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What is not typical, however, is for documents to claim that, beginning in 1977, Trump would remain “completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years” thanks to a mysterious arrangement between his company and the American government; that he was contractually bound to have three children with Ivana (which he did); and that he was being groomed to run for president in 1988 (which he nearly did).32 Despite repeated demands from officials, Trump has still not released his taxes to the American public. The head of the IRS has not complied with congressional requests.
The question of whether Trump, in 1977—at the height of his tutelage under tax-dodger Cohn—struck up some incredible agreement where he would pay no taxes to the United States until 2007 is not just
unanswered but unexamined. The answers could be found: the IRS should know. Given the number of times Trump business dealings have fallen under investigation by federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Treasury, other government agencies may know too. But the American people do not. And the question of why we do not know remains as enormous—and as disconcerting—as the information in the Czech files themselves.
He was not merely an outcome of the economic restructuring ushered in by Reagan’s union-busting and trickle-down economics, and he was not merely a brazen player in the corporate raiding and glitzy rebuilding of New York City. Trump may have been involved in an unparalleled and inexplicable pact with the US government to remain above the law, one that was likely buffered by criminal actors and hostile foreign states. This disturbingly parallels his present-day actions as president.
Trump and US govt secret gov. He never has been held to task for his criminal activities
The Trump administration has been notable for its reverence for criminals and dictators. While designating Canada, Mexico, and the EU to be enemies of the United States, Trump—aided by daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner—sought out an axis of autocrats to take their place.
Manafort and Stone in the 1980s—who represented the Philippines’ Marcos family and Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko while moonlighting as operatives for Republican campaigns.
Adnan Khashoggi, whom Trump befriended and from whom he bought a “surveillance yacht” filled with hidden cameras.34 (In fall 2018, Khashoggi’s nephew, Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, was hacked into pieces with a bone saw by aides of the Saudi government in their Turkish embassy, allegedly under the orders of MBS with information supplied by MBS’s friend, Kushner,
The same names recur over and over in the sordid Trump saga, indicative of an interconnected web of relationships between politicians, spies, and crime lords that were built in the 1980s and continue to the present day.
Tony Schwartz—a ghostwriter who later warned during the 2016 campaign that Trump was a sociopath who would likely bring forth the end of the world if elected—The Art of the Deal could have been subtitled How I Became a Russian Asset.
Churkin had been the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly and in an unexplained fashion since Trump won the election.41 There has been no follow-up reporting or official investigation of his death, and the documents remain sealed.
Trump stayed in had long been under KGB control and would have been bugged.
Trump sought elected office for thirty years. He ran for president in 2000, 2012, and 2016, and he nearly ran in 1988 and 1996. His 1988 bid began with a rally held in late 1987 by Republican activist Michael Dunbar and was guided by Roger Stone, who began his first go-round as a Trump presidential adviser. Stone was involved in every Trump presidential run thereafter as well as in Trump’s near-run for New York governor in 2014.48
But for most of his life, Trump has only taken a risk when the reward is guaranteed by others.
Trump needs to be a brand because he’s terrified of being a person.
am like most Americans: he has inhabited our collective consciousness for my entire life, which means he has been committing crimes, unpunished, for my entire life. He has been profiting off American pain for my entire life, and American elites—the elites he pretends to condemn—have been enabling him for my entire life.
crime committed brazenly is over time redefined as something other than crime. It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.
Trump Tower so we could walk in and use the public bathroom and “show Trump what we think of him!” Trump was synonymous with all that was terrible about America: greed, cruelty, stupidity, rich people. I remember giggling at the glitzy restrooms, an enthusiastic participant in my mom’s immature defiance of a world we could never enter. There’s a bizarre tendency
By the end of the 1980s, Trump properties had gone bankrupt, and some were tarnished by their connection to tragedies and crimes—such as the 1989 freak helicopter crash that killed top executives running his dying Taj Mahal casino. (Trump callously blamed his financial ruin on their deaths.)51
In 1990, Wall Street bond house Salomon Brothers advised clients to bail on Trump Castle. In 1991, Trump declared bankruptcy, and by 1992, he had lost all his signature properties, with the exception of Trump Tower. He sold Khashoggi’s surveillance yacht, which he had renamed the Trump Princess.
profiles, including one in which twelve-year-old Donald Trump Jr. told a reporter that Trump did not love him, did not love himself, but only loved his money;52 to the 1993 book Lost Tycoon by Harry Hurt III, which declared that Trump did not know how to have sex with women and describes Ivana purchasing a book on female orgasms and announcing “I have to give this to The Donald;
he can never find the spots.”53 From the start of the marriage, their terrible sex life, wrote Hurt, had sent Trump running back to Roy Cohn, who was forced to write a new prenup to placate the sexually unsatisfied Ivana. Hurt’s book paints a disturbing picture of Trump’s conception of love and consensual sexual relations.
