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Trump: Putin’s Manchurian Candidate?
The Daily Beast
In light of the DNC hack (which digital signatures point to Russia), we would expect the Democrats to divert attention from their embarrassing emails confirming Trump and Bernie’s accusations of a ‘rigged system’. Schadenfreude for the Right, indeed.
However, as the Left’s automatic impulse to shift the narrative of DSW’s fall from grace, they are pointing to shinier squirrels which may have a more significant impact on the 2016 election. Their story is slowly gaining an audience and being analyzed by many on the center-right, although don’t expect to hear much about it this week during the DNC celebration of government largesse.
The story about Trumps and Putin’s relationship has been bantered about for almost a year. Some refer to Trumps admiration of Putin’s authoritarian style of rule, others (such as Clinton campaign manager wunderkind Robbie Mook) pointed out the emails were leaked “by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump” citing “experts” but offering no other evidence”.
Another former democratic wunderkind referred to the rumors and posed the question directly: “Are there any ties between Mr. Trump, you or your campaign and Putin and his regime?” George Stephanopoulos, of “This Week,” asked Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman. “No, there are not,” Mr. Manafort shot back. “That’s absurd. And, you know, there’s no basis to it.”
The Left have decided to dig much deeper into this. Articles point to Trump as one of many opportunists who tried to cash in on Russia’s dismantled economy starting in the late 80’s. Western businessmen treated Russia as the new gold rush and some instantly became billionaires. However in 1998 many investors were destroyed as the economy collapsed into a massive financial crisis. Reports of western businessmen being gunned down by contract killings which were rumored to be connected to the Moscow government scared much of the Western business interests away.
Then in 2000 commodity prices and oil started to skyrocket. Moscow was suddenly filled with luxury cars, high-end restaurants and night clubs. Luxury hotels were the rage and as commodity prices continued to only go up, everyone wanted back in. Re-enter Donald Trump whose gold-leafed stylings were a dove-tail joint for Moscow’s gaudy chic.
In an effort to venture beyond the conservative echo chamber, I’ll point to the Left-leaning Talking Points Memo which laid out a long list of “basic facts”. (Bold inserted for quicker reading). Please see below for the muted response from the Right.
1. All the other discussions of Trump’s finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.
2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here’s a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration …
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump’s largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that’s not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,
“Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.”
Another suit alleged the project “occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia.”
Sounds completely legit.
Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you’re keeping score at home: no, that’s not reassuring.
4. Then there’s Paul Manafort, Trump’s nominal ‘campaign chair’ who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump’s campaign.
5. Trump’s foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you’re not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom’s role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin’s policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.
6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.
7. Here’s where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump’s larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM’s Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there’s a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump’s backing but because he simply didn’t care. With one big exception: Trump’s team mobilized the nominee’s traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it’s worth (and it’s not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue – in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform – speaks volumes.
This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin’s orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.
Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin’s positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump’s suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.
There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I’ve wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.
The Hill, a right-leaning publication refers to Russian investments into Trumps’ assets. It raises the question for Conservatives that if this was the Clinton’s there would be likely investigations.
Has the Russian money and Moscow ties had consequences and does it shape candidate Trump’s foreign-policy thinking or that of the advice he receives from his aides? It is certainly a question that would be asked — and rightly so — of Hillary Clinton, if the shoe was on the other foot. Saudi donations to the Clinton Global Initiative have come under scrutiny, as well they should.
Other pressing questions present themselves. Has the U.S. election cycle been targeted by the Russians for ‘active measures? The hacking in mid-June of Democrat National Committee computers and the stealing of opposition research on Donald Trump by, according to some experts, Russian intelligence-linked groups is a clear sign for some analysts such as Anders Aslund of the Atlantic Council that Putin is engaged in “active measures in [the] U.S. presidential campaign.”
So, is it a case of leftist journo’s creating a narrative where there is none, or is there really something to this?
In other words, is where there’s smoked herring, there’s caviar?
Published in General
Dave, I don’t have good answers to your well posited questions.
Your scenario(s) seem plausible. What I am unsure of is what benefit does Trump offer that Hillary does not? I am not aware of her being some kind of Ukraine hawk.
Oh, I hate this year!
Just when I think I’ve made peace with it, there’s always some new gaffe (opinion?) or revelation that stirs the bile and starts the gag reflex anew.
Good questions. I guess my thoughts are that Trump better be an American president first and that any signs of outlandish favors to Russia in his presidency should be met with hearings / impeachment.
No matter how bad this is, the corruption taint on Hillary is worse so it should be a fun topic.
It’s worthy of further inquiry. We wouldn’t want an American president to be played like a puppet.
