Putin Aide Issues Ominous Warning About Trump’s New “Obligations”

Donald Trump may have secured a second term in the White House, but his Russia problems are far from over—at least according to suspiciously phrased comments by some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies.

Speaking with Russian state media on Monday, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev noted that while the U.S. election may be over, Trump is still beholden to “certain forces.”

“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

That statement was elevated by Tass, the Russian news agency.

In a curious follow-up about Trump’s susceptibility to being pressured and influenced, Patrushev made another eyebrow-raising comment: Rather than answer the question directly, the Putin aide made a point to bring up assassination attempts against the president-elect.

“We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” Patrushev told Kommersant. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”

Trump’s history with Russia goes way back to the early days of his first campaign. In 2019, former FBI director and Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller noted that Russia had blackmail material on Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

And that relationship appears to be ongoing. On Wednesday, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that he had spoken about the unusual relationship between Trump and Putin several months ago with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

“It’s so close, it seems like it might be blackmail,” Coats said, according to Woodward.

Woodward also recounted a separate conversation he had with CIA Director Bill Burns, who reportedly emphasized that “Putin manipulates” and is “professionally trained” to do so. According to Woodward, Burns believed that Putin has “got a plan” to repeat what he did during the forty-fifth presidential administration by “playing Trump.”

Senator Tom Cotton will be gaining a lot more power in the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments.

On Monday night, The New York Times reported that Trump will appoint Senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state, allowing Cotton to move up and become chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee as Republicans take control of the Senate.

Cotton was initially reportedly in the running to be Trump’s vice president, but ultimately was passed over in favor of his Senate colleague JD Vance. If he does take over the Senate Intelligence Committee, he will bring his record of foreign policy hawkishness and support for violent solutions with him.

Before his political career began, Cotton called for American journalists to be jailed for reporting on classified information, and in the Senate, he made a name for himself by constantly calling on the United States to attack Iran.

In 2020, the Arkansas senator called for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops to crush Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Later that year, he claimed that America’s Founding Fathers saw slavery as a “necessary evil upon which the union was built.” Recently, Cotton has made headlines for again calling for the military to be used against protesters, this time against opponents of Israel’s brutal massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, which he staunchly supports.

As the Intelligence Committee chair, we can expect more sound bites like his racist badgering of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in January, where he repeatedly asked the Singaporean social media executive if he was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ignored Chew’s protests about his actual place of birth.

Cotton’s support of military force against Americans probably endears him to Trump, who has also called for military force against his domestic enemies. The Arkansas senator will also be pushing to use the full force of America’s intelligence apparatus against Americans he disagrees with. Cotton and Trump will very likely be working together to stamp out any dissent, especially if Congress grants the presidency unprecedented new powers.

House Republicans want to be in Trump’s Cabinet so badly that they—and the president-elect—are willing to leave Speaker Mike Johnson vulnerable in the next Congress.

Trump on Monday announced that New York Representative Elise Stefanik will serve as his U.N. ambassador and Florida Representative Mike Waltz will serve as his national security adviser.

With even more appointments on the way and a slim GOP majority, some Republicans have warned the president-elect’s transition team that they cannot select any more Republican representatives for Trump’s Cabinet. At least 12 other Republican House members have already been floated for Cabinet positions. Five of them are from Florida alone.

“I have 10 colleagues who think they’re going to the Cabinet,” an anonymous House GOP member told CNN. “If we’ve got a four-seat minority, you can let one or two go. But you’re not going to let three or four go.”

“I think we have some really qualified people. But I wouldn’t want to drop us down to a one, two (seat) majority tactically,” said outgoing GOP Representative Kelly Armstrong. “We have a lot of talent.… But you have to give Mike [Johnson] some room to operate.”

Trump may also dip his fingers further into Senate Republicans’ majority, as he already did with his pick of Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state.

Donald Trump has selected South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem as his next Secretary of Homeland Security, CNN reported Tuesday.

In the flurry of horrific appointments for a second Trump term, that may not seem to qualify as good news—and really it doesn’t—but this appointment isn’t as bad as it might’ve been.

Noem has her issues, to be sure. She was banned from more than 16 percent of her own state after she suggested Native American tribal leaders were catering to drug cartels. She killed her chance at being Trump’s vice presidential nominee after she bragged about executing her family’s dog. She was caught lying about meeting with foreign leaders. She also didn’t appear to know that Texas wasn’t one of the 13 original colonies, during an interview on Fox News.

Still, it could have been worse.

Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon floated another name for the gig last week: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for parroting extremist conspiracy theories, who recently suggested that Democrats had used weather manipulation to create Hurricane Helene.

One week since Election Day and roughly three months since he joined the campaign in earnest, and Elon Musk is already rubbing Donald Trump’s team the wrong way.

The world’s richest man has reportedly spent “nearly every single day” of the last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to CNN. Musk has been spotted golfing with the president-elect, dining with him and his wife, Melania, and has even been in the room while Trump phones world leaders, hopping on a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday.

And while the Tesla CEO will likely not hold a Cabinet position in the forthcoming administration due to his companies, he’s playing no small role in staffing it—something that has particularly frustrated Trump’s transition team, according to tech journalist Kara Swisher. Swisher noted that Musk’s ongoing presence at the resort has some members of Trump’s entourage viewing him as the “guest that wouldn’t leave.”

“He definitely inserts himself all the time, that’s his style,” Swisher explained about the South African billionaire to CNN on Monday. “I’ve heard from Trump people, calling me saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is odd’. And it is.”

But, as Swisher notes, that will keep happening until Trump throws him out.

Musk and his policies will be the likely benefactor of his extended stay with the president-elect, whose opinion is famously swayed by whomever he last interacted with. But, according to Swisher, the relationship between the two self-imagined strongmen is destined to flame out.

“They’re both narcissists, and there can be only one narcissist as head of the country, and that’s Donald Trump, who just won the election,” Swisher said. “You know he owes things to Elon, but at some point, you know if he takes too much of the attention—think about Steve Bannon. You remember he was on the cover of that magazine and how quickly he got out, even though he was critical to Trump’s first campaign and he was right in the middle of the White House, and then he wasn’t.

“Trump goes through people like tissues, essentially,” Swisher continued. “And even if it’s Musk, they’re going to clash at some point.”