The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

A Putin cheerleader of long standing, he had written him a mash note in 2007 after the Russian was named Time’s Person of the Year, an honor Trump himself craved. “You definitely deserve it,” Trump gushed, adding, “As you probably have heard, I am a big fan of yours!”[3] For years, Trump had tried to build a tower with his name on it in Moscow potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Ever since American banks stopped doing business with him because he was so unreliable, Trump had been financed by Deutsche Bank, the German institution with close ties to Russia. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. said in 2008.[4] Five years later, Eric Trump reportedly said the family did not need American banks because “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”[5] In 2008, the future president sold a massive Palm Beach beachfront mansion complete with art gallery, ballroom, and forty-eight-car garage that he had bought for $41 million to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, an astonishing profit that drew plenty of suspicion.[6] Even then, he tried to keep the buyer’s nationality secret. “Don’t say Russian,” he asked a reporter at the time.[7] Buyers tied to Russia and other former Soviet republics separately made eighty-six purchases of Trump-branded condominiums in New York and Florida for a total of nearly $109 million—all in cash.[8] In 2013, the future president brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow and tried ...