled in advocating torture because it allowed him to burnish the tough-guy image Trump craved in order to appeal to his core supporters, many of whom really are tough, hard-drinking, fist-fighting folk out of a Johnny Cash song.

Trump has frequently wanted to convey he is a hard bastard, not squeamish about waterboarding a few bad guys himself. He seems to harbor a need to project himself as a physically tough and courageous person for purposes of his own self-esteem. Earlier this year after a gunman killed 17 pupils in a Florida school, Trump mused before TV cameras that he would have rushed in to the rescue even if he had been un-armed.

Before Wednesday’s hearing Trump went out of his way to portray anyone who wanted to hear reassurances from Ms Haspel that she would never use torture as being soft on terrorism.

He tweeted: “Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror.”

Many people, myself included, have discussed, over a few drinks, inflicting gruesome punishment on terrorists that have raped, tortured, and murdered, including turning a victims agonized last moments into a video as they are burned alive or their head is sawed off.

Personally I don’t mind if known terrorists are removed to a secret location, tortured and then quietly disposed of in order to avoid new Guantanamo Bays, which serve as PR for Islamic extremists. That applies to American, British and other European passport holders who fought for ISIS.

I think there’s a case for doing such things but they should all be done secretly. The last thing we need is a president publicly joining in such macho fantasizing.

Senators asked about Ms Haspel’s role at the black site she oversaw in Thailand, and where 92 tapes recording interrogations were destroyed after the Congressional investigation into torture began. She admitted she had passed on an order to do that but hadn’t been in the tapes herself.

Some Democrats were displeased that she bucked against labeling the past use of torture as immoral and she said that the methods had contributed to successes such as the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who bragged he masterminded 9/11.

In a bizarre twist, Mohammed wants to give evidence to the senate committee but there’s no sign anyone wants to hear him.

Ms Haspel made clear torture methods belonged to another time and under her leadership would never be used.

When asked whether she would disobey an order by Trump to use torture she said she possesses a very strong moral compass and “I would not allow ……activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.”

Ms Haspel probably will be confirmed even though Trump’s enthusiasm for torture increased her grilling about that subject.

A trustworthy CIA with a leader strong enough to resist Trump’s attempts to bully the agency is needed more than ever. It is one of the few mechanisms available to the White House to correct a view of the world warped through a Trumpian prism of ignorance, prejudice, distortion and possibly traitorous ties between the president’s associates and the Kremlin.

Greater than the distaste some might feel at Haspel’s torture connections is the anxiety that if she is not confirmed Trump would nominate someone from his stable of dodgy wackos with no moral compass at all. That fear will likely push waverers to vote for her.

The two investigations are separate, but connected, and are beginning to look like a dangerous pincer movement.

The main one, nearly a year old, is led by Mueller examining whether there was any collusion between Trump’s election campaign and the Kremlin, which all US intelligence agencies and most Americans agree put considerable effort into supporting Trump by various covert or underhand, Internet-related means.

The other involves $130,000 hush money payment Trump supposedly made via his personal lawyer of 30 years, Michael Cohen, to porn star Stormy Daniels. She says they had a one-night stand in 2006.

For months Trump denied he’d slept with her or paid any money. But in a series of spectacular missteps his new lead lawyer, another larger-than-life character former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, admitted Cohen had paid the money and then been surreptitiously reimbursed by Trump. Giuliani might as well have then blared out the question himself: “If Donald didn’t sleep with her, why is he parting with $130,000?”

The most serious aspects of the Stormy matter are not whether Trump is lying and was unfaithful to his wife just after she’d had their only child. The president has been caught out lying many times but it doesn’t seem to hurt him or bother his supporters.

The danger lurking here hinges on who made the payment and whether it infringed strict rules about campaign expenditure.

Last February Cohen said: “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction…… neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”

Whether that’s true became part of an investigation by the legal authorities of New York’s Southern District, who raided Cohen’s office and residences after receiving evidence, likely from Mueller’s people, of possible crimes. They confiscated masses of material related to Trump.

Trump knows what’s in those documents and seems spooked by the possibility that Cohen may be charged with crimes and cooperate with the New York authorities and Mueller to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.

Trump has edged away from Cohen and some of the president’s pals have already suggested Cohen is a liar in preparation for the day he might give evidence against Trump.

Giuliani replaced the president’s previous chief lawyer who he thought too timid in extricating him from the encroaching Mueller mess. Giuliani has a reputation for toughness and aggression. He was mayor of New York on 911 and is credited with inspiring leadership that lifted morale in the aftermath. As a US attorney general in the 70s and 80s he led a legal task force which broke the power of the five Mafia crime families that “ruled” the city for decades.

But Giuliani, 73, seems to have lost his edge and in muddled appearances on Trump’s beloved Fox News television he denied Trump slept with Stormy Daniels but admitted that Cohen paid the porn actress to sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent her potentially damaging revelations on the eve of the election. And that Trump had eventually, indirectly reimbursed Cohen.

By doing so Giuliani admitted the president was a liar. Suggesting that the money was used to prevent adverse publicity in the election opened Trump up to possible federal charges about misusing campaign funds.

He has also burdened Trump with having to explain why he would pay $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a woman he hasn’t touched and who he is now suing for $20 million damages for breaching.

Daniels alleges that the agreement was invalid because Trump did not sign it with his true name and she is suing him for a “defamatory” tweet he wrote after she said she was threatened by a man telling her to lay off making allegations against Trump.

After Giuliani’s disastrous TV appearance, Trump at first admitted by tweet that Cohen had paid off Stormy Daniels during the campaign and that he was reimbursed. Trump explained he had not had his way with Stormy and such “non-disclosure” payments to quash bad publicity are so common in the world of the rich and famous that the lawyer often acts independently and ponies up without even disturbing his client about such repellent matters.

By Friday (May 4) Trump realized that between his and Giuliani’s outpourings he was in jeopardy of facing serious charges related to campaign finances and was desperately rowing back and preparing Rudy to be the gal guy.

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago,” said Trump about Giuliani who joined the A-team more than two weeks ago. “He really has his heart into it. He’s working hard, learning the subject matter. He’ll get his facts straight. ….”

The most pressing question though is whether Trump will voluntarily agree to questioning as being demanded by Mueller. Even though he previously promised “100 percent” that he would, it’s the last thing he wants to do.

Many of his advisers fear, that unable to distinguish clearly between truth and fantasy, he would open himself up to perjury charges by lying to the FBI, as represented by Mueller. So Trump is, without much hope of success, trying to dictate what questions the special counsel can ask. Mueller might subpoena Trump, something many predict could trigger a constitutional crisis.

Or Trump might trigger one by firing Mueller, especially as he would probably first have to fire his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and the country’s deputy top lawyer, Rod Rosenstein.

Trump never seems to grasp that endlessly repeating lies doesn’t morph them into truth and his infuriated calls to quash the Mueller investigation only make him seem more guilty.

An American TV comedy institution, satire show “Saturday Night Live,” mocks Trump’s bizarre behavior weekly. Actor Alec Baldwin impersonates Trump with other Hollywood Stars like Robert de Niro and Ben Stiller sometimes joining in.

This week the show mimicked how the boundaries are blurred between reality and the Trumpian world. Playing Stormy’s role was the porn star herself warning the president “a storm’s a coming baby!”

Let’s hope for Giuliani’s sake he hasn’t left his day job yet.

That North Korean genocidal maniac Kim Jong Un is being so deferential and solicitous should signal that he’s got an agenda that bears little resemblance to the one the South Korea and US President Donald Trump think is being unveiled

Although Trump is already boasting that is going to be the case, Kim giving up nuclear weapons is a complete non-starter.

When he talks about “de-nuclearization” he means the US withdrawing its nuclear umbrella protection from South Korea. In return North Korea will abandon further nuclear tests because it doesn’t need to conduct more having already reached a sufficiently threatening level of experimental knowledge in that field.

Also it seems the site is so worn out by previous explosions that it’s no good for more tests. Therefore, Kim is offering to trade in an ancient, clapped-out banger for a bright, shiny Kia car.

Kim has learned that by a few flattering words and gestures, but without the need for concrete concessions, he has already made tremendous headway.

The US State Department, which Donald Trump has sought to slash into impotency, was never consulted about his plans for a summit with North Korea.

And why should they have been? This all began not because of a clear-cut plan to resolve the troubled situation on the Korean peninsula but because the American president awoke needing a “Little Rocket Man” tweet target to divert attention from an array of serious, possibly treasonous, charges leveled against him in conjunction with Russia’s massive disinformation campaign favoring Trump’s presidential campaign.

Anyone at State who cares at all anymore is either worried witless by what might happen or is trembling with barely-suppressed, hysterical mirth like Peter Sellers’/Clouseau’s martyred boss Inspector Dreyfus.

However, in the manner of farces where beggars and millionaires improbably swap roles, the coarse tweet slag-off slithered from the realm of playground spats into the grown-up world of nuclear proliferation.

