Timeline Of Trump And Russia In Mid-2016: A Series Of Coincidences Or Something More?
The video appeared on YouTube on March 4, three days after the bonanza of primaries and caucuses known as Super Tuesday. New York billionaire Donald Trump had dominated the contests, cementing his improbable rise to Republican front-runner. And a Russian man named Alexander Dugin was providing his own colorful commentary on the results, in heavily accented English.
The message was unmistakable: Russia was officially rooting for Trump.
"Go ahead, Mr. Trump, in Trump we Trust," Dugin said, staring into the camera.
Dugin isn't just a random crank with a YouTube channel. He is an influential political analyst and philosopher with deep ties to the Russian government. He is known variously as "Putin's Brain" and "Putin's Rasputin," a moniker he was given by Breitbart News in 2014.
In the video, Dugin sits behind an anchor desk, offering disdain for American democracy ("How dare they lecture us about human rights and the fight against corruption?") and neoconservative foreign policy. For Trump, there is praise of his populism and his "America First" approach to the world. For Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, then a Republican candidate for president, there are graphic insults. But Dugin reserves his harshest criticism for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic primary process.
"There is nothing more stupid and fake than the American vote counting system," Dugin said. "The majority votes for [Bernie] Sanders but Clinton wins, bribing the
