What I Told the Baltics about Donald Trump

A speech in Turku on what Finland already knows about Russia — and what Americans still won't say out loud.

The Aurajoki River and Turku Cathedral in Turku, Finland. Courtesy: Unsplash.

First, apologies for my absence from these pages. I just returned from Turku, Finland, where I gave a speech at the University of Turku’s Centrum Balticum conference.

Turku may be unfamiliar to many readers, but, for me, its proximity to Russia, less than 200 miles away, reframed the conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West. Like Minneapolis-St. Paul or Dallas-Fort Worth, Turku and St. Petersburg are — or were — “twin cities” or “sister cities,” one of the older such relationships between Russian and Western municipalities. When Vladimir Putin served as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg from 1991 to 1996, he was personally responsible for foreign business ties, including the Turku-St. Petersburg twin-city relationship. But that amity ended abruptly in 2022 when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine transformed Russia into a profound existential threat.

In fact, Finland had long been aware of how menacing Russia could be. Indeed, the brutal Winter War of 1939 when 450,000 Soviet troops, accompanied by thousands of tanks and aircraft, attacked the 835-mile border they shared with Finland, was a defining moment in Finland’s history. In the end, tiny Finland (its population then was just 3.7 million people) held off a great power and the war became a foundational part of contemporary Finland’s identity.

As a new Finnish friend told me, if you only learn one word in Finnish, it should be sisu, which means guts, grit, determination, and resiliency in the face of extreme challenges, such as its resistance against the Soviets.

In that context, I was honored to be one of a handful of Americans invited to speak last week at a two-day conference put on by the University of Turku’s Centrum Balticum and attended by dozens of intelligence officers, diplomats, and cabinet officials from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and elsewhere to discuss intelligence, national security, hybrid warfare, and the coalescence of Europe as a more powerful geopolitical force.

For its part, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Finland remained scrupulously neutral for decades. Indeed, it was not until Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 that Finnish public support for NATO suddenly tripled to more than seventy-five percent. After applying for membership in May 2022, Finland was admitted in April 2023 — eleven months from application to flag-raising, the fastest accession in modern NATO history.

But the ink was barely dry when it became clear that the alliance’s most powerful member, the United States, had gone over to the dark side.

Think about that for a moment. Nearly 80 years ago, the Western Alliance, fueled by the Marshall Plan and NATO, assembled one of the most successful political, economic, and military coalitions in history—one that deterred Soviet aggression without firing a shot, that prevented the ascent of another Hitler, that built powerful democratic institutions, strong market economies, enormously successful trade partnerships, and a formidable military alliance.

Not to mention Paris, London, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, and dozens of other cities that have played outsized roles in shaping European art, music, literature, and ideas. (Of course, for a man of Trump‘s discerning tastes, such cultural glories can’t hold a candle next to UFC cage fights, his monstrous Arc de Trump, and his $1 billion ballroom.)

So as I saw it, the elephant in the room was that now that all the Baltic Rim countries (except Russia, of course) are finally in NATO, they have to contend with the reality that its most powerful partner, the United States, was completely unreliable.

As an American, I decided it was my painful duty to tell them how that came to be.

This is what I said:

Remarks as prepared for delivery. Baltic Sea Region Forum, Centrum Balticum, University of Turku — May 5, 2026:

I want to begin not with the events of the day, but with something that happened nearly forty years ago. On September 2, 1987, a New York real estate developer spent $95,000 to run a full-page ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

The headline read:

“There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The text complained about America’s allies and asked why they weren’t paying for their own defense. It demanded that the United States tax these wealthy nations. It ended: “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.”

The ad tells you everything you need to know about Donald Trump’s foreign policy forty years ago — and as it exists today. The language is almost word for word what he says now about NATO. The grievances are identical. In effect, Trump was taking the policies that were the basis for the astonishing ascent of the West after World War II — and throwing them out the window.

But there’s more. When Trump placed the ad in 1987, he had just returned from the Soviet Union — on a trip arranged by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency widely known to be a KGB front. He had gone to Moscow because Soviet diplomats had appealed to his vanity, dangling the prospect of a Trump Tower in Moscow in front of him. Trump’s room was almost certainly bugged; the guides, drivers, and hotel staff he met were either KGB operatives or informants who filed reports on the foreigners they handled.

And when he returned to New York, Trump abruptly transformed himself from a roguish playboy to a self-proclaimed expert on foreign policy who dipped his toe in presidential water with an abortive run in the 1988 Republican primaries that has been long forgotten.

Then, just after the ad ran, something astonishing happened that very few people know about.

I learned about it from Yuri Shvets — a source for my book American Kompromat, who, in the 1980s, was a major in the KGB. That September, Yuri was at the KGB’s foreign intelligence headquarters when a cable came across his desk. According to Yuri, the Active Measures Directorate saw Trump’s ad as a great success in helping the KGB drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies.

It was a big deal, Yuri told me. They had succeeded in getting three major American newspapers to publish KGB talking points.