Suddenly, lifting the possibilities from ridiculous exchanges about the relative sizes of one’s nuclear buttons, some optimistic heads decided this was an unexpected chance for serious talks about the stand-off with North Korea.

The South Korean government has thrown itself into “peace talks” with the North hoping that this time, this ONE time, a miracle will happen and a guy nurtured to leadership at the cost of millions of victims of communism by preceding members of his deviant Kim Family kin, really wants honest talks and will stick by his words.

Neither will happen though. They can’t happen because the threat of inflicting a nuclear catastrophe is the only strong card Kim has and he will not discard it because if he does he fears, probably correctly, that would be the beginning of the end for him.

Kim also knows South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Trump want to claim credit for bringing about “peace” even if it’s all a crock of kimchi and that they’ll play along to make it appear that they’ve eliminated the threat of conflict.

So brace for lots of the bread and circus shows that Trump uses as substitutes for real diplomatic achievements.

Trump has painted himself into a corner where he can either try to present to his core supporters that somehow his tough tweeting has secured a historic climbdown by a criminal maniac who knows his tenure depends on unblinking brutality, or, to maintain his ratings, Trump will feel he’ll have to take military action against North Korea.

Sources at the Pentagon tell Reaction.life that the US has limited military options that do not necessarily trigger the horrific mass artillery attack on South Korea causing hundreds or millions of deaths that so many fear. Accompanied by an attempted nuclear strike against the US or Japan. But I’ve never seen them so pessimistic when mulling the various scenarios.

If the Trump-Kim Summit does happen but doesn’t yield anything measurable as success for The Donald, the South Koreans will try to hang onto the illusion of “successful talks” and not abandon the whole show as swiftly as the Americans. Kim will try to turn that nuanced difference into a rift to try to spilt South Korea and the US.

But another unexpected factor is only now crystalizing as a possible prize for North Korean dictator Kim because of the whimsical possibilities injected into this current “peace process” by Trump.

While the US and South Korea admit they need China’s assistance by enforcing sanctions and pressure on Pyongyang to make progress at any summit, it’s unlikely Kim wants China to play a pivotal role.

Kim doesn’t want his existence to depend only on Beijing’s good will and the concomitant, humiliating need to obey China’s instructions. He sees Trump’s ineptness as an opening to cut a deal which gains him kudos in DC and thus enables Kim some leverage over Beijing.

At the moment all Kim has to do is employ the jargon DC and Seoul wants to hear to become a Western darling and to be treated as if he was in the club of the civilized without giving anything away.

That tweak of the political kaleidoscope will allow Kim to carry on with his lies and the next stage of his nuclear program.

Trump looks a bit more crazed each day as the Russia investigation edges closer to some dark conclusion. His personal lawyer, keeper of the president’s skeletons, is being investigated separately. And a porn star continues to twist the knife with allegations Donald had an affair with her that he paid to hush up.

Unable to claim many successes during his 15-month presidency, he is beset by criticism that he behaves like an unpopular school kid, desperate for someone to like him: “Look……..you can play with my toy …… it’s called White House…..we can have anything we want to eat ……. a real banquet.”

It was cringe-inducing to watch Trump launch his touch-feely charm offensive while all the time Macron was playing him like a skilled fly fisherman who has hooked a large trout and is patiently reeling it in.

Macron had impressed Trump last year with French pomp and splendour and a military parade on Bastille Day that so bowled over the American president that he has instructed the US should put on a similar show in DC this year.

The last thing Trump’s red-neck, blue-collar core supporters in rustbelt cities or spent coal-mining communities expected to see was their tough-talking hero prancing around kissing a French man and lovingly brushing dandruff off his guest’s suit to ensure he looks “perfect”.

Trump wanted to show that a world-leader type not only took the US president seriously but actually liked him.  Trump used the term “special relationship” – usually reserved to describe the relationship between the UK and America – to describe the new best friendship, with America’s “oldest ally” that he was forging right before TV viewers’ eyes.

It must have been devastating for Trump when he listened to Le Big Mac’s address to Congress where it turned out that his French pal disagreed with most of Trump’s positions on key issues like the Iran nuclear treaty, protectionist trade policy, climate change, nationalism and populism.

No French leader has probably received such a warm welcome among the majority of Americans because his speech re-affirmed the values that most Americans hold dear – including just being decent to your fellow man.

Macron is smart enough to know that Trump – who he described as “predictable” – will probably reject most of the advice the French president gave and that, for instance, Trump will abrogate the Iranian treaty thus stirring up another Middle East hornets nest that France and the EU will have to deal with.

But after putting on such a show of affection it will be difficult for Trump to slag off Macron.

Britain, mired in Brexit problems and Chancellor Angela Merkel less powerful than at any time previously in her leadership of Germany means that Macron, for the moment, is the only person who can speak to Trump for a Europe that is changing before our eyes.

France will not replace Britain as America’s “special relationship” friend – there really are too many cultural, historical and fiscal reasons for why that bond will endure.

But Macron has done a service for not only his country but for Europe and the majority of Americans by telling it to Trump like it is.

The BBC spoke this week to a man claiming to be a retired Russian scientist who helped develop the “Novichok” nerve agent that British laboratories and those of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body monitoring this hideous form of warfare, say poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter last month in Salisbury.

But as Vladimir Uglev said: “You will never prove Russia’s guilt. Unless you can find the actual test tube that contained the actual poison.”

Watch what happens to Mr Uglev. Likely he will be labeled mentally ill or a paid traitor. One way or another – arrest, hospitalisation, an accident – he will be removed from sight.

Both Britain and the OPCW pinned down the nerve agent as originating in the USSR during the Cold War. Chemical compounds don’t have a “Made in Russia” label microscopically branded onto the molecules that comprise it. Any compound, including Novichok, is composed of the same sequence of molecules wherever it is manufactured.

What scientists do know though is that Novichok production, especially of the high purity used in Salisbury, requires facilities with extremely specialized, sophisticated and expensive equipment. Such as in the only place it’s known to have been manufactured in the former USSR and today’s Russian Federation.

Russia has long used poisons to eliminate awkward folk, and has even occasionally boasted about it. In Britain there was overwhelming evidence, accepted worldwide except by the usual suspects like Venezuela, Belarus, and Zimbabwe, that two Kremlin agents used radioactive polonium in 2006 to murder another former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko.

In 2004 the pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, who polls showed might win the Ukrainian presidential election in a race against Putin’s favored candidate, was poisoned, likely at a dinner.

He probably survived because he vomited after the meal and received weeks of intensive treatment at an Austrian hospital. The poison was identified as a dioxin called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, made at one of only a few high-tech facilities in the world. One, of which was in Russia.

Yushchenko won the election but was left permanently disfigured on his face and body.

The Kremlin has assassinated lots of uppity Ukrainians. One of those was prominent wartime nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, whose guerrilla forces fought the Germans and later Soviet rule.

Bandera, and another Ukrainian were killed by a pistol firing a cyanide mist. Initially both victims were deemed as dying from heart attacks. The murders were revealed only after the KGB agent responsible defected to the West and autopsies on the exhumed bodies proved he was telling the truth that they had been poisoned.

Russian intelligence, from its earliest days when it was known as the Cheka, has been almost obsessed with using poisons. It developed stealth murder methods from 1921 in “Laboratory Number 12”, also known as “Kamera” – Russian for “the chamber” – close to the Moscow headquarters of the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB, at 2 Lubyanka Street. Putin has ensured it is generously funded.

Former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who defected to the US and lives in Washington DC, admitted supervising an assassination in 1978 where deadly ricin, provided by the Kamera, killed an anti Communist Bulgarian journalist, Georgi Markov, who worked for the BBC in London. He was injected by a microscopic pellet of ricin from a mechanism hidden in an umbrella.

Kalugin also told of a deadly Kamera-designed gel applied to objects handled by the target, such as car door handles and telephones.

Russian banker Ivan Kivelidi, who offended the Kremlin, died in 1995 after using a telephone smeared with poison. British police believe the nerve agent used against the Skripals was probably applied to the door handle of their home.

In 2002, the FSB did not bother to deny they had killed Chechen warlord “Khattab” by doping a letter with poison he absorbed through the skin.

After Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow theatre in 2002, FSB special forces pumped an opiate named fentanyl into the theatre that swiftly made terrorists and hostages unconscious. They shot dead 41 terrorists but 129 hostages choked to death when the FSB refused to tell doctors the antidote to their secret chemical weapon.

In 2004, two Russian opposition journalists, Anna Politkovskaya and Andrei Babitsky, were poisoned while trying to reach a terrorist standoff at a school in the provincial town of Beslan. Both recovered consciousness and survived. But Politkovskaya, who wrote a damning book about Putin, was later shot dead, her friends say on government orders.

A politician and journalist, Yuriy Shchekochikin, investigating corruption among Putin’s associates died from a poison his family believes was similar to that used on Yushchenko.

