‘Billionaires, Bagmen, and Thieves’ — My Hot Type column from January
The plot to install Trump as President was the greatest success of foreign espionage in history, and how an Orbán loss could trigger the start of global dePutinization
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“I don’t think any Democrat leader realized information warfare could help destroy an entire first world democracy, and if they did, they did nothing to prevent it. But what we saw in November 2024 — after a decade of information warfare — was an entire superpower change hands in a day, or at least change its allegiances.”—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, Hot Type
Author’s note: Reposting this column from January 24, 2026, in light of the election in Hungary. If Orbán is ousted, Russkiy mir takes a big hit.—hsc
I’ve tried for a decade to use words as blunt instruments while still remaining decent. Democracy was dying behind euphemisms and to stand staunchly in defense of truth, was civic duty, and for that, I needed an arsenal of words, with constant reinforcements.
When powerful people use lies to commit mass menticide, it’s not good enough to call out a lie — truth has to hit back stronger.
For that, I have sources all around the world, whose words help to puncture the force field of lies, giving us an opportunity each day to not get lost in reality distortion.
As I was prepping for my latest appearance on The Thom Harmann Program, to discuss my report, Ghosting In, and Ghosting Out, I reached out to my deep bench of geopolitical and disinformation analysts and mined their brains for the most concise ways to make the point that Donald Trump is just one of many leaders installed with the help of the Kremlin. I wrote up a bunch of notes to prepare for the interview, and as always, as soon as I see Thom’s sweet face, I forget everything I’d prepared to say lol.
So for this today’s Hot Type column in Byline, I took those carefully prepared notes, and worked it up into a report titled Billionaires, Bagmen, and Thieves.
Thank you as always to everyone who supports my work here and at Byline. I believe the work of independent investigative reporters exposing the transnational crime wave has revealed the failing of corporate media in stark contrast.
Below is an excerpt from January 24, 2026, Hot Type.
Billionaires, Bagmen, and Thieves
This week has shown that the plot to install Trump as President was the greatest success of foreign espionage in history, writes American political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Everyone needs to forget everything they think they know about Donald Trump and just see him as Vladimir Putin sees him. As a useful idiot that can destroy America from the inside. And Trump is just one of many useful idiots working for Kremlin interests.
As I have written many times in this column, Russia is at war with the West – not just Ukraine, but all of Western civilization. It spreads its cancer of subversion, coercion, deception — using propaganda, cyberwar, and paid influencers.
Because we failed in the West to fight back against modern warfare, criminals, felons, rapists, and thieves now lead multiple countries in alignment with the objectives of Putin, himself a criminal, and other foreign autocrats.
Trump for President was a Russian initiative, dating back to the 1980s, when Trump — upon his return from his first trip to Moscow — placed $100,000 worth of newspaper ads attacking NATO. He flirted with running for President in the decades before coming down the escalator of Trump Tower in 2015 to a crowd paid to cheer his announcement.
Step by step, the Russians deployed ancient Soviet methods to get their man into the White House.
“Putin is just another Tsar,” geopolitical analyst Dr Michael MacKay told me. “When he dies or is overthrown another dictator will emerge in Russia. But while he’s there, remember he’s a KGB man and not a military leader. That means he always practices Chekist warfare — what we loosely call ‘hybrid warfare’.
“Chekist warfare uses hidden means of domination to defeat enemies. Russians prefer to use proxies or agents of influence to rule others, rather than do it directly. Trump is one of many ‘Useful Idiots’ Russia finds and exercises reflexive control over. These ‘idiots’ genuinely believe they’re acting and speaking for their own reasons.”
Among the ways Russia’s three letter agencies wage these active measures: a spotter agent will identify a mark with bad morals, a history of sexual deviancy, very easily corrupted or blackmailed — and they turn them. In Trump’s case, the Russians bailed him out financially over and over again. Once you take money from the Russian mob, they own you.
Millions of Americans confused Trump for a patriot because he hugs the American flag and clutches a bible. But all they have to do to see that he is a Kremlin asset is to view him for what he does for Russia. Among other things, Trump has been rehabbing Putin’s image in the West.
Vladimir Putin is accused by the International Criminal Court in The Hague of being a war criminal and child trafficker. But Trump invited him on American soil, and even rolled out a red carpet, clapping like a trained seal…
So if you simply view Trump from Putin’s perspective, he’s checking every box on Putin’s wishlist. Although the GOP shared in the project, Americans hugely underestimated the power of foreign influence campaigns.
I don’t think any Democrat leader realized information warfare could help destroy an entire first world democracy, and if they did, they did nothing to prevent it. But what we saw in November 2024 — after a decade of information warfare — was an entire superpower change hands in a day, or at least change its allegiances.
As Trump sat with his cabal of billionaires, bagmen, and thieves on Thursday at a table of the organisation named, with Orwellian irony, the ‘Board of Peace’, he was right at home.
Donald Trump is just one of a cell of global leaders who work for Russia’s interests. How he got there and what he does in office is not unique, only the scale of the US project makes it seem so. The Russian initiative to install Trump as president was the greatest success of espionage in human history, and the greatest failure in American history for not preventing the project’s success.
But it is not remotely unique.
In order to illustrate this point, I created a GIF, where I morphed Trump’s face along with other leaders of Russian projects.
I wanted Americans and Europeans to see these faces side by side so they can understand how this works. This is just a short list, but an important one:
When you see them side by side, it’s easier to understand that Trump is just another one of these puppets — he’s no different than any of these other tinpots.
