I recently sat through an hour and a half of a Russian-language presentation on President Donald Trump. Two men, a slide deck, a friendly conversation. It was sincere, popular, and made by supporters. The presenter opened by promising that 80%-90% of what followed was verifiable fact, and he urged his audience to check it.
So I checked it.
He gave Trump a graduate business degree. Trump doesn’t have one — two years at Fordham University, then a bachelor’s in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1968. He said the first season finale of The Apprentice drew 42 million viewers. Nielsen recorded 28.05 million — the 42 million figure traces back to Trump’s own promotional material. He credited Trump with three Emmy nominations. There are two, shared as executive producer in 2004 and 2005, both lost to The Amazing Race. He put the U.S. goods trade deficit with China at $500 billion-$600 billion a year. It was $202 billion in 2025, and its all-time peak was $418 billion in 2018.
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Every one of those takes under a minute to check from a phone.
The second speaker was a retired U.S. Navy captain — decorated, senior, and, on military matters, the audience is right to listen to him. That is what made his contribution the costliest thing in the video. Discussing Trump’s years at the New York Military Academy, he said the star on the cadet’s collar marked the highest level of academic distinction and would have secured admission to any university without entrance examinations.
That is simply not what happened. Trump enrolled at Fordham in the summer of 1964 and transferred to Wharton in late 1966, graduating in 1968 — a sequence recorded in his own Selective Service classifications, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and held at the National Archives. He applied, he enrolled, he transferred. Like everyone else.
And the real fact was already strong. Trump rose to cadet captain by his senior year, which NPR, reporting from the academy in 2015, called one of the school’s highest honors for graduates. No embellishment required. But build a teenager’s cadet rank into military-grade prestige, and you walk your own candidate into the argument where his record is weakest. The response writes itself, and it is fully documented: five Vietnam-era draft deferments, and a medical classification issued months after graduation on a bone spurs diagnosis publicly disputed by the diagnosing physician’s own daughters.
None of that had to enter the conversation. The speaker opened the door himself, in the one field where his uniform gave him authority.
He fails his own test
Seven minutes in, the presenter stated the rule he was working from and stated it well: Either you have your own opinion, or you are retransmitting someone else’s. His audience, he explains, has been formed by media that it never checked, holding views about a man whose biography it has never read.
He is right about all of that. Then he spent an hour proving it about himself, and 50 minutes in, he mentioned that November 2020 was the first time he began following Trump closely.
A hostile fact-checker doesn’t have to engage with any of the argument. He doesn’t have to explain away the tariffs or the Abraham Accords. He runs four numbers, publishes a piece headlined “Trump’s defenders invented a business degree,” and the whole case is discredited by association. The presenter thinks he is helping. He has just written his opponent’s column for him.
I spent 12 years in Georgian counterintelligence, and this is where that training makes me flinch. A contaminated source is not an aesthetic problem — it is an operational one. A single unverified line retroactively devalues everything filed beside it, because nobody downstream will act on a product from an analyst who has been caught once. Advocacy works the same way, and the people doing it do not seem to know it. They are building a case file. They are contaminating it themselves.
And here is the part that should sting: The real record is better than the invented one.
The document nobody uses
On Sept. 2, 1987, Trump paid nearly $95,000 for a full page in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. It ran on page A28 of the New York Times, an open letter arguing that Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other wealthy states were taking American protection without paying for it. It named the Persian Gulf specifically — a region of marginal importance to America’s own supply on which others depended almost entirely.
On June 25, 2025, at The Hague, 31 of NATO’s 32 members committed to 3.5% of GDP on core defense by 2035, and 5% counting related capability.
Thirty-eight years. One position. Published in the newspapers that now call his foreign policy impulsive and without precedent — they printed the precedent, and he paid them for the page. That alone destroys the claim that Trump’s instincts appeared suddenly, and it requires no invention whatsoever. The presenter never mentioned it.
Nor does anyone reach for the fact that would land hardest with a skeptic. Trump was not the first to make that argument. Charles de Gaulle got there first, from precisely the opposite motive. France tested its first nuclear weapon in 1960 and withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966, on a premise that has anchored French doctrine ever since: A country must not place its security in an ally’s hands, however powerful that ally is. De Gaulle said Europe should not depend on American protection. Trump said America should not pay for Europe’s. Same conclusion, opposite motives, 27 years apart.
The same holds for the charge his foreign defenders answer worst — that Trump is Moscow’s man. It needs no embellishment either. Javelin missiles to Ukraine in December 2017, which the previous administration had declined to provide. Sixty Russian intelligence officers expelled and the Seattle consulate closed in March 2018. Skripal sanctions in August 2019. The sanctions that halted Nord Stream 2 that December. Withdrawal from the INF Treaty over Russian violations the same year. Not one of those requires interpretation. Not one breaks under checking.
Why this matters before November
Outside the English-speaking world, hundreds of millions of people receive the American president entirely through translation and summary. That space does not stay empty. It is filled at the same time by sincere amateurs and by professionals who are not sincere at all, and the audience cannot tell them apart, because it has nothing to check either against.
The presentation I watched dropped the biography entirely in its final 10 minutes and turned to elections — the American midterm elections, then Germany, Israel, and Canada. Vote wrong, the viewer was told, and afterward, they will explain that everything is bad because of Trump. Whatever that is, it is not a lecture on business management. It is persuasion content, produced in Russian, aimed at diaspora audiences and voters in allied states, timed to the American calendar. The midterm elections are on Nov. 3.
In that environment, bad facts are not harmless. They are ammunition, and they are pointed the wrong way.
The fix is not to silence the amateurs — it could not be done anyway. The fix is presence — original reporting in those languages, by people whose names can be checked and whose errors can be corrected in public. Until then, the numbers that travel will be the flattering ones.
Trump’s defenders have no shortage of real material. The 1987 letter is documented. The Russia record is documented. All of it can be argued over, attacked, and defended — which is the point. That is how a case is made: with facts strong enough to survive the person who disagrees with you.
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The 1987 letter is in the archive, where anyone can verify it in a minute. The invented business degree costs nothing, and it is in the video.
Guess which one gets forwarded.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco-based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. A veteran of the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, he served from 1996 to 2008 as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.