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Trump’s advance to the Oval Office had three stages, each of which depended upon American vulnerability and required American cooperation. First, Russians had to transform a failed real estate developer into a recipient of their capital. Second, this failed real estate developer had to portray, on American television, a successful businessman. Finally, Russia intervened with purpose and success to support the fictional character “Donald Trump, successful businessman” in the 2016 presidential election.
Throughout the exercise, Russians knew what was fact and what was fiction. Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the “VERY successful businessman” of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool. Although Americans might dream otherwise, no one who mattered in Moscow believed that Trump was a powerful tycoon. Russian money...
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From an American point of view, Trump Tower is a garish building on Fifth Avenue in New York City. From a Russian point of view, Trump Tower is an inviting site for international crime.
Russian gangsters began to launder money by buying and selling apartment units in Trump Tower in 1984.
In 1987, the Soviet state paid for Trump and his then-wife Ivana to visit Moscow and stay in the Lenin Suite of the National Hotel. This room was certainly bugged and monitored; the normal KGB procedure was to collect compromising material on figures who might later become important. Interestingly, it was only after his return that Trump began to speak of running for president, and to place advertisements advocating U.S. isolationism.
in 1991, the Russian mob extended its reach in New York. The most notorious Russian hit man, long sought by the FBI, resided in Trump Tower. Russians were arrested for running a gambling ring from the apartment beneath Trump’s own. In Trump World Tower, constructed between 1999 and 2001 on the east side of Manhattan near the United Nations, a third of the luxury units were bought by people or entities from the former Soviet Union.
man investigated by the Treasury Department for money laundering lived in Trump World Tower directly beneath Kellyanne Conway, who would become the ...
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Seven hundred units of Trump properties in South Florida were purchased by shell companies. Two men associated with those shell companies were convicted of running a ga...
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By the late 1990s, Trump was generally considered to be uncreditworthy and bankrupt. He owed about four billion dollars to more than seventy banks,
After his 2004 bankruptcy, no American bank would lend him money. The only bank that did so was Deutsche Bank, whose colorful history of scandal belied its staid name. Interestingly, Deutsche Bank also laundered about $10 billion for Russian clients between 2011 and 2015. Interestingly, Trump declined to pay back his debts to Deutsche Bank.
Russian oligarch bought a house from Trump for $55 million more than Trump had paid for it. The buyer, Dmitry Rybolovlev, never showed any interest in the property and never lived there—but later, when Trump ran for president, Rybolovlev appeared in places where Trump was campaigning. Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade. Having realized that apartment complexes could be used to launder money, Russians used Trump’s name to build more buildings.
2006, citizens of the former Soviet Union financed the construction of Trump SoHo, and gave Trump 18% of the profits—although he put up no money himself.
It is thus common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later.
Even after he announced his candidacy for the office of president, in June 2015, Trump was pursuing risk-free deals with Russians.
In 2016, just when Trump needed money to run a campaign, his properties became extremely popular for shell companies. In the half year between his nomination as the Republican candidate and his victory in the general election, some 70% of the units sold in his buildings were purchased not by human beings but by limited liability companies.
In 2010, RT was helping American conspiracy theorists spread the false idea that President Barack Obama had not been born in the United States.
Letting Trump win meant owning him completely. Trump the winner was a fiction that would make his country lose.
A Russian parliamentarian said that the American secret services “slept through” as Russia chose the American president,
The dedicated Russian cyberwar center known as the Internet Research Agency manipulated European and American opinion about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Internet Research Agency worked alongside Russian secret services to move Trump into the Oval Office.
the weeks before the election, bots accounted for about 20% of the American conversation about politics.
About three million hostile Russian tweets were later logged and recorded. Once Twitter started looking it was able to identify about a million suspicious accounts per day.
Russia also digitally suppressed the vote in another way: by making voting impossible in crucial places and times. North Carolina, for example, is a state with a very small Democratic majority, where most Democratic voters are in cities. On Election Day, voting machines in cities ceased to function, thereby reducing the number of votes recorded. The company that produced the machines in question had been hacked by Russian military intelligence. Russia also scanned the electoral websites of at least thirty-nine American states, perhaps looking for vulnerabilities, perhaps seeking voter data for
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Then Russian trolls and bots helped to work the Podesta emails into two fictional stories, one about a pizza pedophile ring and another about Satanic practices.
It was also noteworthy that Deutsche Bank, which had laundered billions for Russian oligarchs, and which was the only bank still willing to loan to Kushner’s father-in-law, extended to Kushner a loan of $285 million just a few weeks before the presidential election.
first foreign policy speech on April 27, almost a year after declaring his candidacy. Manafort chose as Trump’s speechwriter the former diplomat Richard Burt, who at the time was under contract to a Russian gas company. In other words, a man who owed money to an important Russian hired a man who was working for Russia to write a speech for Russia’s preferred candidate.
