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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
I hear and understand your position, and thanks for your direct reply.
My only problem is timing. AFTER we prevent Hillary from abusing our country further with her Alinsky tactics and amoral policies, then we can collaborate with Trump and help him be a good leader.
And parenthetically, after all, NATO is simply a good economic deal for Europe, and he’s questioning the wisdom of this asymmetrical deal. Especially after Ronaldus Maximus and the Iron Lady crippled Soviet communism, NATO became only a financial tool for European countries to have Joe the Plumber fund their security.
I love learning new words.
I’m telling a relatively Never Trump kind of person that if our next president sells the country out I’ll support his impeachment. I am not suggesting that it’s warranted in any fashion now. There are reasonable people opposed to Trump here and letting them know I’d be one of those to hold him accountable for treason is important.
I think this whole issue is the left’s McCarthyist machinations with some truth but greatly expanded. I think we should have impeached the current president and I’m positive a president Clinton should be impeached too. I am now in essence a Trump supporter but that doesn’t mean the man shouldn’t heed the warnings about future selfishness at the expense of America. I expect him to take the office seriously. I hope he does and he has my vote.
Yes I hear myself. Damn voices.
Here’s a response to this story, from a non-Trump supporter: https://medium.com/@jeffreycarr/fact-checking-that-trump-putin-thing-8ed9fd850d40#.s7morvph6
His verdict: 2 out of 7 claims are correct.
Anyway, I take this post as yet more evidence that some fraction of the nevertrump fringe is going to end up going full leftist, seeing the enthusiasm this idea that Trump is a Russian puppet has received.
Of course, this all came about because a huge batch of damaging emails were released about the democrats, which of course generated the usual leftist response to look for a way to blame a Republican for their embarrassing failure, even if that makes no sense at all.
In this case Trump is somehow responsible for the matter, because crazy. So by all means don’t talk about what was in emails, and how Sanders supporters were betrayed by the democrat party establishment.
Nope. Blame the demon Trump, because nevertrump.
Meanwhile, the untold and unknown amounts of money various foreign governments have spent to influence US policy, including such examples as the illegal money China gave Bill Clinton to beat Bob Dole, or the money Saudi Arabia has reportedly given Hillary Clinton now- the GOP responded with the thunderous roar of a trillion disinterested crickets.
But yeah, Trump’s the bad guy.
Sobering but I don’t know which way the leverage works. He owes them money? Maybe not a good place for them to be. On the other hand the Russian government has the goods and leverage on Hillary if they’ve hacked her. Under all scenarios, even if one of our conservatives had won the nomination, we have to approach foreign policy from zero. Nato was essential, it projected an important image and the reality of the US nuclear umbrella. The cold war is over. Like all bureaucratic enterprises NATO became layered, top heavy, staff heavy and if there had really been a war, we’d have tossed that apparatus and pulled together something else. Russia is a challenge to its neighbors and that should concern it’s neighbors, Europe and us. Even more so our relations with China. They are and will always be each other’s major threat so we have to consider foreign and security policy toward them together. That requires a foreign policy. We haven’t had one since the wall fell. So Trump is beginning from zero. That’s further ahead than Hilary who’d have to go back, toss all liberal advisors, and rethink every leftist shibboleth. Hillary and the Democrats are the existential threat, not Russia and maybe China eventually but that’s another story entirely that has to do with our own dynamism, which is being stultified by progressive policies.
Is any of it actually true?
Since we are getting into fruitcake tinfoil hat theories:
Its equally likely that Mosad did it as payback for the meddling in israeli elections by Obama.
Are the Russians going to be paying for our wall now?
This has been discussed elsewhere in this thread.
I, too, read this purported debunking of the ‘facts.’
By the time I finished the article, though, it looked to me as if its author was actually agreeing with most of the assertions he had set out to disprove.
Odd.
Ummm…if this is your major concern, perhaps you should stop for a second and actually listen to some of the things your guy is saying.
Well, here are his conclusions.
She, I don’t know how you can conclude the author agrees with most of the assertions after writing that.
Unless Trump must always be the bad guy, always because nevertrump.
Is that your argument?
