Trump & Russia

A Dystopian Fiction Becomes America's Reality

In 1998 American spy novelist Charles McCarry published Lucky Bastard, the unlikely story of an ambitious kid from working-class Ohio who, firmly convinced he was JFK’s love child, rose to be president thanks to a conniving wife and the KGB.

At the time, this fictional hero seemed barely plausible. John Fitzgerald Adams was a far-fetched character from a sauced-up roman à clef inspired by wild-eyed Republican conspiracy theories about the Clintons.

Today the shoe is on the other foot.

Harry Potter-era fiction is now Trump-era reality.

In McCarry’s story, Moscow Centre grasped how Vietnam, Nixon and inflation were a golden opportunity for them. With America at loggerheads with itself, a lecherous, crowd-pleasing narcissist could become a credible candidate for president. The KGB’s hydra-headed influence networks would ensure he went all the way.

For Soviet intelligence, this work was like their campaign to turn Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who had accompanied FDR to Yalta in 1945 and was later accused of espionage, into a political martyr.

A presidential bid was obviously a bigger nut to crack. It would test the operational limits of Moscow’s ‘Chekists’ – as the first Bolshevik secret police were dubbed. But Moscow’s spy chiefs had never hesitated to dream big.

As Jack’s handler Dmitri told his superior, a KGB lieutenant-general named Pyotr, ''The same people who beatified Alger will discover and love Jack – the Jack we are going to design for them. They will invest every kopeck of their moral and political capital in him as soon as they hear him speak in parables. To them, Jack's weaknesses will be strengths, his lies truths, his crimes miracles.''

Has there ever been a better summary of Trump’s appeal?

(Trump and Ivana Trump in St. Petersburg in July 1987 TASS/Getty Images)

His long entanglement with Russia began a decade after the US left Saigon. Trump first visited the USSR in 1987 with his first wife Ivana. He returned in 1996. When McCarry’s book came out, Trump had just met Melania Knauss; they married in 2006 — the year Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka first went to Moscow. Trump returned in 2007 and wrote Putin to proclaim “I am a big fan of yours!”