My Take | Is Donald Trump the real-life Manchurian candidate?

People often confuse the monster with Dr Frankenstein, his creator, from Mary Shelley’s gothic novel. Many have now taken to calling Donald Trump “the Manchurian candidate”, after the classic 1960s Cold War movie based on the novel of the same name by Richard Condon. That’s wrong. I will ignore, in the following, the more recent and forgettable Hollywood remake.

The original Manchurian candidate was the victim. He was brainwashed under a psychological warfare programme jointly run by Soviet Russians and Chinese communists to become their unwitting agent and assassin. In fact, the word “brainwash” was then new in the English language, a literal translation of the Chinese phrase.

Rather – spoiler alert – the candidate’s mother was the real villain. Conservative and anti-communist, narcissistic and incestuous, she was ready to use her son to achieve her political ambitions at the expense of her country, thus presenting a clear and present danger to America and the whole world. Does that sound familiar?

A quick search combining “Trump” and “Manchurian candidate” on Microsoft Bing yielded 350,000 results. But please, in the interest of literary and cinematic accuracy, stop calling him that because Trump is really not the candidate, but more like his mother.

Almost overnight, Washington under Trump has turned against its post-war Western allies, threatened to end Nato, halted aid to Ukraine and publicly humiliated its leader, adopted the Russian version of the cause of the war, stopped the Pentagon from operating psy and cyber ops against Russia, and started talks to end US sanctions and to relaunch Nord Stream pipelines moving natural gas between Russia and Europe.

Whether Trump is a card-carrying Russian agent, an asset or merely a useful idiot is immaterial. The end result is that he is threatening to end the whole transatlantic alliance that has roughly defined what we call “the West” since 1945, and potentially realigning the United States with Russia. This may not be as shocking as many people seem to think.

Let’s not forget that the two countries were allies during the second world war. And shortly after their historic rapprochement with Mao’s China, Henry Kissinger told Richard Nixon that in the decades ahead, the US might have to realign with Russia to balance geopolitical power against a resurgent China. Now I am not criticising or applauding any of these developments, but merely observing with a great deal of trepidation and also some amusement.