A western intelligence source says the Kremlin sometimes uses poisons instead of simpler methods like shooting when it wants the world to know it can murder opponents in a nightmarish and painful way. It just doesn’t expect anyone to dare to finger the Kremlin.

Shrieking “there’s no proof” as Corbyn did is an old Marxist fellow-traveller tactic that used to be routinely used to rebuff accusations about secret Soviet subsidies for groups working to forward Moscow’s agenda and to fracture Western society.

After the USSR fell apart proof emerged, during the short interval when some Western academics could delve into Soviet archives, that Moscow “gold” had indeed propped up Kremlin-friendly entities such as the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the pro-Soviet newspaper “The Daily Worker”, and other militant leftists who always blamed the world’s ills on the imperialist West as represented, chiefly, by London and Washington.

Corbyn, like so many leftists that previously worshipped at the communist altar, has seamlessly converted to respect for Putin. The far left continues the tawdry tradition of providing cover for Kremlin crimes.

Trump and his crew have worked in parallel, if not yet provenly in collusion, with Moscow’s massive disinformation machine to dispel, confuse and discredit traditional notions of truth. He has taught his ill-educated supporters that 2+2 can equal five or 500 or any number he chooses. So it’s fitting that Trump has used deranged-sounding tweets to announce missile strikes against the Syrian Government – which have brought the US and Russia closer to direct confrontation since than any time since the Cuba missile crisis of 1962.

Trump has used the embarrassingly crude language of a pub loudmouth to promise punishment for Syria, Russia and Iran for the Damascus government’s use last weekend of chemical weapons that killed dozens of civilians, including many children, and affected some 500 people in what had been the rebel-held area of Douma.

The US should indeed make it clear to Syria and its savage patrons, Russia and Iran, that they must face severe penalties for the latest atrocity. But by declaring his threats via tweet Trump has telegraphed his intentions in a way that he repeatedly mocked his predecessor, Barack Obama, for surrendering the element of surprise in military actions.

Such bald announcements have boxed in Trump and left him with no diplomatic wriggle-room.  After all he also ridiculed Obama for failing to follow through on warnings to punish Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad for deploying chemical weapons against his own people. Now Trump knows his core redneck supporters will label him a wimp if he backs down from a strike against Syria.

The problem is that a blustering Russia has also trapped itself by aggressive rhetoric threatening not only to shoot down US missiles but to launch attacks at the ships and bases where they were launched.  So any solution without losing face is a tall order.

Moscow always reacts with high indignation when accused of bad behavior. Even though, as with the Salisbury nerve agent attack, it wants those on the receiving end to know Russia was responsible and to fear her. But the Kremlin was offended by London’s robust response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil and had not anticipated the extensive international support for Britain.

In part the UK and France’s stated willingness to take part in joint action against Syria is because of Russia’s actions in Salisbury. The poisoning of hundreds of Syrian civilians was almost a grotesquely amplified version of the Salisbury outrage. It’s intent was to say “we can do whatever we want and you can’t stop us.”

As I’m writing this the lights are on in many more Pentagon offices than usual on a weekday night and military resources are being repositioned. America, as always, is the biggest player but Britain is moving submarines, surface vessels and planes into the region and France has air bases in Jordan and the united Arab Emirates.

By the time this is published the US, UK and France may already have raided Syrian targets. But where that leads is impossible to predict. Last year the US, acting alone, fired a salvo of cruise missiles at a Syrian air base after Damascus used chemical weapons against civilians. The attack produced few casualties and little damage to Syrian assets.

As that didn’t dissuade Syria from using internationally banned weapons again a year later, the feeling is that a more substantial, and perhaps prolonged, response is required this time.

However, the US wants to destroy only Syrian and Iranian military and is eager to avoid killing Russians so that Moscow won’t feel obliged to retaliate against US targets. But Moscow has allowed Syrian planes and other assets to shelter at Russian bases increasing the risk of Russian casualties. And the Kremlin is still desperate for revenge after a humiliating battle in February when US troops killed dozens, possibly hundreds, of Russian mercenaries storming a joint American-Kurdish base in Syria.

If Russia really tries to retaliate against US military facilities in Syria or elsewhere in the region that would ratchet the game up to an entirely more dangerous level.

Pentagon and intelligence sources say the US and its British and French allies could then choose to respond to Russian retaliation within Syria or by hurting the Kremlin’s interests somewhere else. For example the pro-Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

But another terrifying consideration in all of this is that Trump seems incapable of cobbling together a consistent foreign policy with clear goals or of even grasping how the various dots connect in the complex foreign policy picture.

He seems oblivious to the implications of the Syrian drama for his de-nuclearization talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un scheduled for next month. Iran is involved in Syria as a key player on Assad’s side. In mid-May Trump must decide whether to adhere by or scrap a treaty on suspending Iran’s nuclear program signed by Obama in 2015. Increased hostility to Iran over Syria will probably solidify Trump’s desire to scrap the agreement.

That in turn will not inspire confidence in Kim Jong Un that America will abide by any similar agreement with North Korea. In any case, Chinese pressure on Korea is crucial for the success of any accord and as Trump has initiated an ill-planned trade war with China, he can’t count on an abundance of good will from Beijing.

Perhaps the aggressive response to Russia – the first time Trump has directly criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin – is at least partly explainable by the arrival at the White House of new security adviser John Bolton, a famous hawk who has Russia and Iran in his sights.

But echoing his past reticence to criticize Putin, Trump has also this week tried to blame the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Moscow’s involvement in the 2016 election for somehow leading to the dangerous military confrontation with Russia in Syria.

The investigation has always infuriated Trump because he feels it is impugning his 2016 electoral victory. But the president has become increasingly vexed as Mueller seems to be homing in on Trump’s opaque business relations with Putin’s crooked associates.

A disturbing possibility is that Trump, only ever precariously tethered to truth and morality,  is willing to risk war with Russia to distract attention from the investigation or discredit any evidence of his financial or personal misconduct held there.

There are calls for action each time there’s a mass shooting but they fizzle out – until the next tragedy.

This time though it’s looking a little different. The kids from the Florida school, where 17 died, are unusually eloquent and energetic. They used their social media skills and formidable performances in TV interviews to keep the murders in the forefront of the news and overcame logistical problems to transform emotions into well-organized rallies.

I am a gun-owner and, for a few years until 2016, was an NRA (National Rifle Association) member.  I didn’t join because I believed the US Constitution’s Second Amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms, was in jeopardy of being repealed.

My chief reason for getting membership was that I live in Washington DC and the best recreational range near my home is at the NRA’s HQ in Virginia, a 30 minute drive away.

Criticism of the protesters was led by the NRA which accused them of calling for the destruction of the Second Amendment and said they were “being funded and organised by Hollywood elites, gun-hating billionaires and gun-ban politicians.”

When I joined the NRA I vaguely thought of it as an enthusiasts’ club, akin to bird-watching or stamp collecting hobbyists.

I was irritated by those, particularly many hectoring Brits, who think it’s bizarre, dangerous, and psychologically unhealthy for America to have such easy gun access, and who advocate confiscating almost all weapons (as in the UK after the 1996 massacre of 16 pupils and a teacher at a school in Dumblane, Scotland).

The gun cultures in the UK and US are historically markedly different.

In the US even if all legally-held weapons were confiscated tomorrow, the illegal arsenals would keep criminals and nutters supplied for decades.

I also find it difficult to take seriously objectors who don’t know the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic weapon and erroneously call the AR-15 style of rifle, used in many of the recent massacres, a machine gun.

Mass shootings in schools, churches and music concerts such as Las Vegas last autumn, are, for some reason, overwhelmingly carried out by white males. But only 158 people have died in those since 2000, while tens of thousands, mostly young black and hispanic males, have shot each other dead in the same period.

The school shooting victims are defenseless kids. Many of the black and hispanic victims are also kids but both killers and targets are often not very innocent – dealing narcotics or gang members. Their deaths don’t provoke many tears.

Most Americans don’t see a problem banning the AR-15 or similar military-looking weapons because they are not the tool for home protection or hunting.

They are fun to fire though. But I’ve seen lots of their owners also dressing in camouflage uniforms and acquiring night sights,  and other cool military accessories.  Some join white supremacist, survivalist,  or “freedom” groups and obsess about government conspiracies. I suspect too many are fantasizing about an excuse to use their weapons for real.

The NRA’s immense financial patronage influences politicians of all parties and its endorsement of candidates is often critical, especially in elections in rural gun-owning areas.

I was slow to realize that the NRA isn’t a gun hobbyists’ club but an efficient and devious PR machine to increase the market for gun manufacturers.  It uses romantic legends of Wild West gun law, fear of violent crime, anxiety about terrorism, scare stories that only widespread gun ownership prevents tyrannical government, to promote the need for ever more weapons. It has convinced many Americans that any curbs are the thin end of a wedge to prohibit all guns .

The march was along the wide Pennsylvania Avenue stretching from the southern edge of the White House to near the Capitol, housing Congress. Most participants were of school or college age, serious in their purpose but not puffed up with self-importance. Adults included teachers, and war veterans from Vietnam and the current conflicts. The core message was pupils wanted to feel safe in their schools.

