In one of the most controversial segments ever aired on Fox News, the billionaire Treasury Secretary said this week that the inflation Americans are experiencing is Ukraine's fault — because, in response to Putin's regime daily killing Ukrainian civilians (a war crime), Zelenskyy has been striking Russia's energy assets.

Is this stupidity? Hypocrisy? Something darker still? The claim inverts the timeline that most economists have traced for the post-2021 price surge — a period that began with pandemic-era supply shocks and Russia's own full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which drove up global energy and food costs well before Kyiv began striking Russian refineries.

That same morning, the Financial Times revealed that for the past three years Russia has been helping Iran build a supersonic cruise missile capable of sinking American ships. At an Iran-Russia-China summit in Bishkek attended by Iran's president, Putin, and Xi, Putin said he will continue supplying Iran with "the necessary goods" — goods that can be used to kill Americans. It is the latest marker of the deepening military alignment among the three powers since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine left it dependent on Iranian drones and North Korean munitions, relationships that now run in both directions.

Europe's policy chief stated publicly that Russia gave Iran the satellite intelligence needed to target, kill, and maim American troops while destroying billions of dollars' worth of U.S. military infrastructure in the region. A senior official confirmed to CBS that Moscow was doing exactly that. In just the first 40 days, official numbers show 13 Americans killed and 380 wounded by Iran.

Despite all this, Trump invited Russia's finance minister to a G20 meeting that was supposed to focus on punishing countries aiding Iran. Asked about it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio waved the question off as irrelevant, saying Putin has his own set of problems.

Consider the pattern: the Treasury Secretary scolded Ukraine for fighting back against naked, murderous Russian aggression; the Secretary of State shrugged off Iran and Russia working together against American troops; and Trump issued a new threat against America's closest neighbor and ally, Canada.

If Putin had gathered Trump, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bessent, Rubio, and Stephen Miller in a room and ordered them to hurt and weaken the United States, what would they have done differently? Of course, it was Trump himself who gave the orders and created the environment for all of it. And the motivation may be even more troubling than the simple treachery this Manchurian Candidate scenario suggests.

The war and the weapons

Start with the war. Ignoring the Constitution's requirement that only Congress can declare war — a separation-of-powers rule Congress itself has largely let erode since 1945, the last time it formally declared one — Trump has now bombed at least eight countries, most recently Iran — burning through air defenses that could have defended Europe (including Ukraine) against Russia, or Taiwan against China.

The Patriot interceptor inventory has collapsed from 2,330 before the war to somewhere between 759 and 827 today, a drop of at least 65 percent, and the military has expended nearly four-fifths of its THAAD inventory. Rebuilding those stocks will take years — Patriots and THAAD interceptors are among the most complex munitions in the U.S. arsenal, with production lines that expand slowly even under wartime funding — leaving the country badly weakened on the world stage in the meantime.

Russia knows the Patriot is essentially the only weapon capable of intercepting the ballistic missiles it launches at Kyiv every night — and Trump has refused to provide new ones to Ukraine for over a year and a half. Moscow, meanwhile, has kicked its own missile production into high gear to exploit the shortage. Russian ballistic missile strikes on Ukraine rose from 61 in April to 198 in July, with an even steeper increase across August.

In other words, the war Trump chose to join against Iran — in violation of U.S. law and the Constitution — is directly helping Putin kill children in Ukraine and assists Iran in striking American troops in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a humiliated South Korean President Lee had to go on television and admit to his country that he could not stop Trump from pulling THAAD components and Patriot batteries out of South Korea — at the same moment North Korea's dictator, a Russian and Chinese ally and Trump's "good friend" Kim Jong Un, is expanding his nuclear weapons inventory and testing ballistic missiles capable of reaching Los Angeles and San Francisco. The pullout lands in a region where roughly 28,500 U.S. troops have long been stationed as a deterrent, and where allies already track every sign of American commitment wavering.

Hegseth and the hollowed-out Pentagon

While all that happens, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is hollowing out the Pentagon from the inside in a campaign against women and Black and Hispanic officers. The Army's top civilian leader, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, resigned this week after multiple disputes with Hegseth, who had previously fired Army chief of staff General Randy George. The result: the U.S. Army has no Senate-confirmed civilian or uniformed leadership in the middle of a shooting war.

Morale has collapsed — just as Putin would want — as Hegseth has blocked another six officers from promotion, forced polygraphs on his own subordinates, and installed loyalist officers in senior slots. And when reporters at Stars and Stripes — published since 1861 and founded under Abraham Lincoln — dared to report on the hardships sailors endured aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Hegseth fired the paper's editor and publisher.