Trump advisor on foreign policy, Carter Page, had once briefly worked for an American firm whose director remembered him as pro-Putin and “wackadoodle.” Page then set up shop in a building connected to Trump Tower, and met with Russian spies. In 2013, he supplied Russian spies with documents about the energy industry. Page became a lobbyist for Russian gas companies; while working for the Trump campaign he promised his Russian clients that a Trump presidency would serve their interests. At the moment when he was named an advisor to Trump, he owned shares in Gazprom.
Page returned to the United States and altered the Republican platform in a way that fulfilled Moscow’s desires. At the Republican National Convention, Page and another Trump advisor, J. D. Gordon, substantially weakened the section of the platform about the need for a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There seems to have been little doubt among Trump’s advisors that he owed his victory to Putin.
In addition to Flynn, Trump filled his cabinet with people who had startlingly intimate connections to a foreign power. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was quick to endorse Trump, had multiple contacts with the Russian ambassador in 2016. Sessions lied about this to Congress during his confirmation hearings for the office of attorney general,
Trump’s secretary of commerce had financial dealings with Russian oligarchs, and indeed with Putin’s family. In 2014, Wilbur Ross became the vice chairman of, and a leading investor in, the Bank of Cyprus, an offshore haven for Russian oligarchs. He took the position at a time when Russians who sought to avoid sanctions were transferring assets to such places. He worked alongside Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, who had been a colleague of Putin in the KGB.
The United States had never before had a secretary of state personally decorated with the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin. Rex Tillerson was such a person. Before his departure from office, Tillerson oversaw a vast purge of American diplomats, a group whom Putin regarded as the enemy. In throwing the Department of State into chaos, Tillerson substantially reduced the American capacity to project either power or values. Regardless of the particulars of daily events, this was an unambiguous victory for Russia.
director of the CIA that “Mr. Putin has recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” After a year in office, only the “unwitting” part seemed questionable. By then, Trump had convinced a number of leading American intelligence specialists that he was a Russian asset. As one of them put it: “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”
he used the occasion to tell the world that he trusted the Russian strongman more than he did his own intelligence and national security apparatus. A former CIA director concluded that Trump was “wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
The visitors were the Russian ambassador to the United States and the Russian foreign minister. They brought digital gear to the White House, which they used to take and distribute photographs of the meeting. Former U.S. intelligence officers found this unusual. More unusual still was that Trump used the occasion to share with Russia intelligence of the highest level of confidentiality, involving an Israeli double agent inside ISIS.
Russia lacks local and regional journalism. Little in Russian media concerns the experiences of Russian citizens. Russian television directs the distrust that this generates against others beyond Russia. In the weakness of its local press, America came to resemble Russia. The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse.
According to one survey, 44% of Americans get their news from a single internet platform: Facebook.
In 1976, Stephen King published a short story, “I Know What You Need,” about the courting of a young woman. Her suitor was a young man who could read her mind but did not tell her so. He simply appeared with what she wanted at the moment, beginning with strawberry ice cream for a study break. Step by step he changed her life, making her dependent upon him by giving her what she thought she wanted at a certain moment, before she herself had a chance to reflect. Her best friend realized that something disconcerting was happening, investigated, and learned the truth: “That is not love,” she
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Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.
In the United States, the process is known as “gerrymandering.” As a result of gerrymandering, Democratic voters in Ohio or North Carolina in effect have, respectively, about one-half or one-third as much ability to elect a representative in Congress as do Republican voters. Citizens did not have an equal vote. From an American point of view, all of this might appear to be mundane tradition, just the rules of the game. From Moscow’s perspective, the system looks like vulnerability to be exploited.
In 2010, it ruled that money talked: that corporations were individuals, and their campaign spending was free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This granted real companies, front companies, and various fake civic entities the right to influence campaigns and, in effect, to try to buy elections.
Twenty-two American states passed laws designed to suppress the voting of African Americans and Hispanics—laws that materially affected the 2016 presidential election.
In 2016 in Florida, some 23% of African Americans were denied the vote as convicted felons. Felonies in Florida include releasing a helium balloon and harvesting lobsters with short tails.
June 2016, Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, was discussing Russia with his fellow Republican congressmen. Republican majority leader Kevin McCarthy expressed the belief that Donald Trump was paid by Russia. Ryan reacted by asking that such suspicions be kept “in the family”:
McConnell let it be known that Republicans would treat the defense of the United States from Russian cyberwar as an effort to help Hillary Clinton.
The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.
the 1980s, the federal government weakened the position of trade unions. The percentage of Americans in unionized jobs fell from about a quarter to under 10%. Private sector union membership fell still more sharply, from about 34% to 8% for men and from about 16% to 6% for women. The productivity of the American workforce grew throughout the period, at about 2% a year, but the wages of traditional workers increased more slowly, if at all.
As Warren Buffett put it, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
The association between declining health and Trump voting was strong in important states that Obama had won in 2012 but which Trump took in 2016, such as Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. When life is short and the future is troubled, the politics of eternity beckons.
The correlation between opioid use and Trump voting was spectacular and obvious, notably in the states that Trump had to win. In New Hampshire, traumatized counties such as Coös swung from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Every Pennsylvania county that Obama won in 2012 but Trump won in 2016 was in opioid crisis.