I used “leftist” only because I didn’t want to again befuddle all the people who don’t understand what “globalist” means, which would have made me think I needed to expend many scarce words attempting to explain to them that commonly used term.
I didn’t feel like doing it then, and I don’t feel like doing it now.
From the OP:
The Hill is a right-leaning publication? For me, that’s one of the most shocking statement in the post.
If all this evidence has been compiled from ‘right-leaning publications’ like The Hill, then I question the facts and the objectivity of the sources.
So we have to vote for the candidate before we read his tax returns? Sounds like the obamacare bill. That worked out well.
Who doesn’t understand what ‘globalist’ means? I’m not being flip here, I just didn’t realize this was all that misunderstood of a term. If your main cause is anti-globalization, Trump’s clearly your guy (now that Bernie’s out of the race). It’s the one thing he’s been consistent on.
It just seems a misuse of terms to say that the anti-Trump Republicans are the ones turning “leftist” when Trump’s position on Globalization tracks most closely with the declared socialist candidate.
Let me remind you that Estonia (one of the Baltic countries) is one of the few NATO countries to meet the 2% GDP defence spending requirement. It also sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. And Estonia’s troops are in safe spots but consistently in places with the hardest fighting, like Falujah.
For instance, in Afghanistan, Estonia suffered the second highest casualty rate per population. Second only to Canada!
So Estonia IS meeting its NATO obligation sir.
It also doesn’t make much sense given that most anti-Trump people around here are staunchly opposed to supra-national government.
I confess I don’t know what globalist means. There was a post war foreign policy establishment that adopted containment, built NATO, the EC, the IMF , and GATT and attempted to shore up places we thought were vulnerable to Soviet penetration. It was bi partisan. We stumbled a lot, especially in the third world, but learned. It began to fray as the Democrats moved left in a great variety of ways, as the post war foreign policy leaders were replaced by careerists, bureaucracies “experts” and think tanks, and memories faded. By the time the dust settled from the falling wall and we needed to rethink foreign policy, we lacked the focus needed to have a global vision. I must confess it is difficult to have a foreign policy establishment and a global vision when the media is illiterate about the world, the economy, and post war history and there is no leadership from the White House. It’s all false narratives spun from the left and empty short term politics which means media management, photo ops and postures. What in this generalized Federal dysfunction is globalist?
For those of you just tuning in, here’s a summary of this latest subplot in our continuing national soap opera:
1. Trump has investments in Russia and/or the Russians have investments in Trump
2. These investments may, or may not, have led Trump to:
– Say nice things about Putin
– Back away from NATO
– State that he might not defend the Baltic States if Russia attacks
– Soften the GOP platform’s wording on arming Ukraine
3. These investments may, or may not, have led Putin to hack the DNC and give its dirty laundry to Wikileaks
The #EverTrumper response is:
– Obama and Clinton did bad things
– The GOPe didn’t stop them from doing bad things
– Therefore Trump is a good guy and, even if he’s not, he’s the GOPe’s fault
Bottom line: We know that the Russians can buy Hillary (see Uranium Deal), and it just may be that they can buy Trump as well. Super.
The GOP has made an industry of exposing and decrying every facet of Clinton corruption for twenty five years (heck, even making a bunch of it up along the way) and tried everything they could to pin them down each time. I know I was marinated in the stuff growing up. I even seem to remember a whole impeachment affair if I’m not mistaken.
Yes the Clintons are very bad guys for putting themselves in such corrupted and compromised positions. Therefore is Trump also not a very bad guy for putting himself in very similar positions?
Read the whole thing. Many of the arguments and ‘facts’ that he states in his analysis are less black and white than what he states in his conclusions.
Also, please do not make the mistake of thinking that I cannot walk and chew gum simultaneously, or that I cannot hold in my head two contradictory thoughts at the same time.
That is the tragic flaw of all those who will not hear a word against their preferred candidate, and among whom any criticism of said candidate is a call to arms, a nail that must be pounded down, as is demonstrated time and again to the point of tooth-numbing tedium, here on Ricochet.
“You dare to criticize Trump!!” “You must support Hillary.”
Nah.
First of all, I can’t vote.
