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Trump-splaining Ukraine
President Trump and Ukraine and the Bidens seem to be in all the news stories these days. But, if you don’t know how Trump thinks, then you won’t understand what you are hearing and reading. This short write-up is a primer on the mind of Trump.
For Trump, Ukraine didn’t matter until 2016, when two very important events occurred. The first was in August after Paul Manafort had recently been named chair of candidate Trump’s campaign committee. Someone in Ukraine (Serhiy Leshchenko) published in Ukraine papers and the New York Times that Paul Manafort had taken $12.7M in secret payments. These were in a “Black Ledger”, which was suspiciously found years after the previous Ukrainian leader was ousted. The controversy led to Manafort resigning and Donald Trump had his first taste of a foreign country attempting to sabotage his campaign. From Politico:
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency — and publicized by a parliamentarian — appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.
The second and more important thing to happen occurred on November 10th. The day after the day after the election, instead of being gracious after the loss, Hillary Clinton claimed that Trump cheated and was not a legitimate president. This was based primarily on Trump “collaborating” with Russia to “hack” DNC emails and release them via WikiLeaks. This was unprecedented in American history. Never before had a loser in the presidential election claimed that the winner was illegitimate. From the NY Post:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign didn’t just pay for the Kremlin-aided smear job on Donald Trump before the election; she continued to use the dirt after the election to frame her humiliating loss as a Russian conspiracy to steal the election.
Bitter to the core, she and her campaign aides hatched a scheme, just 24 hours after conceding the race, to spoon-feed the dirty rumors to an eager liberal media and manufacture the narrative that Russia secretly colluded with her neophyte foe to sabotage her coronation.
Trump is a winner. That’s his brand and Hillary and DNC undermining his victory/legitimacy robs him of the greatest accomplishment possible. It also undermines his ability to govern and is very divisive for the country. Any of those three reasons is sufficient to fight back and re-establish the his legitimacy.
The first thing Trump probably heard was that the DNC email hack was probably not done by the Russians. The determination of the supposed hack was not done by the FBI or CIA, but by a private cyber-security firm called CrowdStrike (co-founded by Dimitri Alperovitch). Their determination was “probably Russian” based on information of who had a motive more than cyber analysis. Dimitri Alperovitch has ties to Ukrainian nationalists and a reputation for finding Russian hacking, when called to investigate. Basically, some dude with a Russian name (Dimitri Alperovitch) and extensive Ukrainian ties is the keystone for the Russian collusion story. Meanwhile independent experts and WikiLeaks are saying it was a DNC insider.
By the time inauguration day rolls around the Dems and the Media are full on with the Russia Collusion hoax. Trump calls his attorney (Rudy Giuliani) and he sets to work to undermine the collusion hoax. To do this, he heads to Ukraine to unwrap things from the beginning. Gee, that op-ed by the Ukrainian ambassador to the US written in August of 2016 seems like meddling in hindsight. Once in Ukraine, Rudy learns about the two Ukrainians that were convicted of helping Hillary’s campaign by releasing the Black Ledger publicly. More meddling. And the fired Ukrainian prosecutor that complained about the US embassy giving him a list of names to not investigate. There are stories of billions of dollars in US and international aid being misappropriated or simply disappearing. There are also stories of big payments to Hunter Biden from the very corrupt Ukraine national gas company Burisma.
Trump is hearing that everything in Ukraine is corrupt. Rudy Giuliani, the mob prosecutor of New York, is shocked by the scale of it all. Rudy is unable to get documents from Ukraine to the DOJ, because he is blocked by the US Embassy. Trump ran on a promise to “drain the swamp”, but it seems the swamp stretches from the FBI, CIA, State Dept., all the way to Kiev. All the agencies are headed by Obama holdovers, so Trump has to wait until conditions change. Those conditions change in 2019, the Mueller probe ends and Trump can put his own personnel into place, Ukraine gets a new president that genuinely seems to want to end corruption, and Trump has an Attorney General that wants to protect the Constitution and Article II.
Knowing the mindset of Trump and knowing what he knows explains everything: the effort to investigate Ukraine corruption; the reluctance to send tax dollars to Ukraine; the distrust of the new Ukrainian president until he could be vetted by phone calls and people that Trump trusts; the email server mentioned in the phone call (surely that was destroyed in 2016, hello BleachBit); why Trump used “unofficial” channels; …
If you want to go deep down the rabbit hole of the Ukrainian timeline, Look here. For a relevant movie clip from The Matrix, Look here.
Published in Foreign Policy
I want several circles of hell reserved for her.
Rush Limbaugh was the first one I heard bring this up. Trump has become such a caricature that perhaps we forget that he is human and would react as any of us would if robbed of our crowning achievement. I’d be ripping mad.
@dong, what you posted here is what journalism is supposed to be, but almost never is anymore. Good job. One suggestion: In your title, don’t claim to be mind-reading Trump. Just lay out the facts and let the readers draw the conclusion. They will. You can’t miss it.
And here is Sharyl Attkisson doing her own ‘splainin’ …
And yet, Fiona Hill testified that it is a “fictional narrative.”
In my line of work, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
I strongly recommend several books. One is Andy McCarthy’s “Ball of Collusion.”
https://www.amazon.com/Ball-Collusion-Election-Destroy-Presidency/dp/B07XTMSQ7Q/
Another is Lee Smith’s “The Plot Against the President.”
https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-President-Congressman-Uncovered/dp/B07Z46Z329/
It is in numbing detail but the facts are all there.
The third is Kim Strassel’s “Resistance at all costs “
https://www.amazon.com/Resistance-All-Costs-Breaking-America/dp/B07Y43DG8X/
Those are audio versions which we listen to driving between Tucson where we live and LA where a new grand daughter lives.
The Strassel book explains in detail how bureaucrats have tried to sabotage the Trump agenda. If that is not enough, there is the George Papadopoulis book, which explains how he was used by the FBI and CIA to concoct a case.
Why read (or listen) when the shortcut to thinking (i.e. blindly accepting the Democrat narrative as dictated) is so quick and easy.
Thank you, @dong, for this post. The conspiracy is far-reaching but not really complicated. If the media was not in on the putsch this would have been over in a heartbeat.
@dong?
Great summary.
But you left out the part (a) where nothing that makes Obama/Biden/Hillary/DNC/partisan bureaucracy look bad can ever ever be true and (b) Orange Man Bad.
I don’t think that Trump himself fully understands his own mind and taking all that into account, Trump was extremely foolish to speak to Zelensky about a political rival. Not impeachable, but stupid. That pretty much sums up the entire Trump presidency.
Can’t disagree with that.