Most were unprepossessing, nice kids. There was no trouble, everyone I met was polite, and I thought there was something determinedly American and hopeful about them.  I felt proud of them.

And I felt angry that the NRA wasn’t collectively man enough to greet these impressive young people, even if they disagreed with them. Instead the NRA heaped insults and scorn upon them accusing them of being puppets, dupes or even paid actors pretending they were pupils from the Florida school.

I’m hanging on to my .38 Smith & Wesson revolver but I’m not going to renew my NRA membership. Perhaps these young people have set in motion something that will endure and eventually result in the sensible changes to the regulations that most Americans want. I hope so.

Trump has become increasingly anxious about the special investigation into his possible ties with Moscow now that it is homing in on his business’s transactions with Russia.

The special investigation team, led by Robert Mueller, has subpoenaed Trump business empire documents related to Russia and elsewhere.  The chatter in DC is what Reaction predicted more than a year ago – that any investigation would eventually examine whether Trump’s business had effectively functioned to launder dirty Russian money.

Scores of Russian individuals and entities, many linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have bought Trump properties in the US enabling them to transform large sums of questionable cash into legal assets in America.

A furious Trump poured out a torrent of Tweets in which he  floated the idea of  firing Mueller and closing down the investigation which he calls a “witch hunt”.

He seemed to be testing the water for reactions – particularly among his own Republican Party – to the possibility of firing Mueller.

His tweets repeated lies that had previously been exposed as just that, but the generally tame Republican response encouraged him and he may feel confident enough to try to remove Mueller.

That is not a simple process and Trump might first have to fire both the Attorney General and his deputy, further adding to the sense of chaos at the White House.

As the time approaches when Trump himself is to be called in for questioning by Mueller, the president’s determination to quash the investigation has led him to hire a new member for his legal team – a lawyer who has appeared on Trump’s favorite Fox News television channel to say that the FBI and Justice Department officials framed the president.

As Mueller broadened the Russia investigation and Trump’s rage acquired almost hysterical proportions, curiosity increased about why Trump, so cavalier in criticizing or insulting many world leaders, has been so reticent to chide Putin.

Indeed Trump has dismissed and belittled conclusions by the FBI and US intelligence agencies that the Kremlin ordered widespread meddling in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump and undermine his rival, Hilary Clinton.

Trump has tried to ignore Russia’s actions in Syria, invasion of Ukraine, continuous attempts to undermine western institutions, and infection of the Internet with lies and distortions.

He only imposed sanctions on Moscow for its election meddling and for cyberattacks because he was forced to do so by a US Congress which, abandoning the usual partisan divisions, overwhelmingly voted to instruct the White House to penalize Russia. Even so he delayed the measures by a couple of months

While US politicians of both parties and senior members of his own administration have supported the UK in unequivocally blaming the Kremlin and Putin for the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, Trump has been reluctant to back that conclusion.

And yesterday (Tuesday) Trump telephoned Putin to congratulate him on winning a fourth term as president in last Sunday’s deeply flawed election where his only real opponent was prevented from running, anti-regime candidates had almost no media exposure, and observers reported many irregularities including ballot-stuffing.

Trump’s security advisers wanted him to raise concerns about Kremlin misbehaviour such as election meddling and the UK poisoning. But true to form he refused to touch on anything that might upset Putin. After the conversation Trump said: “We had a very good call. We will probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future.”

Trump has consistently signalled to Russia in every way he can that he is not enthusiastic about any reprimands by the US or its allies against Putin’s regime.

But that reticence to challenge Putin suggests to many that Moscow holds damning evidence against Trump and will be one of the core issues Mueller will ask the president about.

Moscow has been rattled by Britain’s swift imposition of sanctions after very publicly concluding that Moscow tried to eliminate former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, who spied for MI6, in Salisbury nearly two weeks ago.

British scientists identified the nerve agent as Russian manufactured and London gave Moscow a deadline to explain why Skripal, his daughter and a British policeman, who helped the unconscious victims, were left fighting for their lives.

The Kremlin had, for years, become accustomed to the idea that after it murdered a journalist or politician at home, used a radioactive poison to kill a defector in London, bombed Syrian hospitals and schools, invaded Georgia or Ukraine, launched crippling cyber attacks abroad or meddled in other countries’ elections, it could blandly deny involvement and there would be a tepid Western response.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West imposed economic sanctions on Russia and visa bans on some close Putin associates, but the Kremlin said the penalties had little effect and Moscow’s finances had suffered much more from a drop in oil prices than sanctions.

Russia again expected Britain and the rest of the world to swallow Kremlin equivocation, stalling, and mendacious bullshit for weeks or months before taking action, if taking any at all.

After all, it took a decade before London carried out a thorough investigation into the 2006 radioactive poisoning of Russian defector Alexander Litvenenko, which ultimately concluded the Kremlin was resposible. Holland reacted so timidly to Russia’s shooting down of an airliner, packed with Dutch adults and children, over Ukraine in 2014 that any censure has been almost imperceptible.

Moscow is like an oafish, un-civilized guest that comes uninvited into your home, behaves rudely, but expects your own good manners to prevent any ungracious response. Moscow never expected London to react so bluntly.

However, the British government warned that this time there wouldn’t be any dilly-dallying, even as Moscow begun its usual indignant denials in that smirky, plausible deniability manner intended to convey “sure we did it, but how can you prove it or what can you do about it?”.

Moscow expected the usual Western polite caution, but after the deadline expired, the Russians experienced something alien and very un-nerving.  London expelled 23 Russian diplomats and said more penalties would be imposed if Moscow didn’t show a little honesty and contrition. That has led to indignation magnified to fury because the West is no longer even pretending to believe Putin’s lies.

Various motives have been suggested for why Moscow would carry out such an outrageous attack at this time.

Some believe it’s for domestic Russian consumption, to buff up Putin’s bare-chested strongman image ahead of this weekend’s presidential elections. Any condemnation and penalties for the Salisbury incident bolster Kremlin propaganda that Russia is beset by enemies who only Putin can counter.

However, a more sinister motive could be that the discovery of the nerve agent and its provenance wasn’t due to Russian intelligence bungling, but a deliberate, chilling demonstration of the effects of biological warfare and to show that Russia still possesses the substance, despite it being banned under international treaty.

A strong signal has already been sent to Moscow by London and the fact that Britain’s NATO, European and other friends have lent united support means that Putin’s mockery and lies will no longer suffice.

Even US President and Putin idoliser, Donald Trump, has been forced by rational actors in his administration to admonish Moscow over the Salisbury attack, however half-heartedly. Months after Congress overwhelmingly voted to impose extra sanctions over Russia’s 2016 presidential election interference, the White House finally penalized a few more Russian individuals and intelligence-related entities.

But more real punishment for Moscow must follow. More of Putin’s cronies, who profess undying love for Russia but can’t stand to live there, must be denied visas and have their ill-gotten gains frozen.

Revealing where Putin has hidden the estimated $40—120 billion he has looted from Russia should be considered.

A person with knowledge of such things in Washington said Western countries, including Britain, have developed devastating countermeasures to Russia’s cyber-attacks which have caused billions in economic losses, disrupted nuclear and conventional power plants, endangered passengers by interfering in air control systems, and meddled in US and other elections. But he said the West does not want to reveal its capabilities, which will stay hidden until a Russian military or all-out cyber attack becomes imminent.

Some in the UK have mentioned increased military aid to Ukraine, fighting Russian invasion since 2014, as a possible sanction. Britain provides training but no deadly weapons. Providing those seems an excellent idea.

Not only would Ukrainian troops be able to eliminate many Russian soldiers but Moscow wouldn’t be able to complain because – as Putin has repeatedly declared – there aren’t any Russian forces in Ukraine.

I am in East Ukraine where Ukrainian soldiers are holding the line against Russian forces – regulars and “separatists” created and controlled by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

The bad-joke Minsk II “ceasefire,” negotiated between Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany in the summer of 2015, diminished fighting but never stopped it. Death has visited the conflict zones in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk provinces almost daily since it was signed. Recently, nine Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a single day, three near the front line positions where I was.

As much of Europe commemorates the World War One Battle of Passchendaele, which took such a tragic toll in 1917, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are living, fighting and dying in trenches reminiscent of the great war.

Every night I was near or at the front mortars fired from enemy lines usually kicked off an exchange of heavy machine gun fire with the Ukrainians also firing back some mortars. One night silent spectacular sheet lightning with an occasional lightning bolt lit up the horizon as large calibre mortar shells were fired toward the Ukrainian. Slowly the lightning approached our little battle until thunder and shellfire blended and then, as if to crush the arrogance of men, the thunder obliterated the sound of explosions.

Many Ukrainians believe that Putin may ratchet up the war ahead of his presidential election campaign next year. Russian opinion polls show that each time his forces slaughter Ukrainians (or Syrians, Georgians or Chechens) his popularity increases.

