Is Donald Trump the real-life Manchurian candidate? | South China Morning Post
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 11:12 AM
Friends + Interlocutors,
Alex Lo of the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong) has written a confusing column. This is unusual. He is known for his clarity and insight.
First of all, in the 1962 Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury who plays Eleanor Iselin, the mother of the brainwashed Sergeant Raymon Shaw played by Laurence Harvey, is not “conservative and anti-communist” as Lo states. Rather, she is a mole Soviet agent who is tasked with carrying out a coup and installing her pliant, stupid Senator husband as a frontman when he becomes President of the United States. The insane woman nearly succeeds.
Lo goes on to entertain the liberal-Democrat assumption that Donald Trump is a brainwashed Manchurian Candidate who must be acting as the pawn of Vladimir Putin. Lo makes no distinction between the Soviet Union, the leader of world communism starting in 1917, and the post-communist, anti-communist Russia which emerged at the end of the Cold War (1990) under Yeltsin and Putin.
Russia is Russia, the eternal enemy of the West. That is a dangerous idea which Washington seems to be operating under.
The truth is, except in the minds of cynical Democrat Party operatives, Donald Trump is not acting as a frontman for Vladimir Putin. That was a partisan hoax drummed up during Trump’s first term. It has been disproved and debunked, but the establishment media has taken little notice. It is sticking with the hoax. The Democrats feel comfortable with that.
In any event, it seems to me that Trump is a much more likely to be acting as a bona fide Manchurian Candidate for the Zionist project to create Greater Israel on top of the Palestinians. He exhibits no objectivity whatever in dealing with Israel and the Palestinians.
Trump may indeed have been brainwashed, like most Americans, over the years by the Israel Lobby, but in addition, as added insurance for the conspirators, he has been bought by campaign contributions from billionaire Zionist donors. This is a fact. Russia is a diversion.
Is Donald Trump the real-life Manchurian candidate?
Internet speculation may be off the mark, but his tilt towards Moscow will enable Putin to prevail over Europe and regain leverage over China
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.
I also don’t think Trump being Vladimir Putin’s lapdog is any worse than Joe Biden being that of Benjamin Netanyahu. In both cases, their destabilisation spilled over around the world, not just across the immediate regions affected.
Be that as it may, there is no question that Moscow is coming out as the big winner.
Isolated by the Western powers, Putin had no choice but to rely on China and play junior partner to Xi Jinping.
Now, he can play the two superpowers against each other. He won’t, though, completely go over to the Americans, as some people suggest.
The distinguished historian Margaret MacMillan explains that quite well recently in the Financial Times: “At the recent Munich Security Conference, Trump emissary Keith Kellogg said the US hoped to offer Russia such a good deal that it would break away from China, Iran and North Korea … While such a diplomatic reversal could take the world closer to war between the US and China, for the moment it looks like a non-starter. A much-weakened Russia has become increasingly dependent on China and, with its long common border, knows where its interests lie.”
It’s a bleak commentary on the state of the world that thanks to the US, Putin and Netanyahu – two men charged by the International Criminal Court with war crimes and crimes against humanity – are now the biggest winners.
I will leave you with this memorable line from Condon’s novel: “The psychotic group known as paranoiacs had always provided us with the great leaders of the world, and always would.”
