Olga Lautman and Julie Roginsky
Last week, we wrote about Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into whether anyone connected to Donald Trump’s campaign had cooperated with Russia’s election attack, and how Carter Page, with his long trail of Kremlin entanglements, further deepened those suspicions. This week, we turn to Trump’s first major foreign-policy address. It was organized by Dmitri Simes, who would later be charged with funneling Kremlin funds and signaling an openness to Moscow, while quietly aligning Trump’s candidacy with Moscow’s strategic ambitions.
On April 27, 2016, in the gilded ballroom of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump delivered what would become one of the most consequential foreign-policy speeches of the 2016 campaign — an address that, in retrospect, reads as an early, unmistakable articulation of a worldview aligned with the strategic objectives of Vladimir Putin. Before an audience of diplomats, policymakers, and Beltway insiders, Trump unveiled a sharply defined “America First” doctrine that repudiated decades of bipartisan consensus on alliances, embraced a transactional understanding of global commitments, and signaled a willingness to reset relations with Russia at a moment when Moscow was illegally occupying Crimea, waging a bloody war across eastern Ukraine, intervening militarily in Syria to support Assad’s atrocities and crimes of aggression, and actively attacking the U.S. election to install Trump.
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