Now I’m going to say something that may be obvious to many of you but is still taboo in the United States: Donald Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence.

Let me be precise about what I mean. When I say Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence, I do not mean he is an agent. Agents are knowingly employed; they get paychecks; they can be tasked. What I mean is that Russia has built a relationship with Trump in which his interests have become aligned with Russia’s. He doesn’t need orders. He acts in ways that serve Russia because serving Russia serves him. You do not control an asset through coercion alone. You align his interests with yours. And when they align, he serves you freely — even enthusiastically.

I wrote about this in two books, House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat, which show, step by step, how the Russian Mafia and the KGB won him over.

Here’s how it happened:

Russia’s cultivation of Trump began years before they sent him to Moscow. Trump has never been the successful businessman he’s been made out to be. He was a man of spectacular ambition and equally spectacular debt. At one point, he carried $4 billion in debt. He filed for bankruptcy six times. American banks stopped lending to him.

He needed money from somewhere. And again and again, he got it from the Russians.

In 1984, a Russian mobster named David Bogatin walked into Trump Tower, met with Trump, and put down $6 million in cash for five condos. Bogatin had direct ties to Semion Mogilevich — the man the FBI called the “Brainy Don” of the Russian mob. According to the New York State Attorney General at the time, the Russian Mafia had just laundered millions of dollars through Trump real estate.

Bogatin wasn’t alone. Over the next thirty years, Trump sold more than a thousand luxury condominiums to Russians, who laundered more than $1.5 billion through Trump real estate.

Trump Tower in New York became a key hub. Among its residents: Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the most feared Russian mob bosses in the world, ran his criminal enterprise from Trump Tower for years. In all, I found at least thirteen people who were allegedly part of the Russian Mafia or Putin’s oligarchy who owned, lived in, or ran criminal enterprises out of Trump Tower.

When you understand that the Russian Mafia is effectively an arm of Russian intelligence, you can appreciate what a catastrophic breach of security this represents: the president of the United States has hosted Russian operatives for decades, at the building that was long his primary residence and the crown jewel of his empire.

From the moment Trump took office in 2017, his foreign policy diverged from American interests in ways that consistently benefited Putin. At the 2018 Helsinki summit, he sided with Putin over his own intelligence agencies on whether Russia had attacked our election. Again and again, he pushed to readmit Russia to the G7 — the group from which Russia had been expelled in 2014, when it was still the G8, for invading and annexing Crimea.

Taken alone, such overtures might be dismissed as idiosyncrasies. But together, they form a pattern.

Trump’s second term has removed any remaining doubts. He has dismantled the institutional architecture of American democracy — the independence of Congress and our judiciary, the accountability provided by our inspector general system — as he has assaulted freedom of the press. He has repeatedly undermined support for Ukraine in ways that have benefited Russia. He has echoed Russian disinformation — calling Zelensky a “dictator” and questioning the legitimacy of Ukraine’s government. And he has threatened to pull the United States out of NATO entirely.

For Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and the other nations on Russia’s borders — you understand better than anyone what it means when NATO’s Article 5 guarantee becomes conditional.

Consider the moment that changed every deterrence calculation in this region. When Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in 2019, planners in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius watched the United States switch off deterrence for domestic political reasons. The answer to whether that could be done was yes. They have factored it into every calculation since.

The sixty-five kilometers of Polish-Lithuanian border between Kaliningrad and Belarus — the Suwałki Corridor — now have to be defended on the assumption that the largest member of the alliance may not show up.

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Suwałki Corridor is a narrow piece of geography whose closure would be felt instantly across an entire alliance as it would allow Russia to cut off the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) from their NATO allies by land.

So when Finland joined NATO in 2023, it entered an alliance whose largest member might, at any moment, treat Article 5 as conditional. As an American, I hate to say it, but the United States has become the unreliable partner.

Finally, there’s the immense corruption. Trump has essentially turned the White House into a criminal enterprise. Just before his second inauguration, Trump launched a personal meme coin with his name on it, and then hosted a private dinner for its largest holders — a naked pay-for-access scheme. There’s also the case of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, which pays family entities hundreds of millions of dollars in fees — thanks, in part, to a $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi.

There are too many other scams to itemize in my remaining time, but Trump has reportedly made roughly $5 billion in 2025 alone.

This is what a kleptocracy looks like — a mafia state in which the line between the president’s interests and the nation’s interests has been deliberately erased. Most of you in this room recognize the model. You have lived next to it your whole lives.

So what about the future? The ugly truth is that seventy-seven million Americans voted for a man who wants to destroy the Western alliance, who used violence to try to overthrow one of our own elections, who is a Russian intelligence asset, and who has elevated corruption to unimaginable levels.

I’m a reporter, and in my judgment, after fifty years of reporting, the most important story of our era is that the President of the United States is an asset of Russian intelligence. That the United States allowed it to take place is perhaps the greatest counterintelligence failure in American history.