Therefore, stepping up the violence might seem an obvious election ploy to Putin.

Most soldiers I spoke to believe they could contain a Russian onslaught if only America provides weapons.

Many in Trump’s administration and the US government want to supply powerful weapons, probably including Javelin anti-tank missiles, which would greatly even up the odds in favour of Ukraine.

A majority of the Republican and Democrat members of the Senate and House of Representatives have for years wanted to help help Ukraine’s military. That desire has been sharpened by outrage at Moscow’s attempts to interfere in the US presidential elections and recently Congress imposed, contrary to trump’s desire, more sanctions against Russia.

Trump’s new special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who visited the battlefields recently, and defence secretary Jim Mattis both apparently want to deliver anti-tank weapons.

But without a complicated Congressional process, it is President Trump who must sanction the supply of such equipment. And all the indications are that he would hate to do that.

Trump’s adulation of Putin – during his presidential campaign and after his victory – made Ukrainians apprehensive that the new American leader would ditch US support for their country in exchange for better relations with Moscow.

This publication was one of the first to indicate that Trump’s seeming love-affair with Moscow was rooted in the fact his wealth had, crucially, for years depended on Russian cash. Scores of Russian companies and individuals – many linked to Putin – had been transferring huge amounts of their murky sources of wealth into the western fiscal system by buying Trump properties in the US.

These business dealings, which resemble money-laundering, figure in some of the investigations into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election and possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign being conducted by the FBI, Congress and a special investigator.

Suspicion has been fuelled by revelations of multiple connections between key Trump associates and figures close to Putin’s regime. Those revelations have followed a disturbing pattern where attempts have been made to conceal even the existence of such meetings. Once they have been brought to light the full story only comes out grudgingly and piecemeal.

Last month it was leaked to news media that Trump’s son, Donald Jr, met a top Kremlin lawyer in 2016. He first claimed they only discussed Russian kids’ adoption by Americans and the brief meeting was a waste of his time.

Later he was forced to admit the Kremlin lawyer, who wanted US sanctions against prominent Russians lifted, had offered dirt on Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton. Also Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort and other important Trump team figures attended.

Then President Trump admitted he helped compose his son’s first dissembling account of that meeting. A confession that the president deliberately tried to mislead the public.

Trump is extremely sensitive about allegations of collusion with Russia during the election campaign. All US intelligence agencies agree the Kremlin did massively interfere to skew support in Trump’s favour. Collusion is another matter. Although Donald Jr’s behaviour smacks of it, and is thus particularly harmful.

In an attempt to deflect attention the Trump camp accused the Democratic Party of colluding with Ukraine to influence the elections. That “collusion” took the form of an American of Ukrainian origin, Alexandra Chalupa, who had contacts with Ukraine’s embassy in DC, in 2016 publicising some of shameful things about Manafort, at that time heading Trump’s campaign. Manafort had worked to elect Ukrainian pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was ousted in 2013 after his corruption and brutality triggered a pro-democracy revolution. He fled to Russia, prompting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and a conflict now in its third year with more that 13,000 dead.

Manafort’s connections with Yanukovych had been in the public domain years before Chalupa’s revelations. But renewed Press interest forced Trump to fire Manafort.

The attempt to forge equivalency between Chalupa’s tip and the prolific Kremlin attempts to influence US elections was mostly ridiculed and failed to gain traction.

But Trump, notoriously vindictive, almost certainly bears a grudge against Ukraine.

Moscow was overjoyed when Trump won the presidency, but its expectation that he would overlook Putin’s actions in Ukraine and Syria, (which have been branded by many as war crimes) and single-handedly reforge US policy towards Russia has been severely battered.

Some speculate Trump will agree to arm Ukraine in order to demonstrate that there is no collusion between him and Russia.

However, evidence has mounted that Trump has unclear financial and perhaps other connections with Russia. If that is the case, then Trump will resist approving game-changing arms for Ukraine for fear of what Moscow might reveal about him.

At a timber and earth dugout in the trenches near the shell-pocked village of Krymske in Luhansk province, the Ukrainian commander, (who wishes to remain anonymous), said: “We can’t understand why America hasn’t helped us. We don’t want American troops but we need American weapons to defeat Putin.”

This commander is certain that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will use military aggression to rebuild a new Russian empire and risk plunging all Europe into war. He said: “We believe America will do the right thing. It must.”

I think Trump’s understanding of foreign affairs is so feeble that he really thought he could strike at Syria without offending La Putaine as long as the US warned Moscow to clear the airfield so no Russians were injured.

As to the Mother Of All Bombs attack in Afghanistan – I don’t believe it was Trump’s idea at all. I think the magnificent General James “Mad Dog” Matthis spotted an opportunity to do something demonstrative and useful there.

The good general likely suggested the attack as it would allow President El Tweeto to strut more of his macho stuff. It’s probably not difficult for someone like Mattis, who has courageously served his country for decades and often risked his life, to exert simple psychology on a spineless Vietnam-era draft-dodger like Trump so he acts tough, hoping to erase his cowardly past.

The effect of the US Syria bombing has been a hugely unpleasant and humiliating surprise for Putin. Despite the US giving two hours warning of what was about to happen, the Russians were impotent to do anything about the strike. They didn’t even try to use their much-vaunted S-400 surface to air weapons systems to intercept any of the US Tomahawk missiles heading their way.

In a petulant, bad-loser kind of way Moscow claimed Washington only gave an hour’s notice about the attack and said that around half the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched failed to find their targets. “So there America! You couldn’t stop Russian and Syrian jets taking off the very next day to murder more women and children.  Ha! Ha! Ha!” cackles Kremlin foreign minister Sergei Lavrov,  his Putin-ass-licking tongue defiantly protruding.

But sources who are military and Pentagon types (some of whom voted for El Tweeto) and definitely do know what went on explained:

1) When the Russians were given advanced warning of the attack they were also reminded that some of the Tomahawks have ARM capability. As a reminder, an anti-radiation missile (ARM) is designed to detect and home in on an enemy radio emission source. That means if the Russians had tried to use their S-300 and S-400 anti-air weapons systems, some of the Tomahawks would have smartly diverted to follow the Russian radar tracks and blow the Russian equipment and operators to smithereens. So it didn’t matter whether the US had given two hours warning or two days, the Russians could do nothing about the Tomahawks. Several very big potential customers (in the Middle East and Asia) who had been considering buying the Russian systems are now rethinking as a result, meaning that Moscow will lose billions of dollars in weapons sales.

2) The US launched 61 Tomahawks. One went into the sea and the other failed in the launcher. 59 struck the target.

3) The US didn’t even try to pepper the runways with bombs in an attempt to disable them because even Third-World style militaries like Russia and President Assad have the ability to quickly patch up airfields. So the US focused on destroying aircraft bunkers and buildings with valuable command and control equipment.

4) The US only wanted to make a point about chemical weapons. Prior to this, the Russians and Assad could courageously bomb civilians with barrel bombs to their hearts’ content, the feeling being that nobody would want to go to war with the Russians. The Tomahawk attacked changed that. The strike also showed that Washington was firmly back as a player in any resolution to the Syrian imbroglio. A puffed-up Putin last January revelled in his “international conference on Syria” in the Kazakh capital Astana because he thought he’d insulted and sidelined America, which wasn’t invited. Now the Astana event has been revealed as a Mickey Mouse conference with the rodent-like Putin running nowhere fast inside his wheel.

But throughout all of this Trump has assiduously avoided levelling direct criticism at Putin. Although others in his administration openly wondered whether Moscow knew about the Syrian government’s planned chemical attack (the Russians were certainly involved in trying to eradicate evidence of the atrocity when Syrian and, likely, Russian planes bombed the hospital treating victims of the chemical attack).

In answer to a journalist’s question whether he believed the Russians knew about the Syrians’ chemical weapons, Trump said it was possible but that he himself thought it unlikely. Those kind of weasel words leave a crack open for Putin, and the likes of Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov wide enough to insist that the Syrian government never carried out the chemical attack against its own people, that President Assad doesn’t possess such weapons, and that Russia was never involved in anything reprehensible.

I’m writing this in Ukraine, where the war against the Russian invaders has never stopped and costs Ukrainian lives almost every day. In recent weeks there has been a deadly uptick in Russian aggression and there are reports of tens of thousands of Russian troops massing on the border.

There was much rejoicing when the US attacked the Syrian airfield and Ukrainians hoped that Trump had finally seen the light, that his bromance with Putin was over, and he would arm Ukraine (which has never asked for foreign soldiers to do its fighting) so it could defeat Putin.

For Ukrainians, the Syrian conflict and their own fight for life are closely intertwined. The realisation that the bombings of Syria and Afghanistan weren’t a turning-point that changed the game for Ukraine in its existential struggle has dampened spirits somewhat.

Putin, Lavrov, Peskov and so forth are the same crew that in 2014 for weeks boldly lied that Russia wasn’t invading Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, and later that Russia wasn’t supplying weapons and regular troops in the invasion of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. They indignantly denied the overwhelming evidence that Moscow provided, and most probably manned, the surface to air missile system which destroyed a Malaysian airliner with hundreds of civilian passengers in July 2014.

