John LeCarre is perhaps the world’s greatest spy novelist, whose Cold War-era books about espionage were so inventive and detailed that they were studied by Russian spies and the CIA (to his everlasting regret). Today, the 85 year old is speaking out about what he believes is the impending fall of the Trump administration and the “honey trap” set by Russians that Donald Trump unwittingly fell into.
LeCarre believes that the infamous Christopher Trump dossier on the kompromat Russia holds over Trump is true — specifically, what is elegantly called the “pee pee tape” — and that if revealed, it wouldn’t hurt him. “I think it’s perfectly possible that Trump was taken into what I call a honey trap—that he had ladies found for him, and he misbehaved in Russia,” he said in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross. “If that film was shown tomorrow worldwide, Trump would get away with it. People would say, well, ‘boys will be boys.’ Or they would say the different parts of the body in the video don’t add up; this is all fake stuff. And 35 experts would testify to that—so wouldn’t get any distance on that.”
He says Trump’s fall is more likely to come from his domestic dealings than anything that’s gone on in Russia. He believes his downfall will come from his sketchy business deals, “the domestic stuff, as the properties that he owns around America: how they’ve been bought, who they’ve been bought by, in what sums, whether the sums were actually consonant, whether they were gross, whether they look like some kind of backhander or bribe, and the extraordinary number of Russians with criminal records or Eastern Europeans with criminal records who frequent Trump’s company,” LeCarre says.
He concludes that Trump’s much-valued “loyalty” will force him to disappear. “In the end, it seems to me, some of this has got to come home to roost,” he says. “And I think there might be a point—I hope there will be a point—when somebody goes to Trump and says, your family is so deeply involved in this that you have a choice: You either fade away or we disrupt the house of Trump in ways that would be very painful to you.”