Some of Trump’s ties to Russia have been reported in books and in front-page investigations. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report called the relationship between Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik “a grave counterintelligence threat.”⁸ But the overarching story — that Trump’s actions, knowingly or not, serve Russia’s strategic objectives — has not been fully reported in mainstream newspapers or network newscasts. It is not part of the American conversation, except when Trump refers to it as the Russia Hoax.

It remains taboo.

When I started in journalism, one big story — the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the My Lai Massacre — could change the course of history. But today the media have been fragmented and atomized. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has become America’s Pravda. The legacy media — the New York Times, the television networks — are too slow, too cautious, too invested in the appearance of balance to tell the story plainly. And social media has been polluted by disinformation and Russian bots, dividing the country into millions of insulated silos.

Putin has spent two decades turning Russia into a country where facts could be rewritten on command. Over the last ten years, with Russia’s help, Trump has done something similar in the United States. America has nearly 350 million people, but they do not share the same factual reality. As an American, I can’t tell you how deeply disturbing that is.

The upcoming midterm elections in America represent a real chance for course correction in November, and polls suggest the American public is finally waking up. With that in mind, I offer a couple of final observations.

First: Do not wait for the United States to save you. As an American, I hate to say it, but one hard lesson of the Trump era is that American security guarantees are no longer reliable. European and Baltic defense must be built on foundations that do not depend on the occupant of the White House.

Second: As you well know (and as Americans don’t), hybrid warfare today is about more than bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground. It is also about information and disinformation. The hardest part, for those of us who have spent our lives in journalism, is admitting that Putin and Trump have succeeded because the United States made it easy. Finnish schoolchildren are taught to spot a manipulated image, trace a source, and recognize propaganda. Too many American adults are unable to differentiate real reporting from disinformation, or foreign influence operations from ordinary political speech. That media illiteracy is the soil in which Trumpism grew.

In 1939, Finland faced the Red Army alone. Today the threat is subtler, more diffuse, waged through money and information and political manipulation. But it is the same adversary, with the same contempt for the sovereignty of its neighbors.

The difference is that this time we have something to learn from you. In this war, it is Finland — and the institutions you have built alongside your neighbors — that have something to teach the rest of us. We would be wise to listen.

Thank you.

Notes

1. Yuri Shvets’s account of the KGB cable on the September 2, 1987 ad is in my book American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (Dutton, 2021). Trump’s 1987 Moscow trip and the timing of the ad and his first presidential foray are documented in the same volume and in House of Trump, House of Putin (Dutton, 2018).

2. The 1984 Bogatin transaction is documented in Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (1992), and synthesized with later reporting in House of Trump, House of Putin. Bogatin pleaded guilty in 1987 to a $1 billion gas-tax fraud and forfeited the Trump Tower units after they were ruled to have been used to launder criminal proceeds.

3. The cash-and-shell-company figure (more than 1,300 condos worth roughly $1.5 billion across Trump-branded properties) is from BuzzFeed News’s investigation by Anthony Cormier, Tanya Kozyreva, John Templon, and others, “Secret Money,” January 2018. Specific Russian-buyer documentation in Trump’s Florida buildings ($98.4M across 63 buyers) is from Reuters, “Russian Elite Invested Nearly $100 Million in Trump Buildings,” Nathan Layne, Ned Parker, Stephen Grey, Ryan McNeill and Janet Roberts, March 2017. Synthesis with additional reporting in Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin.

4. The roster of thirteen alleged Russian Mafia or oligarchy-linked figures who owned, lived in, or operated out of Trump Tower — including Vyacheslav Ivankov — is detailed in Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin, chapters 5–7. Ivankov’s residency and FBI manhunt while based at Trump Tower in the mid-1990s are also covered in Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America (1999).

5. On the May 22, 2025 dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, for the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP meme coin: CNN, “Inside the room at Trump’s meme coin dinner” (May 23, 2025); CNBC, “At Trump’s $148 million meme coin dinner…” (May 23, 2025). Attendees collectively spent roughly $148 million on the token to qualify; the top 25 received an additional VIP reception with the president.

6. On the $2 billion Abu Dhabi investment: MGX, an Abu Dhabi state-backed firm, used World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin to settle a $2 billion investment in Binance, generating ongoing yield for the Trump family. See Bloomberg, “Trump-Tied Stablecoin Used for MGX’s $2 Billion Binance Deal” (May 1, 2025); ABC News, “Trump family crypto venture tapped as part of $2B Emirati-backed investment deal”. Senate Banking Committee Democrats requested records on the deal in a May 2025 letter from Senators Warren and Merkley.

7. Estimates of Trump family 2025 income vary by source and method. A U.S. House Judiciary Committee Democrats report estimated more than $800 million in family crypto sales income in the first half of 2025 alone, with total Trump family crypto holdings valued at approximately $11.6 billion. Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure listed $57.7 million in income from World Liberty Financial; CBS News reported a “$5 billion” boost to Trump family wealth from WLFI tokens. Forbes has tracked the running totals.

8. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities” (August 2020). The committee identified Konstantin Kilimnik as a Russian intelligence officer and characterized Paul Manafort’s relationship with him as a “grave counterintelligence threat.”