The Kremlin’s propaganda often works by shooting out various (often contradictory and outlandish) conspiracy theories to cover their tracks. Individually their accounts may look ridiculous, almost comic, but the purpose is to muddy the waters with so much puzzling, disconnected nonsense that people shake their heads and give up on trying to understand. For Moscow’s distortion mill, that’s good enough.

Credit for the robust actions in Syria and Afghanistan goes to the true American patriots in the presidential administration who are endeavouring to steer a sensible and honourable course for their country, despite their president.

Even though popular approval in the US for the military action was high and cut across party lines, it hasn’t snuffed out the investigations by the FBI and intelligence committees in both chambers of Congress looking into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections and delving into Trump’s plentiful connections with Putin and other unsavoury Russian characters.

As more information emerges, it strengthens the allegations (that this publication wrote about before most others) that money lies at the core of those entanglements. To be precise, huge sums of shady Russian money bought up hundreds of expensive apartments in Trump’s luxury property developments, thereby rescuing his failing and bankrupt-prone enterprises. The purchases enabled Russian oligarchs, many closely tied to Putin and others operating with his permission, to embed money, much of it that looks of questionable origin by western standards of good business governance, into the US financial system by a process that resembles money laundering.

Investigators have focused on some characters that we spotlighted months ago, such as Paul Manafort, Dmytro Firtash and Carter Page. Page, linked to Trump’s campaign, bizarrely seems to be admitting he had contact with Russian spies.

Meanwhile Manafort, who worked as Trump’s campaign manager at a critical period, made millions of dollars advising and polishing the image of corrupt, pro-Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort also reportedly offered to work directly for Putin.

One of Manafort’s former clients, Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash, ran a company suspected in siphoning off billions of dollars in gas profits for Putin. He is being extradited to the US.

Manafort has already had to admit to some Ukrainian dealings he tried to conceal and is likely to come under further pressure as a result of the Congressional and FBI investigations. Firthash is probably going to get prison time whatever he does, but both he and Manafort are likely to try to cut deals where they give information that will help in the investigations concerning Trump and Russia.

So however angry the Russians are that their supposed ally in the White House ordered the strike on the Syrian government airbase, the issue of Trump’s murky ties with Moscow is far from settled.

But for Russian despot Vladimir Putin it will have an immediate and unwelcome effect. It would be a setback for his campaign to disrupt the politics of the West.

However, for Russian domestic consumption in Putin’s fake reality world, he has tried to portray himself not merely as an influence upon but as the all-powerful, canny master-puppeteer controlling the Western politicians who seemed in the ascendency and paid obeisance to the bare-chested Tsar.

Indeed, a few weeks before the first round, Maine Le Pen, who acknowledges receiving Russian financial help, met the Tsar himself. She probably intended the visit to Russia to make her look an international player and bolster her standing among the far-right voters who admire Putin’s anti-Americanism and many European Communists, who creepily and effortlessly, have transferred their allegiance from Marxist tyrants in the Kremlin to the fascist kind.

For months preceding the April 23 first round, National Front leader Marine Le Pen was tipped to come out as the front-runner but was beaten into second place by centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron.

In a desperate gamble, Le Pen has tried to broaden her appeal by putting distance between herself and her party, which has been unable to shrug off the suspicion that the racist and anti-Semitic sentiments still linger within its ranks. Those sentiments certainly formed much of the appeal for the supporters of party founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, when he ran the National Front between 1972 and 2011. She expelled her father from the party when he repeated statements doubting the Holocaust.

The day after Macron gained 23.8 percent of the vote against her 21.7 percent, Le Pen declared she was no longer National Front leader (understood to be a temporary ceding of power) but a candidate for all French people.

She hopes that by thus rebranding herself she will gain some of the Republican vote, especially from those who dislike the EU and are concerned at Muslim immigration and from repellent extreme-Left parties, which also fared quite well and are often a hair’s breadth away from National Front positions, especially in their adoration of Putin. Le Pen knows that she risks offending some National Front supporters by seemingly shying away from them. But she has bet that in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of way they understand her new ideological tent is big-enough to accommodate those who cling to her father’s purist line.

However, despite giddying, logic-defying, statistical acrobatics by pundits to show that Le Pen could still win – depending on, for her, a favorable conjunction of many improbable factors – it looks like Macron, with a 20 percent lead in most of the polls, will become president.

Macron has swooped out of nowhere in the past few months to take command of an anarchic – even by French standards – political landscape.

The charge forward of his En Marche Party, founded barely over a year ago, has been aided by the collapse of support for the previously dominant conservative Republican Party. Its candidate, Francois Fillon, was accused of fraudulently claiming state funds by pretending he employed his wife and children in his political work.

Fillon refused his party’s pleas to step down in favor of a non-scandal ridden candidate. The Republicans joined the Socialists, the other traditional French ruling party, in breaking the decades old political mould by both getting knocked out of the race.

Barring a last-minute damaging scandal, Macron seems set to win, his numbers swelled by the support of probably a majority of Republicans and Socialists and likely some Left hardliners, all united in finding the relabeled Le Pen as unpalatable as the previous brand and in search of more “normal” and safe hands at the helm.

On the night of the American elections last November when Trump won the presidency, Putin swelled with triumph and bottles of Champagne were cracked open in the Kremlin, the Russian Duma and elsewhere. Everything seemed to be going Putin’s way. Trump, who has continued to praise the repellant Putin whatever atrocity he committed and despite overwhelming evidence the Kremlin tried to interfere in the US election, seemed Russia’s man in the White House. And the far-right seemed set to do splendidly in elections in the Netherlands and France.

But now Trump is having to change because he is being taught that the US is a mature democracy with three branches of government and strong institutions, and he cannot use his legislature and judiciary as obedient rubber stampers like Putin does. Trump’s position has been diminished by the Netherlands result and what is likely to happen in France on Sunday.

French security experts say that the Russian state-backed hackers who intruded in US and Dutch elections have been at work in France trying to influence the electorate by spewing out a toxic effluent of distortions, lies and fake news to skew support in favor of Le Pen.

Putin still has his secret services, massive propaganda machine and hackers continuing to work against Macron, and it would not be a surprise if scandalous allegations emerged early enough to make an impact on the election but too late to dispel completely.

But it’s very unlikely the Kremlin’s efforts will prevent victory for Macron, who is anti-Putin and who doesn’t want to smash up the EU. And that victory will prove that Europe’s democracy, as fractured as it may seem, is mature and steadfast in ways that a gangster-dictator like Putin can never begin to understand.

So, to end with, two things:

a) When, as a student, I had saved up enough money to buy my first Levi jeans I learned with horror that my beloved, well-intentioned grandmother had laundered and ironed them and snipped off the “ugly” red Levi tag and “silly” leather label. I had been“rebranded” but everyone still knew I was wearing Levis.

b) The smug Putin has worked hard to convince his people that he is a black-ops genius secretly pulling the world’s levers of power. Now he is in danger of comparison with the monkeys in some of the first space capsules who perhaps also thought they were controlling epic events.

For anyone living in a former Soviet country – like Ukraine or Russia – Stein’s role is immediately recognisable and is further powerful evidence of Kremlin interference in the 2016 American presidential election.

In Ukraine people like Stein are called “tekhnichni kandidaty” (technical candidates) – persons without a hope of winning themselves but put up, spouting an agenda appealing enough to split the vote of rivals from ostensibly the same part of the political spectrum.

US NBC News examined photographs of the infamous dinner and discovered that Stein was one of the others seated at Putin’s table. NBC suggests she took enough votes off Hillary Clinton to tip the election in Trump’s favour. NBC writes:

“Her vote totals in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were all greater than Clinton’s margin of defeat, and arguably denied Clinton an Electoral College victory.”

That’s in precise accordance with routinely-operated schemes used in former Soviet countries to help the desired, pro-government candidate (except the ones, as in Central Asia, where everyone knows the incumbent is so splendid that nobody else need exert themselves by running). The method has been commonly used in all Ukraine’s elections since 1991 independence.

Another dramatic similarity between the recent American election and 2014 elections in Ukraine was there involvement of Russian state-sponsored hackers. After the violent revolution that overthrew pro-Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and triggered war between Ukraine and Russia, elections were held for a new parliament. Kremlin hackers actually tried to directly alter the balloting results by hacking into Ukraine’s central electoral office computers collating the counts from all the country’s constituencies.

The hackers were so confident they had circumvented Ukrainian hacking precautions that Russian TV blithely broadcast the fake results Russian hackers were feeding into the Ukrainian system and portrayed those as the results being seen by Ukrainian TV viewers. The fake results showed that Ukrainian extreme right-wing parties were sweeping the polls.

