Arno Khidirbegishvili, Director General and Editor-in-Chief of GRUZINFORM and Director of the Center for Security, Strategic Analysis, and Information Policy, explains specifically for SPUTNIK Georgia why it is categorically contraindicated for Georgia to participate in the anti-Trump campaign.

On November 23, 2003, when Georgia was headed by Mikhail "the Deranged" (Saakashvili), who is mentioned in the Epstein files, I—having unimpededly observed the entire process from Rustaveli Avenue to Shevardnadze’s Krtsanisi residence—returned home and wrote a publication stating that there are no good or bad nationalities in the world, only two nations: the nation of the smart and the nation of fools. The Internet preserves dozens of my publications where I prove this theory using the examples of Ukraine and other countries of the post-Soviet space.

However, today we shall speak of another category of citizens—unserious people. They are smarter than fools, whose "simplicity is worse than theft," but stupider than smart enemies, though the harm they cause is by no means less. They damage the cause only when they attempt to attract public attention as "politicians" and "analysts" with their absurd forecasts in the style of "conspiracy theories." The Georgian commoner, hungry for scandals and such exoticism, greedily consumes this low-quality but easily digestible propaganda commodity; after all, unserious people are as superficial as the intrigues they "bake." The disinformation and mystification of an impulsive and fragmented Georgian society—allusions to the "Deep State," the true depths of which are unreachable for them—are the very evil that hinders the consolidation of zombified citizens and provokes panic during such a critical period, when the future of not only Georgia but also nuclear superpowers is being determined.

I will provide a few "fresh" examples of how unserious people meddle in politics—which in Georgia, like sports in the USSR, is an amateur mass endeavor—and what comes of it.

I am not a regular viewer of Georgian television channels, most of which I have never watched at all, though they are considered popular due to online political debates. Such a mentally depressing spectacle evokes negative emotions, especially for those who remember Georgian state television before the mid-90s of the last century. That was the face of a highly cultured and highly intellectual Georgian society, where all written and unwritten rules of morality, ethics, and aesthetics were observed. Nevertheless, I still have to arrange a daily collage of news broadcasts with remote in hand just to have information on what is being fed to an audience that long ago lost its skills of critical perception.

So, last week, during one of these viewings, I was surprised to find that the largest Georgian television company, which is considered the main pro-government channel in Georgia, began to circulate the opinions of political subjects from both the pro-government camp and the opposition who are distant from one another. In particular, they featured one political blogger whose Facebook posts are read out in their entirety on air (an unprecedented practice that gives the opposition grounds to call him a "pro-government propagandist-ideologue"). The latest post by this gentleman, who positions himself as a "philosopher," contains an "exposure" of U.S. President Donald Trump, who is "branded with a curse" as a "warmonger" acting on orders from the Deep State (?!), which, supposedly, "well-coordinated" the war in Ukraine with Moscow and Kyiv (?!).

It is hardly accidental that this epatage occurred simultaneously with:

1. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze once again declaring a desire to reboot the strategic partnership with the U.S.—to start with a "clean slate"—confirming the tactic of "patient optimistic expectation of a response" from Washington to Tbilisi’s "open gesture";

2. The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia repeating the same to the Assistant Secretary of State during a working visit to Washington;

3. The Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Head of the Government Administration repeating the same to a delegation of U.S. Congressional staff who arrived in Tbilisi for meetings with representatives of the Georgian government and opposition;

4. Laura Thornton, Director of Global Democracy Programs at the McCain Institute, stating that the U.S. Vice President will not visit Georgia during her visit to the South Caucasus in February because "American leaders have no reason to meet with a government that insulted Western diplomats, accused them of wanting to open a 'second front,' and supports forces chanting 'Death to America'"; and that a "reboot of relations between the United States and Georgia under the current government is impossible."

"So who is one to believe?"—the citizens of Georgia, clouded by propaganda, are utterly lost. Should they believe the government in the person of Prime Minister Kobakhidze, who has a full carte blanche from Bidzina Ivanishvili, or the mouthpiece of the government—the pro-government television company, on whose live air the government will soon open televised debates with the opposition? No one disputes that soothsayers and sorcerers have always enjoyed influence at the courts of august personages, but does Bidzina Ivanishvili really need their services, especially after all the "admitted to the table" knavish "experts" turned out to be sell-outs—spies sent into the "Glass Palace"?!

At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that an ordinary citizen, zombified by cross-propaganda from the "left" and "right," would ask a natural question: is this television company truly pro-government? To what extent does the editorial policy of this TV company correspond to the foreign policy of peace and non-interference pursued by the ruling "Georgian Dream" party since 2012? Since February 22, 2022, this station has been covering the special operation from Kyiv’s position, copying the propaganda clichés of Ukrainian media about "civilian casualties as a result of bombings by Russian aggressors and occupiers who committed crimes against humanity in Bucha and Mariupol." After this, should one be surprised that the largest TV company in Georgia, enjoying fame and privileges as pro-government, pursues a policy diametrically opposed to that of the government? Is it only because Trump is the first U.S. President in modern history to start a business-like conversation with Putin—something Tbilisi is still refraining from? Is it only because Trump is a proponent of traditional family values who banned multi-genderism and its main sponsor, USAID?