There is also, in no particular order:

— Ordering new carriers back to steam catapults on ships already under construction
— Making the future drone carrier harder to build, delaying its arrival in the fleet until 2034
— Bombing boats in the Caribbean in what legal scholars across the spectrum call criminal extrajudicial killings
— A national debt hitting $40 trillion because of Reagan's, Bush's, and Trump's tax cuts, on pace to break the World War II record by 2030
— Interest on that debt now exceeding all defense spending — money that could instead have funded healthcare and free college for two generations
— Handing roughly a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the top one percent last year while cutting Medicaid by about the same amount
— Cutting SNAP so severely that more than a million poor American children lost food benefits
— Refusing to raise the minimum wage or make unionizing easier
— Cutting the CDC's parasite surveillance staff from 11 people to three and halting surveillance for cyclospora
— Driving inspections of foreign food facilities to historic lows
— Cutting the childhood vaccine schedule from seventeen diseases to eleven while discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated
— Refusing to enforce antitrust laws
— Firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for publishing a jobs number he disliked, leaving numbers that must be corrected two months later
— Attacking America's closest allies and trading partners, Mexico and Canada, with punitive tariffs
— Withholding $1.7 billion from NIH and canceling 2,200 grants for medical research and cancer cures while Europe and Canada recruit American scientists
— Moving nearly 150 programs out of the Education Department to dismantle it, along with children's chances at a better future
— Killing Voice of America as Russian and Chinese state media move to fill the vacuum
— Weaponizing the DOJ against Trump's personal enemies
— Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR because they told the truth
— Threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that offend the president
— Hollowing out CISA, the cybersecurity agency protecting infrastructure and elections, leaving states alarmed that there is no federal election security plan for the midterms
— Pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the main defense against foreign money bribing or corrupting American officials, including the president
— Handing American media to friendly oligarchs
— Deregulating the crypto underground, which moved $104 billion to sanctioned entities in a single year — most of it Russian, Iranian, and North Korean
— Pardoning the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and others convicted of attacking police, and erasing their seditious conspiracy convictions entirely
— Sending masked, unmarked, armed federal agents into American neighborhoods
— Deploying armed National Guard troops into American cities over the objections of governors, mayors, and citizens, in violation of posse comitatus
— Labeling "anti-capitalism" and "anti-Christianity" as terrorism indicators under NSPM-7
— Destroying faith in American elections
— Standing up an FBI-IRS joint effort to harass good-government and anti-corruption nonprofits
— Capping federal student borrowing in ways that hit aspiring teachers hardest

Beyond the enormous benefit to Vladimir Putin, almost everything on that list can be used in one way or another to put money — often government money — into somebody's pocket.

The family business

At the same time, Trump's appointee at the CFTC is suing states that try to regulate futures betting markets, and Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital venture fund led a billion-dollar funding round for Polymarket, valuing the betting outfit at $21 billion. Trump Jr. himself told Republican attorneys general to back off.

Both Trump brothers now hold major stakes in drone and other defense companies that benefit from unaudited Pentagon tax dollars, and a rare-earth firm Trump Jr. invested in just received a $620 million Pentagon loan after the White House intervened to make it happen. Rare earths are central to both defense manufacturing and the U.S.-China tech competition, which is precisely what makes political intervention in who gets Pentagon backing for such ventures so consequential.

Whatever happened to the old GOP — the party that fought fascists in World War II, opposed repressive governments like those in Russia and China, and preached fiscal moderation? Between the Powell Memo, Jude Wanniski's "Two Santas" strategy, five consistently pro-Republican justices on the Supreme Court, and Trump's embrace of Putin, the author argues, it is essentially dead — leaving only loyalists, bigots, and cynical opportunists who believe the best way to win an election is to shut down polling places in Texas.

What is being witnessed, in this telling, is a government run by people philosophically — and often financially — aligned with Putin and other authoritarian leaders, who view the nation as a resource to be stripped for private gain.

The author's closing appeal: make sure everyone you know is registered to vote via vote.org, double-check registration in Republican-led states, and turn out this November to vote incumbents out while voting remains available. What to watch in the months ahead: whether Patriot deliveries to Ukraine resume, how quickly Army leadership is confirmed, and how the administration responds to state election-security concerns raised after CISA's hollowing out.

Source: Raw Story