Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 economic summit.
Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 economic summit. Morris MacMatzen / Getty

There are two fascinating developments in mainstream in US politics today. On one side, you have a GOP that's becoming more and more treasonous, as it refuses to do anything about Trump, about the fact that he is clearly owned by the Russians, and, as a consequence, is at odds with many of the country's deepest military allies and its geopolitical positions. Vladimir Putin is well aware of this state of things, which is why the story of his undisclosed and unreported hour-long second meeting with Trump is blowing up on Twitter and mainstream media. It was meant to do exactly that.

Putin is not stupid. He is a professional spy. While Trump was ripping off contractors, he was gathering and analyzing information in Germany for the KGB. Putin knows that the GOP will do nothing about this secret meeting, and wants Americans to see this inaction, to see that our second major political party would rather rot the core of what the late singer of Broadcast, ‎Trish Keenan, described almost luridly in "America's Boy," as "Yankee power," than let go of Trump.

This strategy also has the advantage of immobilizing the GOP's main opponent, the Dems. Instead of providing a clear political direction away from Putin and his puppet, and dismissing the Russian story in the way Bernie Sanders dismissed the email story ("American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails") during a presidential debate, the Democratic Party, which is controlled by centrists, is simply sitting and waiting for a bunch of white American voters on the other side of the aisle to abandoned their party and crossover. (Joe Scarborough is seen as having taken steps in just that direction.)

The Dems are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Americans to finally see that they are, in fact, not socialists or Godless or unAmerican. They are more American than the GOP. They are more patriotic than the GOP. They killed Osama bin Laden. And so on. But this is a huge misreading of the situation. The developments in the GOP have nothing to do with patriotism. Many of the white Americans who vote for the GOP do so, and will continue doing so, because it is the white party. This has zilch to do with believing in democracy or the constitution or liberty. It's about being white and staying in power.

As long as the Dems are run by centrists, they will continue to wait and hope to exploit GOP's lack of patriotism and moral collapse. This why many Americans see them as the party that's against Trump.



But Trump's votes will never appear. He is not losing support. Indeed, he may even be hardening the base, to the horror of some GOP intellectuals. What all of this means is that Putin has a lock on both major parties.