There is nothing to be surprised at here—almost the entire brotherhood of television journalists in Georgia grew up "on the same potty" and "ate from the same bowl" marked with the inventory inscription "Rustavi 2." "Rustavi 2" was the name of the television of the Georgian people defeated by Misha Saakashvili in November 2003—a "Procrustean bed" with rigid rules, like a Masonic lodge, where living robots with microphones were stamped out on a diet of Russophobia and homosexual propaganda.

Instead of these questions, various "conspiracy theories" are born in the head of the Georgian commoner, whom unserious people have accustomed to seeing treachery and subtext in everything. For example—that it was at the suggestion of Bidzina Ivanishvili himself that the pro-government TV company voiced a foreign policy vector different from the official one, according to which the U.S. is grouped with the EU and the UK, who have dropped their masks regarding Georgia; and that this backup foreign policy vector will become the primary one if the U.S. does not send its ambassador to Georgia in the near future and demands extraordinary parliamentary elections.

The Internet is a witness that in many publications and press conferences after Trump’s second inauguration—that is, after January 20, 2025—I have emphasized that the situation from Trump’s first presidency will repeat in Georgia, when no American ambassador was sent to Tbilisi for almost two years (there was only a Chargé d'Affaires). At the same time, I explained in detail which objective and subjective factors this was related to, but unserious people do not delve into the essence of events and, in the race for one-day PR, miss the main point. For example—that Bidzina Ivanishvili, who passed through the period of "wild capitalism" in Russia in the 90s practically without losses, is an experienced and tough politician who is wealthier than both Trump and the global real estate leader Mohamed Alabbar—an honorary doctor of Seattle University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Sun Moon University in South Korea (who, in all likelihood, lobbied for the Economic Partnership Agreement between Georgia and South Korea reached last week). Unserious people confuse Avlabar with Alabbar and do not suspect that it is precisely in case of extraordinary parliamentary elections—the likely holding of which I have also stated more than once—that Bidzina Ivanishvili, in order to exclude foreign interference in the voting process, initiated through his party's parliamentary majority the bill to toughen the Law on Grants.

Unserious people of all stripes—both "pro-government" and opposition—still do not understand that the briefing at the Helsinki Commission on the current situation in Georgia, which was supposed to take place on January 28, was postponed not "due to bad weather," as reported on the Commission's website, but thanks to the American lobbyists of the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. I remind you that at the briefing, Claire Kaiser (Managing Director of McLarty Associates), Laura Thornton (Director of Global Democracy Programs at the McCain Institute), and Olesya Vartanyan (Researcher at George Mason University) were supposed to speak with sharp criticism of Georgia. "The weather in the house" is, of course, "most important of all," but for unserious people, the "bad weather" in Washington is too "far away"—they simply cannot "stretch" further than the "bad weather" in Larisa Dolina’s house.

Unserious people, together with the radical opposition and the NGO sector—who crave new sanctions against Georgia and a repetition in Tbilisi of the operation carried out in Caracas, just so their gloomy forecasts about the final rupture between the "Georgian Dream" government and the current White House administration would come true!—do not understand why Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin blocked the adoption of the anti-Georgian MEGOBARI Act in the U.S. Congress (which assumes the introduction of new sanctions against prominent representatives of Georgia’s ruling party). Yet this also happened thanks to the honorary chairman of "Georgian Dream," Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his lobbyists—and not at all because Mullin's election campaign was supported with some "pennies" ($6,000) by the founder of Frontera Resources Corporation, Steve Nicandros, who supposedly plans to return to Georgia and invest billions in a previously started oil extraction project in Kakheti.

The scandal that ended with the departure of the American Frontera from Georgia and an arbitration court was provoked by the then Prime Minister of Georgia, Giorgi Gakharia, on the orders of a European intelligence service.

And all because unserious people—who distract public attention from global problems toward the merger of TSU (Tbilisi State University) and GTU (Georgian Technical University), the first building of which the Georgian communists built in the shape of a Hammer and Sickle as an admonition to descendants that knowledge and labor, in factories and in the field, will grind everything down!—do not understand the main point: the era of globalization has ended and the world has split into "clusters" (this term is more to my liking than the definition "multipolar world") with their own national interests, which will either cooperate or feud as "families," that is, clusters. Therefore, it is treacherously harmful to tease the U.S.—the American "cluster"—with Georgia's strategic and economic partnership with the countries of the East and Asia—the Eastern "cluster," i.e., China, Turkey, Iran, the UAE, other Persian Gulf countries, and Central Asia—which is what local foreign agents are doing along with unserious people.

