If there is one claim at the heart of RussiaGate that Time Warner and Comcast have beaten us over the head with about a thousand times an hour since Hillary Clinton's historic loss to her pied piper, it's this:

Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin's puppet.

As the Steele dossier illustrates, Putin has had an embarrassing video of Trump paying prostitutes to urinate on each other since 2013.

Yes, for at least the past five-plus years Trump has been a Kremlin pawn.

The New York billionaire does Putin's every bidding. And since Russia was able to also hack DNC emails and hypnotize millions of Americans with Facebook ads, this means that the former KGB agent has had direct control of the Executive Branch of the United States government for two years.

Sadly, we are living in a real-life Red Dawn.

It is for this reason that Trump's decision to meet with Putin last summer was repeatedly dubbed "treasonous" by the philosopher-kings in the corporate media: certainly Trump was just getting more orders from his boss.

It sure is awfully strange, then, when Trump does things that piss off the Kremlin -- no pun intended -- and it is even stranger how #TheResistance stays completely silent on these many, many issues.

Take for instance's Trump's recent decision to stop recognizing the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Instead, Trump decided that Juan Guaidó is now Venezuela's president. Anyone even a little familiar with Latin American history knows that Trump's move is perfectly in-line with a bloody legacy of US imperialism that dates back to the Monroe Doctrine. But isn't our Manchurian candidate president supposed to represent a break from those great traditions?

Working under the narrative that Trump is Putin's puppet, then certainly this should mean that Trump's recognition of Guaidó is a Russian scheme as well. If Trump only does what Putin tells him to, then that must mean that Putin no longer wants Maduro in charge of Venezuela, right?

And, even if Trump didn't take a direct order from Putin to recognize Guaidó, then certainly his decision to interfere in Venezuelan politics is at least morally the same as Putin's interference in US politics.

After all, if Russia was wrong to lend assistance to Trump in an election, then certainly Trump unilaterally handpicking Venezuela's leader must be that much worse.

Except such claims are nowhere to be found in the corporate media. Instead, Trump is getting much praise for his move against Maduro, now labeled "the least Trumpian" thing he has done.

And this isn't the first time that Trump has won over his critics by asserting US power abroad, however. Many of us remember how Trump received compliments for bombing Syria twice, both in April of 2018 and in April of 2017.

Beyond that, the media also gets pretty damn silent when Trump takes positions that quite obviously make no sense in the context of the White House allegedly being subservient to the Kremlin.

For example, why is Trump selling weapons to Ukraine? Why would Putin want him to do that?

And why did Trump also cancel a meeting with Putin -- remember, his own boss -- after increased tensions between Ukraine and Russia? Is Trump disobeying his master? Or is this part of an even grander, craftier Putin scheme?

But why did Trump condemn Germany for buying Russian gas? Certainly Putin and his oligarch buddies must be making tons of cash from that. As a businessman, Trump must know this, right?

How could Trump let US forces kill hundreds of Russians in Syria? And why is Trump trying to stop Russia from supplying Syria with missile defense systems?

And, most of all, why is Trump now set to let the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty expire -- a move that will risk throwing the US and Russia back into the depths of the Cold War?

One wonders how Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd want us to integrate these contradictory data points into one coherent Red Scare storyline.

Is Trump just sometimes obeying Putin, and then going rogue sometimes? Or is he just appearing like he's disobeying, but still secretly working with Putin?

In the end, of course, none of it makes sense because -- as has been demonstrated repeatedly -- the RussiaGate narrative is all just one rambling conspiracy theory. It's a giant pile of absurd claims puffed up by Iraqi WMD-esque media sensationalism and resurrecting a Dr. Strangelove, McCarthyist paranoia.

Trump is not Putin's puppet. And Putin is not Trump's puppet. Both are just the figureheads of two competing military-industrial complexes that, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, are still jeopardizing the future of mankind in the name of funneling even more wealth to oligarchs on either side of the planet.