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January 26 - March 30, 2025
And so, the grift continued. Between 2007 and 2018, buyers tied to the former Soviet Union made eighty-six cash purchases at Trump properties.
People who can pay to play are less likely to report on corruption, inequality, or injustice, because they are less likely to recognize it exists.
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.
While there have been numerous political dynasties—Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes—there had never been such a blatant insertion of unqualified relatives into such high positions of power.
When Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released, Billy Bush (a first cousin of George W. and Jeb Bush) was fired from his job as a TV host for egging Trump on. But Trump, the shameless sexual assaulter, became the president.
because influential young people in media and politics had increasingly come to resemble Ivanka and Jared—rich, connected, and unqualified. Their insertion into the White House was consistent with an increasingly nepotistic America.
In 2011, the world seemed to hang in the balance between good and evil, with rapid technological change bringing new visibility to the weaknesses of autocratic regimes. We did not know that evil had already launched its own plans, transnational criminal ambitions that were far beyond the scope of a sole state fighting its citizens.
If Ferguson taught me anything, it was that noticing and caring are two very different things. People
Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go.
Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs poured money into the National Rifle Association, which then dispersed it to their preferred Republican candidates under the guise of American donorship.
“Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow?” Trump tweeted that June. “If so, will he become my new best friend?”34
The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.
The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.
Trump: I try and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn’t matter—like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter.44
One of the most horrific realizations when your government is hijacked from the inside is that there is no official to whom you can turn—because it is rare to find an official who cannot be turned by a corrupt operator. Living for legacy, living for security, living for money—it makes no difference, they are not living for you. There had been a coup, and we were on our own.
Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.