They dupe voters into believing they’re patriots, usually through the tough-on-immigration talk and anti-gay stance, when in fact, they should all be wearing Russian general uniforms instead of suits. And then maybe it would be clearer to the untrained eye.
Most call themselves populists, but if you examine them more closely, you will find globally connected billionaires, with a history of corruption and human rights abuses, and long ties to the Russian Federation. And notably, you won’t find them betraying Vladimir Putin.
And while allegations of kompromat trail these men, I think it’s simpler than that: Russian military intelligence through Chekist warfare tactics assisted them in their rise to power.
Although strategy and narrative warfare shifts country to country, the tactics are largely the same. Russians use referendums, malinformation campaigns, third party spoiler candidates, misogyny targeting women candidates, oligarchs funding politicians, narrative warfare driven on virtual battlefields, well-funded domestic propagandists delivering pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine narratives, while wrapped in the flag of their respective countries to obfuscate intent, poisoning democratic wells to disengage voters, actual poisonings and defenestrations of opponents of the regime, assassinations and hacking, staged shock events to derail or boost careers, and of course, proxy wars.
“What these people have in common is that even if they can’t do good for Russia they can do harm to Russia’s enemies,” said Mackay. “And that suits the transactional nature of the Russian war machine just fine.”
Countries That Fight Back
Watching countries like Ukraine, Estonia, and Romania fight back is inspiring and should be where we go for advice on next moves…
The most important piece of this, said MacKay, is that the Russians never stop until they’re stopped.
If At First You Don’t Succeed
Manafort tried to install another one of these puppets, trailed by a lengthy history of corruption, recently in Albania, and failed. So now, Albania, whose leader supports Ukraine and the EU, is suddenly erupting with protests — another Russian classic, the titushky rent-a-mob of paid trouble-makers.
“The Russians run thousands of influence campaigns to turn local leaders all over the world into Useful Idiots and if only a small number of their efforts work out, the devastation done to civil society in the world’s democracies is massive,” MacKay said.
What’s more shocking to me is that more people are not looking for Russia’s hand in the escalation of the world’s weirdness.
The Pro-Russian faction will always respond with: “US imperialism! CIA! CIA!” Just because one group is wrong, doesn’t mean the other one is right. But if you want to go there, during the Cold War, the US actually believed it was stopping Communist Totalitarianism.
“When the CIA did interfere, it didn’t bring wholesale murder, pillaging, rape, the mafia, and drugs into other nations as a strategy,” geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra told me.
I picked up another potential clue from a Nigerian reporter, who has spent the last seven years exposing Russia’s human rights abuses in West and Central Africa.
Philip Obaji Jr told me that some African leaders cut quiet deals with Russia, and in return, Russia gets access to resources and people.
I shuddered when he said this, imagining the kind of deals Trump and his crime boss-envoys have been quietly cutting with Putin, and where exactly the American people fit into these deals.
The Power of the Powerless
It made sense that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney would reference Vaćlav Havel in his rousing Davos speech. The world has seen these dictators before, ruling Communist Totalitarian countries until one day they weren’t. Until one day, they each fell, and brutal leaders like Romania’s Nicolae Ceașescu faced a firing squad.
It was men like writer and later president of then-Czechoslovakia Havel, who helped people find their way out of seemingly impossible situations into the light and courage of truth.
It will be leaders like Carney, who the world must increasingly turn to. I hope he does not let us down.
The Main Battlegrounds
America has fallen, and the UK, Canada and Europe are the main battlegrounds now. We see the Russians and now the US running the same operations against Carney, Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and the women leaders of the EU, Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen.
They are coming for them the way they came for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2024. They’ll use gig worker espionage, they’ll use shock events, sabotage, and the digital gasoline will be relentless. We see anti-EU attacks on Poland, delivered on TikTok through the use of AI created women. The full-throated attacks against Keir Starmer began right after his 2024 election, just as they accelerated against Biden in 2020, giving Trump time to build a shadow cabinet of billionaires and grifters.
The tactics will expand, but the game will be the same: they will try to encourage voters living in democracies to decide that their freedoms and human rights are offensive, and that the fascist choice on the menu — a faux populist, faux patriot, who always loves on Russia (or pretends not to) — is the better choice.
The Russians, of course, will deny any involvement. Just like they denied the mass murder of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s. Just like they denied the man-made famine of the Holodomor. Just like they deny the reality of Ukrainian independence. Just like they denied the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Just like they deny that they’re not a democracy.
Reality Distortion
It’s up to the free world to stop the acceleration of reality distortion.
It’s still my hope that world leaders with any power recognize that democracy globally is being threatened out of existence and to come together to find a way to deposit both Trump and Putin to The Hague for crimes against humanity. They can share a cell with Rodrigo Duterte from the Philippines, who is already there awaiting trial for his crimes against humanity…
The most obvious solution to all of this is the same it’s been since 2014: help Ukrainians defeat Russia.
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The above is an excerpt from Hot Type.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
With at least one "mole" already in place in the CIA, the KGB zombified the CIA and the FBI in late 1961 when it sent Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov (who in 1965 "flipped" to the CIA in Rangoon) to the FBI's NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the UN., and a month later, sent KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA Fedora) to the same field office to do the same thing.
With at least one "mole" already in place in the CIA, the KGB zombified the CIA and the FBI in late 1961 when it sent Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov (who in 1965 "flipped" to the CIA in Rangoon) to the FBI's NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the UN., and a month later, sent KGB Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA Fedora) to the same field office to do the same thing.