I knew about the Manafort and Wikileaks stuff. I didn’t know about the Russians lending Trump that much. So now you’re telling me there’s a nonzero chance that in 2017 President Trump will be simultaneously negotiating a sovereign-debt default with China and business debt default with Russia?
At least he wrote the book on negotiating.
Thanks @brentb67. Hillary was the author of the much celebrated but failed “Russian Reset”. That idealism represented by her stupid Staples ‘that was easy’ red button, says more about her disillusionment. All show and marketing, no steak.
Meanwhile, the question is, what do Putin and Co. have on Trump.
Considering Russia’s ability to dump treasuries and a being nuclear super power, I’m not sure we are in tin-foil hat territory asking these questions.
Putin, when asked to comment, remarked “At this point, what difference does it make?” But in Russian, and more menacingly.
But seriously, cui bono aside, I don’t think there is hard evidence that it was Russia, per se, but that it probably involved Russians. Russians being quite excellent when it comes to cybercrime and also cybersecurity.
So I’m not quite sold on the idea that Russia itself did this.
Manchurian candidate? Nah. Useful idiot? Certainly. On this one issue, which I personally rank very high on my priorities list Clinton, for all her awfulness has managed to come out looking like less of a liability. Trumps flirtations with Putin and attitude to NATO actually makes me fear he will retroactively lose us the Cold War. This election is so darn depressing, and frightening.
We are in the tinfoil hat presidential race of all time baby. Soylent Green is people….ahhhhhh.
Nothing should be off the table in terms of discussing anything about fitness for office and the complications of both of these flawed people.
Putin has financial leverage on Trump to some degree and possibly some shady business issues.
We are definitely not in tin foil hat territory. This is the kind of stuff we deal with at NSIC. This is all very plausible.
We do know at least the first tranche of what Putin has on Hillary.
As far as Manchurian, that’s the current president. He was a set up for Wall St all along and most people don’t know that.
Will these nevertrumpers ever give up? Who cares if he’s a Russian puppet. Who cares about the Balkans and Ukraine. Who cares about his tax returns. At least he’s not Hillary.
Vote Trump for President!
I care and I’ll support his impeachment if it’s merited.
Thanks Jay. I find the continual solace of referencing the separation of powers a stark reminder of the sadness that is 2016.
Could Putin exert influence over Trump by threatening to pauperize him personally? If the financial connections run as deep as this indicates we could have a President personally indebted to a foreign power. Yikes.
Between Mr. Trump’s remarks a few days ago, and those from his would-be Secretary of State, you can’t help but wonder if there is a quid pro quo between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin regarding the Baltic states. The deal: a future President Trump would turn America’s back on the Baltic states in return for monetary and other assistance from Mr. Putin’s friends and the Russian FSB during the election campaign. If so I would warn Mr. Putin ahead of time that Mr. Trump is not known for honouring his business agreements.
Two years ago this would have been tin foil hat stuff but no longer. When the facts lead a certain way you have no choice but to at least have a look in that direction.
There’s an alternate universe where Clinton ran for President to get herself a pardon and Trump ran for President to get himself a bailout. It’s very similar to our own, only Clinton is less ambitious.
The NATO stuff is truly scary. Per usual Trump has taken a legitimate point: some NATO allies don’t live up to their treaty obligations, and Trumped all over it by unilaterally declaring he would not honor the treaty with those states. This would have the side effect of weakening the treaty and commitment of all states in the treaty effectively ending NATO.
You are all forgetting the eternal truth of trump. He fights! That is all that matters.
Julian Assange is claiming that the documents which the DNC claim came from Russian hacking were NOT part of the WikiLeaks release:
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wikileaks-julian-assange-no-proof-hacked-dnc-emails-came-russia-n616541
It’s Julian Assange, so take it for what it’s worth.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
Well, if they’re not honoring the treaty, why should the US honor the treaty?
If you want to get them to honor the treaty, what tactic would you use other than threatening to pull out of the treaty?
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
I certainly wouldn’t announce to the whole world that if you invade our NATO allies we will have to check on their accounts before defending them.
I would tell them privately that we really need to see them up their game or we might have to rethink our commitments.
Threaten to expel them from NATO. Once you say you won’t hold up your end for any reason then what expectation do other countries have that you will honor the treaty when called?
Isn’t that what the US has already been doing for decades with little result?
Yabbut, how would you expel them when they control the majority of the votes around the NATO boardroom table?
If so, then it is time to rethink our commitments, again, privately.
The Baltic states do not control the majority of the votes.
@jamielockett Yes, that’s the crux of it. You did in one sentence what my laborious page and a half post did… Concise was never my strong suit.
You could have said, “Concise? Not me.”
Try addressing the issues. I did and it helps further the conversation.
I also hit the heart button cuz I heart this post.