The Friday Brief, August 15, 2025

Welcome To Alaska

Inside:

The Tsar’s Puppet
The Fight We’re In
Maxwell At Summer Camp
Laura Loomer’s Vagina Monologues
Trump’s New Head Of BLS And Al Qaeda BBQs
AI CAPEX And the Uneven Economy
Melania Threatens Hunter Biden

The Big Picture

The Tsar’s Puppet

Vladimir Putin is not a mystery. He is the product of thousands of years of Slavic history and the Cold War’s most ruthless finishing school; the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, where loyalty was absolute, compromise was a tool, and human life was expendable. His professional adolescence was spent in Dresden, East Germany, learning how to break men without leaving marks, how to infiltrate governments, and how to make an adversary believe betrayal was his own idea.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, learned his craft in the New York real estate scene, gaming building permits and stiffing contractors. One man played long games with intelligence assets. The other played short cons with plumbing contractors. One man plotted to restore Russia’s power in the world, while the other focused on leaking the name of the model he was trying to bang to Page 6 of the New York Post.

We’ve seen them together before.

Helsinki, 2018, wasn’t just a meeting; it was a masterclass in psychological dominance. Putin, fluent in the grammar of power, stood composed, delivering facts (or at least the appearance of them) while Trump squirmed, desperate to please. When asked if he believed his own intelligence community or the ex-KGB man beside him, Trump sided with Putin. That humiliation wasn’t an accident; it was a template. Whatever was said in the room between them was so damning that the translator feared for her life.