The Borscht Republic

The term "banana republic" refers to Caribbean and Latin American dictatorships that were dominated by American business interests. With the blessing of the US government, companies would essentially install puppet governments servile to them.

Now the United States itself has suffered the same fate with the election of Donald Trump. But since we don't export bananas, we'll need a new term. I suggest "borscht republic," in honor of Trump's patron and benefactor, Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The FBI, NSA and the CIA say that Russians created thousands of fake news stories that slammed Hillary Clinton, as well as hacking the Democrats emails, in order to get Trump elected.

Donald Trump and his surrogates deny it. The information the intelligence agencies has is covert, so they don't want to release it for fear of exposing sources, blah blah blah. So far, it's a "they said-he said" argument.

But here's some evidence that the Russians tried to get Trump elected, in full view for all the world to see (from the New York Times):

In Danilovgrad, a town in Montenegro, Serbian supporters
made their views known on a billboard in November.

This billboard in Montenegro, Serbia, looks like a Donald Trump campaign sign, except that Vladimir Putin is his vice president instead of Mike Pence. Are they running for co-dictators of the world?

Now, you say, this doesn't mean anything. This sign was put up by some dumb Serbs.

Except it wasn't. The sign is in Russian and English. You can see for yourself if you run "Let's make the world great again together!" through Google Translate:

Russian: Давайте сделаем мир здорово снова вместе!
Serbian: Хајде да се свет велики поново заједно!

Google Translate isn't perfect, which you can see by its use of the word здорово (healthy) instead of великим (great). And it got the ending of здорово wrong -- it should end in -ым, not о. The Google Russian translation also uses the exact English word order, while the sign uses a more natural Russian word order -- though it isn't wrong, because word order in Russian is pretty flexible.

I can't comment on the quality of the Serbian translation -- I can tell it's Serbian, and understand the last four words because they're Russian cognates.

But from this you can tell that Serbian and Russian, while they have many words in common (including велики, which it got right in Serbian), are significantly different: Russian doesn't even use the letter j.

The question is, why would Serbians put a Russian sign up in their own country? If this was their heartfelt endorsement of Trump and Putin, why wouldn't the sign be in Serbian?

The only plausible answer is that the sign was produced by the Russians. If Trump had put it up, it would have been in Serbian, because -- one supposes -- he wouldn't want to insult the locals by getting their language wrong. The Russians don't care about such niceties, because they plan on taking eastern Europe back again.

Since the Russians put campaign signs up all over Europe for Trump, they clearly wanted Trump to be president. Wouldn't they engage in a little old-style KGB dezinformat hacking to make that happen, as insurance?

The CIA, the FBI and the NSA got it right on the Russian hacking. Trump can't admit it because it makes him look like Putin's puppet -- or a Russian collaborator.

Welcome to the borscht republic.