Let us return to the aforementioned post-publication by the philosophizing blogger, who is being given unprecedented promotion by the "pro-government" TV company created by the billionaire Patarkatsishvili, who died in Great Britain under unclarified circumstances. Having repeated post factum the hackneyed sentences about the unsightly actions of the U.S. in Iran and Venezuela, and in the Israeli-Palestinian and Russian-Ukrainian conflicts, he practically quotes my statement made in many publications and at a press conference—that "the 8 wars that Trump ended are unknown, while the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended on November 10, 2020, 4 years and 2 months before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025." Plagiarism never bothers me—anyone in Georgia and beyond its borders can note this fact even a year later, as the aforementioned respected gentleman did; what is important is only that neither he nor anyone else noticed the following "details."

The first nuance is that the Ceasefire Agreement dated 2020 and the Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and Inter-State Relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, initialed at Donald Trump’s desk in the Oval Office along with the signing of a Declaration by Ilham Aliyev, Nikol Pashinyan, and Donald Trump in the Oval Office, are—as they say in Odessa—"two big differences." But for unserious people, a ceasefire and the end of a war are apparently one and the same.

The second nuance is that if the President of Azerbaijan and the Prime Minister of Armenia in the office of the U.S. President recognized his exclusive role in ending the war in Karabakh, for which they jointly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, this does not mean that the Peace Agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been signed. Unserious people in Georgia do not understand that Armenia and Azerbaijan are satisfied with a status quo where the guarantor between them is now the United States, and not Russia. And the U.S. is satisfied with a presence in Zangezur, on the border with Iran, where the Americans will build an intelligence center (data-center). True, the drummer Pashinyan, who created the vocal-instrumental ensemble "Varchaband," whose first concert took place last week, suggested to Russia to restore the railroads connecting Armenia with Azerbaijan and Turkey (from Yeraskh to Nakhichevan and Akhurik), abandoned after the start of the Karabakh war—who knows what might happen?! Trump comes and goes, but Putin remains—at least until May 7, 2030.

As for the insinuations of unserious people—that Georgia will supposedly lose its transit function because of the Zangezur Corridor, "Trump's Route for International Peace and Prosperity" TRIPP №741—this is yet another provocation aimed at inciting ethnic discord between Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Armenians, because Trump's Route cannot compete with the Georgian section of the "Middle Path" for many objective and subjective reasons (Google "Khidirbegishvili Zangezur Corridor" and you will find out why). But most importantly, the Zangezur Corridor—Trump's Route—is planned to be commissioned only in 2028, when Trump will leave the White House; on November 7, 2028, presidential elections will be held in the U.S., and Trump will not become U.S. President for a third time.

The campaign against Trump has already begun—exactly as it did during his first presidency. But if then he was accused of secret ties with the Kremlin, which supposedly helped him win the presidential election (Trump would have been put behind bars had he not become president a second time, after which it was "suddenly" discovered that the fake campaign against him was organized by former President Obama), now they have chosen another fake topic. There are 3 million Epstein files, but no matter how hard the American Justice Department tried, it did not find a single document proving Trump's participation in violence against minors. And the files of the billionaire financier, which suspiciously surfaced only after his liquidation in prison, will be forgotten after there is no one left to blackmail, just as Snowdens's 1.7 million files or Assange’s hundreds of thousands of files previously vanished into oblivion.

A video in which a young Trump and Epstein are having fun at a party with beautiful girls (not boys, after all!) is not incriminating material against the current U.S. President. Yes, Trump is a well-known womanizer; yes, his spouse is the most beautiful First Lady in the world, and his two previous spouses were not ugly either; yes, the owner and organizer of "Miss Universe," "Miss World," and "Miss USA" Donald Trump stayed for one night in Moscow (from November 8 to 9, 2013, after dinner with Agalarov at a restaurant), where he flew regarding the organization of the "Miss Universe" contest: tell me, for heaven's sake, where is the corpus delicti? Even Stalin, when Beria reported to him that Marshal Rokossovsky had a mistress—the famous beauty and actress Valentina Serova—and asked what they should do with them, took the pipe out of his mouth, thought a little, and said: "What shall we do, what shall we do... we shall be envious!"

But the concept of "envy" is not from the sphere of politics; therefore, for "Georgian Dream," when the situation in the "Russia-EU-USA-Ukraine" square is tense and uncertain, participating in the anti-Trump campaign as unserious people strive for, and calling the sitting U.S. President a "warmonger" and "Deep State," is categorically contraindicated.

Post scriptum

The aforementioned "philosopher"—a soothsayer confusedly interpreting dialectical materialism on Georgia’s main pro-government channel, having finally confused the inevitability of a world revolution with a conspiracy theory about the "coming rule of corporations"—ends his "sacred" Facebook post with a threat addressed to the government: saying that when my magical prophecy comes true, all responsibility and the curse will fall upon "Georgian Dream" for not preparing the population of Georgia for the apocalypse...

February 5, 2026 Georgia, Tbilisi