A top Kremlin aide took time this week to slyly poke at Donald Trump, his domestic political foes, and instances of Russian interference in U.S. elections.
In an interview with Russian newspaper Kommersant, Putin aide and former Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev warned Trump about the “obligations” that come with his election.
The interview was supposedly about Russia’s status as an “oceanic” power. But in the first question, the reporter asked Patrushev to offer his “evaluation” of the presidential elections.
“Does the incoming change of power in the U.S. carry any positive changes for Russia?” the reporter asked.
“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev replied. “And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”
Patrushev is known for being a relative hardliner in Putin’s circle. Like the Russian leader, he’s a former KGB agent from Leningrad. Putin reportedly called him his “good comrade” before ascending to the Russian presidency in 1999, but demoted him last summer to the position of aide in charge of shipbuilding.
Throughout, Patrushev has chimed in to the media with bizarre statements. In 2021, he accused western elites of using the “hypocritical slogans of the fight for equality” to mask their real goal: “legalizing marriage with animals” and labeling mothers and fathers “parent number one and two.”
Patrushev stayed closer to Earth in the Monday interview with Kommersant. After the remark about Trump’s obligations, he added that the President-elect had persuaded voters to go “against the destructive external and internal policies that the current U.S. administration was conducting.”
“But the political campaign has concluded, and in January 2025 the time for concrete acts of the president-elect will come,” Patrushev said. “It’s known that campaign promises in the U.S. often can diverge from the actions that result.”
It’s a different kind of trolling that plays on a bizarre meta-irony. Patrushev knows how making these remarks in the interview neither proves nor suggests anything about supposed Russian collusion; rather, it’s a kind of trolling that relies on the irony of everyone knowing the history of Russian interference in U.S. elections and the scandal it provoked around Trump.
The next section of the interview reads more like a script than it does a conversation. The reporter took Patrushev’s response as an opportunity to observe that “many are in doubt about [Trump]’s security,” largely because of the “influence and pressure” that the “deep state” have brought to bear on him.
That teed up a nice, gray area for Patrushev to dive into: “You have touched on the real question,” he pronounced, before referencing the two attempted assassinations against Trump during the campaign.
Patrushev then ran through the history of assassination attempts against U.S. presidents and candidates: it’s happened “more than 20 times,” he said, with four Presidents having been killed by assassins.
“So it is extremely important for the U.S. special services not to allow a repeat of similar cases,” he remarked.
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