The Kremlin knew that the results would eventually be revealed as fakes and the true election outcome, in which the ultra-right got less than five percent of the vote, could be ascertained by recounting the physical ballots. But the intention was to cast doubt on the election by forcing a recount and planting the notion that a “fascist junta” was in control of Kyiv that would linger in some memories long after the true results emerged.

However, the Ukrainians had found out long before the election about Russian intentions but had not publicised them. Instead, they quietly blocked Russian hackers and broadcast the true results on Ukrainian TV. Meanwhile, the Russian channels were broadcasting the Kremlin’s fake results until they realised Ukrainian computer geeks had outwitted them. They abruptly and without explanation stopped their fake coverage.

Ukrainian media had a lot of fun showing the expressions of the Russian TV presenters and pundits when the Kremlin ruse fell apart live on air. Some of them took longer than others to realise what had happened as they hadn’t been let in on the disinformation scam.

But back to the Jill Stein and the US presidential election. The dinner in December 2015 was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of one of the Kremlin’s most formidable propaganda tools, Russia Today (RT) – its template for the fake news that has spread like a plague around the world.

Flynn took $45,000 fee to praise RT and Putin. The US intelligence community says RT engages in information warfare against American policies. Flynn was fired as Trump’s National Security Adviser after it emerged he had unauthorised discussions with the Russian ambassador in Washington about the US sanctions against Moscow.

But RT also lavished much broadcast time to give Stein’s 2016 campaign positive coverage. Inevitably now questions will, and should be, asked about what other help Moscow might have given to Stein and who were the donors who paid for her campaign.

The FBI director James Comey admitted last week that the FBI had been investigating links between people in Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia for many months. Now sources with US intelligence experience (but not FBI personnel working on the Russian links) are confident money-laundering will be a priority of the FBI investigation.

Investigators from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will likely collaborate. Our sources indicated that even before Trump’s inauguration the overarching connection between Trump and Vladimir Putin was not Kremlin blackmail or some weird ideological affiliation but money.

Russian individuals and entities may have used Trump’s property empire, perhaps without his knowledge, to launder dirty cash into legitimate western financial systems, thereby rescuing Trump from a series of financial disasters, including bankruptcy.

A desire not to damage a good business relationship could also explain Trump’s puzzling refusal to criticize Putin despite Russia’s covert meddling in US elections, military aggression and atrocities in Syria and Ukraine.

After Russian police used violence and arrested more than 1000 protesters demonstrating against their government’s corruption last Sunday (March 26) Trump remained silent.

In contrast he has made outlandish accusations that US intelligence agencies, former President Barrack Obama and British intelligence at GCHQ have spied on him or “wiretapped” his building to deflect attention from the ties with Russia that seem to surface daily.

Money-laundering of dirty Russian cash by many Western banks, financial institutions and businesses, including Wall Street and the City of London, has been a shoddy open secret for years.

In March there were allegations that British institutions had laundered some $30 billion. Last month the UK and US fined Deutsche Bank, which happens to be intimately connected with Trump, $630 million for Russian money-laundering.

Several years ago the FBI discovered, at a property where Trump himself was living in Manhattan, a Russian money-laundering operation being masterminded from apartments owned by Russians. As many as 30 of them were arrested.

Scores of Trump properties have been purchased over the years by wealthy Russians and that doesn’t tie him to money-laundering.  But he has tried to obscure his Russian business links although his son, Donald Jnr, has admitted that Russian money was “pouring” into their property empire.

Many Russian businessmen acquired their fortunes in a murky, often violent, environment where success depended on a nexus of links between politicians, secret police, crooks and business. In the Putin era success depends on obedience to Putin and sharing the spoils with him. Cash is laundered to buy luxury property, yachts and businesses in the West. They educate their children here and enjoy the freedoms that Putin’s “elite” conspires to deny their own people.

It is not a “victimless crime” because it has disastrously stunted those nations’ economic development, suppressed democracy and the rule of law and helped mire a majority of Russia’s citizens in poverty.

Trump’s businesses will have to show investigators they carried out the due diligence checks demanded by laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Patriot Act and KYC rules – know your client – requiring demonstrable efforts to check the provenance of clients’ money.

The FBI is one of the few outfits with the resources, capacity and reach to track the probably thousands of individuals and business entities involved.

Political operative Paul Manafort, who has featured in my previous articles on this topic, could be pivotal to the FBI investigation.

For several critical months last summer he ran Trump’s election campaign but was dismissed after embarrassing media revelations concerning his clients including ousted Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. Firtash has strong links to Putin and faces th prospect of extradition to the US on bribery charges.

Another Manafort client, Oleg Deripaska, is one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, who is also tied closely to Putin.

Manafort allegedly received undeclared large sums of money for his services to Yanukovych, which included undermining American and EU efforts to foster human rights and democracy inUkraine. Putin-puppet Yanukovych fled to Russia after his security forces murdered 100 pro-western demonstrators and his government was deposed.

Manafort’s assistant in Ukraine was a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer who claims he visited the US and continued communications with Manafort during the latter’s time on Trump’s campaign. Manafort is credited with diluting Trump’s Republican Party’s support for arming the Ukrainian military – something welcomed by the Kremlin.

Associated Press claims documents show Manafort offered his expertise to Putin at a time when the Russian dictator was charting an openly hostile course towards America and the West. He worked for Ukraine’s richest and pro-Russian oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, who funded Yanukovych’s political career from street-gangster to president.

Manafort could face criminal charges for not registering his work as a foreign agent.

Manafort is also financially linked to Firtash who for many years ran an opaque company used by Russian energy giant Gazprom to channel billions of dollars for Putin and his cronies.

Firtash has long fought extradition but now it’s looming he may strike a deal with US authorities to tell all he knows about Manafort. Manafort in turn might be tempted to make his own deal.  After all… Trump boasts that it’s all about the art of the deal.

As Trump’s Russian morass deepens recurring elements in allegations involving the US president, some of the colorful characters connected to him, and to Russia are bound up with large sums of money and property deals.

Many dubbed “oligarchs” from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet empire have sought to transform vast piles of dirty dollars, sometimes amassed through crime and corruption, into legitimate property assets in Western countries.

Many Russian oligarchs, despite professing undying love for it, don’t want to live in their largely impoverished, primitive, oft-brutish, country where they might lose their wealth at the whim of a kleptocratic, repressive regime. They – and these include many Putin cronies – want luxury homes in the West, their children educated in the US or UK, and their wives and mistresses to be able to shop in New York, London and Paris, not Moscow, Minsk or Ashgabat.

The tried and tested way to exfiltrate their money is to buy property abroad – the more outrageously expensive, the better.

And it’s not important to turn a profit on that asset.  Say you have paid $200 million stolen from your country for a collection of overpriced Manhattan or London flats and can sell it for only $150 million. It doesn’t matter because for a commission of $50 million, that wasn’t yours anyway, you now have a freshly-laundered $150 million embedded in the pukka western fiscal system.

US intelligence agencies are already investigating Kremlin computer hacking intended to influence last November’s presidential election in favor of Trump and looking at allegations – some in a report by a former British MI6 agent – that Moscow holds compromising material exposing Trump to blackmail.

Intriguing financial information and connections, some of which were known before Trump ran for president and others now coming to light, will need to come within the ambit of any investigations if Trump hopes to be cleared of the Russia- related allegations swirling around him.

Democrat Congressional members don’t trust the committees of inquiry currently being mooted as their composition will reflect the Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. Democrats are sceptical Republicans will pursue rigorously enough a president from their own party and fear some damaging evidence may remain secret.

That fear mirrors concerns in the former administration of President Barrack Obama that information relating to Russian electoral interference and ties to Trump might be buried by the incoming administration. For that reason, Obama’s administration in its last weeks, it has emerged, distributed, declassified and leaked information so that it would become public. Similarly the Democrats are pressing for a high-powered, politically independent inquiry that will make its findings public.

Trump has repeatedly tried to make it appear there are no financial connections between him and Russia. He chooses his words very carefully saying he has no investments or properties in Russia or loans from there. But his statements don’t exclude Russian investments into Trump businesses. And they certainly don’t exclude past business dealings with Russia.

Indeed, Trump and family members have made many trips to Russia seeking investors there. And they have met with success, as the president’s son, Donald Jr, boasted in 2008 when he said: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets…. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Helping to enable Russian oligarchs to clean their money by providing opportunities to buy very expensive properties and not asking awkward questions about the source of the money may not be in the same territory as being a money-launderer. Many western countries and financial institutions and centres, including the City of London, have been accused of profiting from and being tainted by billions of dollars in corruptly-generated Russian funds.

But the sparse undergrowth on the no-man’s land between the two territories may not provide sufficient cover for an American president seeking to preserve an unimpeachable reputation.

If there is an independent inquiry it will likely strip Trump of the camouflage about his business dealings provided by his refusal – unprecedented in modern times for presidential candidates – to open up his tax returns for perusal.

More information about his Russian dealings may figure in those tax records. Many are already known about. One or two such transactions might be explained away. But add to that the fact that so many others linked to Trump have Russian financial connections and a disturbing pattern emerges revolving around Russian money, with much of that, in turn, linked to Putin and his cronies.

