Drudge Report Headline Asks: Is ‘The Don Being Blackmailed’ by Putin?
Matt Drudge’s eponymous news aggregator, The Drudge Report, linked to an op-ed as one of its lead headlines on Monday, asking “IS THE DON BEING BLACKMAILED?”
The headline harked back to the heyday of the Trump-Russia scandal, which was fueled by President Donald Trump calling for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign and widespread allegations that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia in 2016. In recent years, Trump has raged against the special counsel probe into those allegations, and in recent weeks, his administration has attempted to flip the script on the scandal and accused former President Barack Obama of being part of a “treasonous conspiracy” by helping to promote the allegations.
The op-ed Drudge linked to was penned in June of 2025 with the headline, “The idea that the Kremlin has kompromat on Trump seems increasingly plausible.” The piece by Irish Times columnist and former Irish Minister of Justice Michael McDowell warned that if Trump “capitulates to Putin on Ukraine, it will grossly and perhaps fatally betray the principles on which Nato was founded.”
McDowell’s argument that Russia may have “kompromat” on Trump is based on his conclusion that despite all of Trump’s rhetoric and promises to end the war, he has actually done “nothing” to do so. McDowell wonders what Trump’s real aims in Ukraine are if not to end the conflict:
What is his real strategy? Is it to collapse the Ukrainian state by weakening its resistance to Russia or to re-establish Ukraine as a Russian satellite? Is it to divide the mineral and oil assets of Ukraine with Russia, in line with the “deal” he imposed on Zelenskiy in a Corleone-style offer he couldn’t refuse? Is the “dictator” Zelenskiy now to be the object of US-backed regime change as part of a capitulation to Russia?
Or is there some different hidden policy agenda in the White House? I used to be sceptical about claims that Putin had access to kompromat on Trump that explained his grovelling relationship with the Kremlin. But if such kompromat is not the explanation, it is hard to see why the White House is behaving as it does towards Ukraine.
Drudge has become a fierce critic of Trump in recent years and upped his barbs against the president during the 2024 presidential campaign, regularly showing edited images of Trump in an orange jumpsuit while covering Trump’s many trials. Trump, in turn, has publicly attacked Drudge.