Second, I’m too smart than to fall into that trap.
Third, it’s just boring, and you can do better.
Stop it, please.
In a policy vacuum, no foreign policy, no vision, no direction and billions of dollars to spend, like everyone else and every other sector, those wanting to have some influence, must buy it, including foreign interests. That is how it works. Government is always corrupt, that’s how it operates and big rich government is more corrupt and big rich directionless government is offers the ultimate in corruption. In domestic policy we could just dismantled most of what Washington pretends to do, and if not, at least spread the corruption around by sending it to the states where some might get it right. Foreign and security policy is one of the few things Washington is supposed to and must do. It can be trimmed but it can’t be dismantled. How and what to trim requires a vision of what it is we want to do in this post cold war disintegrating post cold war world. We require a foreign policy vision even if not bi partisan as it was in the immediate post war world, and in the absence of such it’s for sale to domestic and foreign interests. The current foreign policy is best characterized by entropy. It will always be ordered chaos, but entropy doesn’t really catch that notion.
Is The Donald controlled by Putin, a man with a visceral hatred for America?
Well, just for starters, during this campaign Trump has already destabilized American policy towards Eastern Europe. If you a head of State right now in Eastern Europe, how reliable would you believe America to be towards it’s commitments with Trump leading in the polls? Not very reliable, in fact, downright, on the wrong side. With his influence as the Republican nominee, and his comments towards NATO and Eastern Europe, in my book Trump is already a Traitor.
Trump’s never ending connections to Mafia sleaze around the world, including the biggest Mafia Don of them all, Vlad Putin, is just mind-bongling. First, it was the Genoveses and the Gambinos for his first Trump Tower close to forty years ago, and then not in too short order, the Trump makes connections with the most lethal crime familyof them all- the Russians.
Trump is a vengeful, troubled narcissistic psychopath with very skewed priorities who always puts the Donald first, including his personal assets, above everything else. With these loans and investments from Russia and Putin, you should know already who really is in real control of Trump’s assets, and a little hint- it’s not Trump. Trump already has a gun to his head. So you are telling me Trump will not do Putin’s bidding at the drop of a hat?
The Deal has already been made -Trump has already sold out America.
The fact that this is such a dominant topic, instead of the actual covert actions of the DNC as revealed by their emails, shows how gifted the left is at steering the conversation. We could be discussing how to use their exposed deceit and voter manipulation to help our nominee, how to gain Bernie voters, etc. Instead, many have chosen to deploy our finely-tuned R> purity divining rod out trying to determine exactly how sincere a Putin stooge Trump is.
Squirrel!!!!!
How would you propose that conservatives persuade hard core socialists into voting Republican?
You could have admitted up front that you’re so smart. Could have saved many of us from wasting mental energy.
Why would I propose tilting at windmills? Hard core means hard core, by definition being immune to argument. Besides, my dog hates squirrels with white-hot intensity, as they are nefarious and diligent in their taunting behavior.
There are many other far more productive pursuits to increase our share of the vote, such as working to eliminate vote fraud. Once we have elected somebody who might actually select an attorney general that upholds the law, that effort could bear important fruit.
Kinda reminds me of a situation where someone gets caught cheating, but the real problem™ is the lack of trust where the partner checked phone records, and that person’s motives!
There is a veritable feast of dirty laundry to sift through and put on display to the world, and all some wish to discuss is how only the United States is allowed to meddle in foreign elections.
I’ll bet someone has similar RNC emails (or could get them if they wanted to), but they’re just too boring to release.
Perhaps we should have, instead of tax returns from candidates, mandatory email hacks for each major candidate’s PACs, the campaign itself, and national organization. It would sure be more fun than repeating the conversation about how convoluted our tax laws are.
You literally just said we should be trying to gain Bernie voters, so how will you persuade these socialists?
@jordan, You get the award for insightful revelation of a sanguine truth. Well done!
You can’t sneak around your original mention, literally, of hard-core so easily. Bernie voters are not hard-core, but are malleable, emotionally fraught left end of the Bell Curve type voters, and only numbers matter in elections.
The squirrel has escaped unscathed. Huzzah!