Ivana had said at the time of her divorce that Trump, angered by a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot conducted by a doctor Ivana recommended, grabbed her, pulled out hair from her own scalp, bellowed, “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!,” and raped her. The deposition papers describe a terrified Ivana hiding in a closet in the hours after the rape, emerging in the morning to find Trump sneering at her, asking:
The horror of the present is realizing that many adults had no sense of what was really going on during my 1980s childhood either—and that those who did know, and lived to tell the tale, are the ones who stole the future.
“kakistocracy,”
a word that means rule by the least competent.
“Kakistocracy” assumes that the Trump administration’s malice is the result of incompetence, and that the dismantling of departments is the incidental result of appointing unqualified people. In the Trump administration, people are hired to dismantle the departments they lead, and the main quality for which they are valued is blind and total fealty.
That is not kakistocracy but kleptocracy, with elements of burgeoning authoritarianism.
Kleptocracies like to move players around to create the illusion of debate and dissent. Changes in personnel give the impression that power is distributed equitably rather than consolidated around a dictator, while also distracting the press from the regime’s more substantive flaws. As during his reality television days, Trump shakes up the status of players, and positions are cast more than filled. Firings create court intrigue that reporters will pounce on while ignoring the steady spread of rot.
As in foreign kleptocracies, the glue that holds the Trump administration together is nepotism.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who opposes public education, is the sister of military mercenary Erik Prince, a key operator in Trump’s network of back-channel trades with other kleptocracies. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao is the wi...
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In 2019, the appointment of Attorney General William Barr was followed by the appointment of Barr’s son-in-law, Tyler McGaughey, as Trump’s White House legal counsel and his daughter, Mary Daly, as an employee of the Treasury. These are just a few example...
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longer autocrats stay in power, the smaller the inner circle becomes, and the more kins...
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Parties bound by blood or marriage are easier to control. Nepotism allows for an easy...
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Officials who are not related by family ties in Trump’s cabinet are often people who have been working together in corrupt ventures for decades. For example, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross were both protégés, like Trump, of Carl Icahn, who stepped down as a White House adviser after a year following a proposed ethics investigation that was, like so many other investigations, mysteriously dropped.
who are tied by complicity, including, at this point, the entire GOP, which is contaminated by the influx of dark money in the 2016 election and beyond. For example, in 2017, the GOP made Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer who would later be sentenced to three years in prison for campaign finance violations, the deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Corruption breeds loyalty out of fear. The choice is to embrace the crooked gains, hoping that the new regime will consolidate power and rewrite laws to create a sort of preemptive exoneration, or leave politics
The record number of GOP officials—forty-four—who stepped down during Trump’s first year in office shows the difficulty Repub...
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there had never been such a blatant insertion of unqualified relatives into such high positions of power. We have never seen adult children operate as official advisers from the moment a president took office. Pundits initially attempted to rationalize their rise with a baseless argument that Ivanka and Jared were a moderating influence.
But the two never intervened in Trump’s brutal domestic policies, nor did they counter his racist rhetoric. Instead they carried out their own illicit schemes with foreign partners, abusing executive power for personal gain.
The foreign deals Ivanka made that implicate the emoluments laws or that Jared made with Middle Eastern countries who agreed to pay down his debt as he influenced policies that favored them also serve as a perverse method of résumé-padding, especially to a gullible and sometimes compromised American press. That Jared and Ivanka’s activity in office has abetted enemies of America (like Russia) or states rife with human rights violations (like Saudi Arabia) has proven irrelevant to media personalities seek...
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Adult children of authoritarian leaders are useful in multiple ways.
First, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states are.
Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough distance th...
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state are harder ...
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Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile, which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with pictures of thei...
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Fourth, a dynastic kleptocracy is the most reliable way to keep assets stolen from the state in the family. It therefore falls upon the authoritarian ruler to legitimize his offspring ...
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He has acquired decades of secrets and is willing to weaponize them.
to reveal the sexual relationship between MSNBC cohosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser for Jimmy Carter) in 2016 after the two had deviated from their standard sycophancy to raise serious concerns, most notably about Trump’s love of nuclear weapons. Called out, they resumed their ass-kissing. Once they divorced their partners and decided to wed, and Trump lost his leverage, they resumed their critiques. In 2017, the two reported that Trump had threatened them with hit pieces in the National Enquirer and described the
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problem of nepotism has become a problem of national security.
violated the law in serious ways during their time in office yet face no consequences. In 2017,
it was revealed that Kushner had lied on his security clearance forms more than any person in US history.
