Craig Unger: America’s new Manchurian Candidate

Craig Unger

Anyone who follows the scribblings of the Washington press corps knows all too well that journalists who probe the ties between Donald Trump and Russia are promptly dismissed by the White House as a conspiracy nuts who have been taken in by the “Russiagate hoax.”

I, of course, find that deplorable.

As I’ve chronicled in two books—House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat—I believe Donald J. Trump is the beneficiary of the greatest counterintelligence failure in history, one that allowed the Russian Federation to install an asset of Russian intelligence in the White House as president of the United States.

That’s right. Russian intelligence has its own man in the Oval Office.

My thesis is not yet widely accepted in the United States, but I’m not the only one to come to that conclusion. In one form or another, no fewer than three former CIA directors— John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden— have all said the same thing.

But if it’s true, how could that possibly have happened?

As a child in the Sixties, I was entranced by the 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate, in which a Communist plot did something similar. But that was Hollywood. In real life, how could that have happened? How could Russia have installed an intelligence asset in the Oval Office, thereby executing one of the most devastating attacks on American sovereignty in history— all. without firing a single shot.

As I show in my books, what took place was the result of a two-pronged attack involving both the KGB and the Russian Mafia.

The story began more than 45 years ago when Donald Trump was a young developer enjoying the fruits of his first success in real estate, the development of the Hyatt Grand Central Hotel in New York. Like any hotel, it needed hundreds of TV sets. One might think that a major outfit like Hyatt would buy the TV sets from a huge vendor like Sony or Samsung, but Trump bought them from a small operation called Joy Lud Electronics, which happened to be a front for the KGB.

That was the opening.

Moreover, the Soviet émigrés at Joy Lud were not the only operatives to reach out to Trump. In 1984, a man named David Bogatin, who was tied to the Russian Mafia, dropped by Trump Tower and plunked down $6 million (about $33 million in 2025 dollars) in cash for five condos in the building that was the crown jewel of Trump’s growing real estate empire.

In so doing, the Russians were effectively laundering money through Trump real estate—because they were buying luxury condos via an anonymous corporation an all-cash transactions. (It is worth noting that the Russian Mafia, which played a crucial role in cultivating Trump, far from being an enemy of the state, is actually an arm of Russia’s intelligence services.)

And so Russians began laundering hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars, through Trump real estate, in effect bailing out Donald Trump from one business disaster after another. Oligarchs and mobsters moved into Trump Tower. Before long, they owned him.

And for more than 40 years, Russian intelligence began to implement one “active measure” after another through Trump, often getting him to articulate policies that aided Russia far, far more than they did the West.

Of course, having a Russian asset in the Oval Office has already dealt a devastating blow to the Western Alliance which has provided vital support for the democratic institutions, market economies, and military alliances in the West since the end of World War II. One has only to look at America’s less-than-steadfast support of Ukraine in its battle against Russia’s invaders. All of which leads one to wonder how strong NATO really is if the United States is no longer a reliable partner.

And, finally, one has to ask whether Trump’s presidencies will mean the end of American democracy.