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Comment by apercu | Hacker News Reader

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Is there any evidence towards this allegiance? Why should we attribute to malice what we could attribute to incompetence, or greed?

One piece of evidence would be that Russia, Belarus and North Korea have been specifically excluded from US tariffs. You could argue that the net effect is negligible since we don't import a lot from those countries, but the signal being sent to long term allies is devastating to America's future relations with them.

Uninhabited islands made the tariff list, but those countries somehow managed to slip through.

The US has trade sanctions with those countries.

The US has trade sanctions on Iran too, and Iran is on the tariff list. I don't think that's it. Some transparency would be helpful.

Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.

I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.

I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.

Yes, there is a LOT of evidence of this allegiance, although maybe just observing Trump's unwillingness to openly criticize Russia and Putin is highly suspect by itself.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associat...

And those "mishandled classified documents"? They were all about Russian interference in elections.

We never got them back but I'm sure Vlad liked his birthday present

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...

Your eyes and ears for the last 9 years?

If you're going with the great conspiracy of GOP as Russian assets, you should also add Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons as Russian assets as well.

Whether or not Musk is a Russian asset, it seems like the more immediate issue with him are the many conflicts of interest.

Agreed. We should examine all government contracts for conflicts of interest

Edit: only Elon's contracts

Some witting, some not. I am not convinced all of DOGE are actual Russian assets. That would be too conspiratorial.

But that they’re all compromised? That’s much more likely. We know for a fact that at least a couple are pwned.

In a lot of cases it's just simple conflict of interests.

To be clear, I meant literally compromised. As in, their machines are pwned. The whistleblower indication of Russian IPs logging in immediately after creation of usernames/passwords is a clear indication of that.

And/or these 19 year olds are selling data to their Russian (and Chinese, and Saudi) handlers.

Musk seems to just have "small dick energy", or in proper words, a very fragile ego. And he seems to hate the "woke left" for "poisoning" one of his kids' minds that came out as trans. And like a 12 year old, his ego told him that anything the left is for, he'll be against...

No argument there!

Is there something about Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons being russian assets as well that makes the whole notion stupid on its face? I can't tell what your point is. Are you being dismissive or do you just want to remind people about the tech robber barons as well?

What is your explanation for Trump putting tariffs on every country in the world except Russia?

Russia is already under sanctions and has no significant trade with the U.S. — same as North Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-cuba-north-korea-escape...

The US imported 3.5 billion dollars of goods from Russia in 2024, and exported 500 million dollars of goods.

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia...

So under your logic, Trump is also controlled by Cuba? How does that work exactly?

https://translatingcuba.com/the-cuban-regime-celebrates-that...

It's not true that he excluded only Russia. North Korea and Cuba also are not in the list, clearly countries that are under heavy US sanctions.

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