Some examples:

One of Trump’s business partners was chairman of a company called Bayrock: a Kazakh emigre called Tevfik Arif. Kazakhstan, nominally independent after the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union, is still largely controlled by Moscow and Arif was closely tied to one of its oppressive, corrupt politicians who was looking for safe havens to invest in.

Another former senior Bayrock member is Russian born, now US citizen, Felix Sater, who was a middleman for investments into Trump’s property business and says he guided Donald Trump Jr on visits to Moscow and made a large money donation to Trump’s presidential campaign.

Sater was convicted of assault in 1991 and in 1998 he pled guilty to stock racketeering in a Russian gangster-connected fraud. Around 2000 Sater was indicted in for stock fraud worth $40 million. He struck a deal where he provided the CIA and FBI with information about national security in return for not having to serve jail time.

There were allegations, denied, that Bayrock was involved in a large fraud with an Icelandic-based investment fund. More than a decade ago US intelligence uncovered links of huge amounts of Russian money, including large sums of Putin’s personal loot, in companies with opaque ownership structures in Iceland – a country previously not known as a haven for dodgy money.

In 2008 Trump purchased for $40 million a luxury property in Florida. Two years later a Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, with extremely close ties to Putin, bought it for $100 million.

Rybolovlev partly owned the Bank of Cyprus, one of the largest centers for Russian oligarch money. Wilbur Ross, this week confirmed as Trump’s new Commerce Secretary, invested $400 million in the bank in 2014 – an 18 percent holding. He also appointed a former Deutsche Bank chief executive Josef Ackermann, to be BoC chairman.

After Trump suffered financial problems, including bankruptcies, and few serious western financial institutions would lend to him, Deutsche Bank loaned hundreds of millions of dollars. For a long time DB was dogged by allegations that it had helped Russian clients launder money. Earlier this year the US and UK fined DB $630 million for Russian money-laundering.

One of Trump’s chief campaign advisers was professional political operative Paul Manafort who had to leave the Trump campaign last summer after allegations he had received undeclared millions from Ukraine’s former pro-Putin President, Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort had worked for years grooming the corrupt and repressive Yanukovych. Yanukovych was driven out in a 2014 revolution after his security forces shot dead 100 unarmed protesters. Manafort continued to advise the pro-Russian remnants of Yanukovych’s party.

Manafort has worked for some unsavory characters. Those include Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who was the key figure in a scheme laundering billions of dollars siphoned off by Putin and his coterie from the country’s main revenue source, gas. Firtash is now awaiting extradition to the US on financial bribery charges.

Ukraine’s pro-western former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who was jailed by Yanukovych, began court proceedings in the US in 2011, which included allegations Manafort helped Firtash launder large sums of money by sham investments in New York property and part of that. That case was dismissed in 2014. But it is likely Tymoshenko will be asked by US authorities to support the prosecution against Firtash.

Manafort claims he did not work for Moscow but his close assistant in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, a former member of Soviet military intelligence, GRU, who some suspect never completely severed his ties with Russian intelligence. Manafort’s efforts helped keep Yanukovych, Putin’s puppet, in power and thus helped to stifle democracy and moves to integrate with the West.

And so the list goes on.

The Trump camp has already suffered casualties because of Russian connections. The most important so far has been the resignation of Trump’s National Security adviser, General Michael Flynn, in February. He was fired for lying about talks with the Russian ambassador in Washington, Sergey Kislyak. It was illegal for him to discuss with Kislyak possibly easing US sanctions against Russia prior to Trump’s inauguration.

Now Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is facing calls for his resignation because, in testimony under oath to the Senate, he failed to mention meetings with Kislyak last year when Sessions was a leading member of Trump’s campaign team.

Wilbur Ross is now also under pressure to go. Many honorable people have vouched for Sessions and Ross. And they may well be wonderful people. But the financial links are troubling not just because the president and some of his influential and powerful associates must (unless they haven’t been paying attention to the news since the fall of the USSR) suspect they are involved with tainted Russian money, but because Putin might be asking for political considerations in return for allowing access to the Russian oligarchs.

Two of Putin’s priorities are the lifting of US sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Flynn was discussing that in his secret conversations with the Russian ambassador, it is alleged.

Another Putin priority was that the US should not provide lethal weapons to Ukraine’s military for use against Russian forces. Last year both Republican’s and Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly voted to supply such weapons to Ukraine and probably would have if another Republican candidate had become president or even Clinton.

Manafort, during his time as Trump adviser, is credited with watering down the Republican’s support for Ukraine and eliminating from party policy the provision about lethal weapons. All in all? A magnificent triumph for Putin.

Many in Ukraine have been fearful that Trump, who during the presidential election campaign repeatedly praised the Russian dictator, will ditch crucial US support for Ukraine in return for improved relations with Moscow.

Within hours of Trump and Putin talking last Saturday fighting intensified in the eastern Ukrainian Donbas confrontation zone, where Ukrainian troops face pro-Moscow separatists armed and backed by Russian regulars, to its worst since 2015. At least a dozen soldiers have been killed on each side and many more, including civilians, wounded.

The epicenter of the fighting is around the Ukrainian government-held town of Avdiyivka, a few miles from the rebel capital of Donetsk. Intense artillery and missile attacks by the separatists have knocked out electricity and water supplies. Thousands of civilians, left without heat in freezing conditions and rapidly running out of food, face evacuation.

Predictably the Russians blame Ukrainians for the increased fighting. If only Ukrainians did not defend their nation but rolled over and surrendered to Russia there would not be any fighting. Quite right. Bad obstinate Ukrainians!

The likeliest explanation is that Putin is testing how far he can ramp up the conflict in Donbas without triggering US criticism.

Possibly he has misunderstood the affectionate signals from Trump and believes he already has Washington’s tacit blessing to do what he likes in Russia’s “backyard”. Or – the nastiest explanation – he really has received some back-channel assurance from Trump that America will no longer impede Putin’s ambitions to revive a new Russian empire.

If Trump had explicitly warned Moscow against intensifying the conflict in Ukraine that almost certainly would have prevented this escalation of the violence, as Putin wouldn’t want to snuff out a promising relationship just as it was beginning.

Trump wouldn’t even have had to introduce a brittle tone by warning Putin off directly during their telephone chat. He could have sent the message confidentially through diplomatic channels. But it doesn’t look like he did do that.

Failing to warn Putin that aggressive actions would harm attempts to improve relations between the US and Russia continues the pattern of Trump’s fond posture towards the Russian dictator throughout the presidential election campaign. It conforms with Trump’s repeated public praise of Putin; shrugging off Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and war crimes in Syria.

Trump has encouraged Putin by mooting he might accept Russia’s armed annexation of Crimea and is considering lifting the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin for shattering long-embedded international rules forbidding border changes by invasion and slaughter.

While American intelligence agencies concluded that Russian security services tried to influence the US elections, Trump has dismissed the overwhelming evidence and instead stridently defended Putin. He even compared CIA methods to those used by there Nazis.

Trump accused two senators from his own Republican party, who are outspokenly critical of Putin, of wanting to start World War Three.

So it’s only natural that Putin assumes Trump is on his side. The new American president has already handed Putin a great propaganda triumph. The sub-text message the Kremlin is spreading to the Russians and other suckers is that Putin’s all-seeing, strategic genius indeed was in full play during the US elections and the world is changing in his favor.

Trump has remained silent about the escalation of the conflict. That further bolsters Putin’s belief that Trump will fall in with Moscow’s distorted, alternate reality, portrayal of the conflict. Particularly that it’s all Ukraine’s fault and that Russia did not create the “separatists” trying to dismember Ukraine and is not propping them up with its regular forces.

The fact that the US has not firmly pinned the blame for the current increased killing where it belongs – on Putin – augurs ill. I’m not sure whether the State Department has already been reduced to mumbling lame statements about “all sides should refrain from…” but no wonder that Ukrainians are scared that Trump is about to sell their country down the Volga.

Trump seemingly would justify discarding Ukraine to its fate in Moscow’s “sphere of influence” as a “great” deal that would ally Russia to America in a war on ISIS. But if Russia really wanted to make war on ISIS instead of bombing women and children in Syria, it could have been doing that already without being anyone’s ally. However, it hasn’t.

So if Trump’s motive for buddying up to Putin isn’t to gain Russia’s alliance in a “war on terror” what is it?

One motive that has always driven Trump is greed. And a clue to his infatuation with Putin could be the boast of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, last year that Russian “investors” were “pouring” money into Trump’s businesses.

This is one of the allegations that US intelligence agencies are quietly continuing to pursue about their president’s opaque dealings in Russia.

This week Trump seemed to heap more insult on US intelligence agencies with an executive order lifting some sanctions on Russia’s FSB secret police to do with their acquiring internet technology.

At the Kremlin and the Lubyanka they must be laughing loudly. But perhaps this latest insult will cause the CIA and others to approach exploring Trump’s past with added relish.