title:  It Sure Looks Like Donald Trump Would Be Putin’s Puppet If He Is Elected President
text: The Republican Party has been wishing that America would be more like Russia in recent years and they may very well get their wish with Donald Trump.As it turns out, Donald Trump is connected on many levels with Russian dictator Vladamir Putin, the most alarming of which are the financial connections that are keeping him afloat as his liquid assets decrease and his debt continues to rise into the hundreds of millions of dollars.According to Bloomberg, while Trump brags about being a billionaire, he still has major debts that he owes:Trump s debt almost doubled, to an estimated $630 million from $350 million, as he drew down on a $170 million line of credit from Deutsche Bank AG for a hotel project in Washington At the same time, Trump s liquid assets shrank to about $170 million from $225 million, based on the high end of value ranges for those assets listed in his financial disclosure form.And because US banks are smart enough to deny Trump any loans, the Republican nominee has had to rely of outside support for capital, and that has mostly come from wealthy Russians who are close to Putin.The Washington Post reports:Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,  Trump s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication.  We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia. Indeed, Trump has been desperate to build a Trump Tower in Moscow for over 30 years now and if he is able to become president and do some favors for Russia and Putin he would get closer to achieving his business goal.In fact, even some of Trump s top advisers have close ties to Russia.Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort  has done multimillion-dollar business deals with pro-Russian oligarchs  and worked for recently ousted Putin-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych s downfall sparked the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine in which they seized the Crimean Peninsula.Two of Trump s advisers, Carter Page and Michael Caputo, worked with Gazprom, which is the government-controlled natural gas corporation. As Talking Points Memo described it,  imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. And there s Trump s foreign policy adviser former General Michael Flynn. He cozied up to Putin at a dinner in Moscow in 2015.With all of that being said, Trump s foreign policy ideas would strongly favor Russia at a time when Putin has never been more dangerous, especially to Europe.Not only has Trump been talking about fundamentally weakening NATO by pulling US support, which would give Russia an opportunity to flex its military muscles to take over some Eastern European countries, Page suggested earlier this year that Trump could lift economic sanctions placed on Russia since 2014, which would help some of his Russian business buddies. And in what has clearly been under-reported on by the media, Trump and his team successfully strong-armed the GOP into ditching the party platform condemning Russia s aggression toward Ukraine the GOP s support of assisting Ukraine against Putin.And Trump has been rewarded handsomely for this treachery as Putin has directed Russian state media to blare out support for Trump s campaign. Russian hackers also hacked into the DNC to give Trump information to use against the Democrats.In short, Trump would be nothing more than a puppet of Vladamir Putin should he be placed in the White House. It would the first time in American history that the leader of the free world is controlled, especially by a Russian ruler who disregards human rights and subverts democracy. Ronald Reagan would be spinning in his grave. What was the point of the Cold War if the United States is just going to become a Russian satellite state anyway?If Republicans think that President Obama is similar to former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, they haven t seen nothing yet. Because at least Chamberlain wasn t Hitler s puppet.Featured image via YouTube