With the country (and the world) two full years into
the Trumpian captivity, a pause for reflection and taking stock is in
order. How quaint seem the initial hopes
that the gravity and solemnity of the nation’s highest office would tame this monster’s
worst instincts and traits!
Cheeto Head entered office under a cloud of suspicion that
has become a storm. For reasons that are
still being sorted out, Trump managed to make it all the way to election day (and
shortly beyond) without the country learning about the existence of a
counterintelligence investigation into his campaign’s complicity ("if any") with Russia’s
theft – and Wikileaks’ disclosure – of the DNC-Podesta e-mails.
Only after we were stuck with him did the world learn of
some truly alarming possibilities – not the least of which was the scenario sketched
out in the raw HUMINT collected by Christopher Steele.
I read those raw HUMINT reports the day Buzzfeed published them and immediately thought to myself: “Jesus Christ! If even ten percent of this stuff is true . . .”
A very highly placed Kremlin insider, one Oleg Erovinkin,
is now widely believed to have been a key source for Steele’s reporting. When he turned up dead shortly after
Buzzfeed published Steele’s misnamed “dossier,” I concluded along with the rest
of sentient humanity that a bit more than ten percent of that raw HUMINT is
probably all too accurate. Steele, an experienced
former spy and a Russia specialist, estimated that his unnamed Russian sources
are only about 75% accurate (with 25% feeding disinformation). In the intervening two years, none of the key
claims made by those sources have been disproved while many have been confirmed.
The worst version of what happened to us in the summer
and fall of 2016 is almost beyond imagining: active collaboration between the
Kremlin and the Trump campaign, with Trump’s full knowledge and consent, in
exchange for some combination of political and financial rewards flowing both
ways. For the Kremlin: a more favorable
policy towards Russia (something I would have strongly favored in any other normal
context) and the lifting of economic sanctions, Magnitsky and otherwise,
against Vladimir Putin and his cronies. For
Trump: clandestine and illegal help with the election and a business deal for a
Trump Tower Moscow worth as much as hundreds of millions. (The very recent reporting that
Michael Cohen’s cell phone was pinging cell towers in Prague at the very time
that Steele’s sources say Cohen was in Prague arranging payments to Russian
hackers will, I think, if ultimately confirmed, prove to be game, set, match
for Donald Trump.)
Getting to the bottom of this possible conspiracy was
– and is – of utmost importance. Could
there be any greater threat to national security than an American President compromised
by, or beholden to, a country that has been a geopolitical competitor for a
century? That much should have been obvious and uncontroversial to everyone –
especially flag-waving Republicans. And
yet, on a long list of depressing events that have transpired over the past two
years, watching about one-half of my fellow countrymen take the view that Trump-Russia
is not even worth investigating is at
the very top.
The public knows much more today than it did two years
ago. The reasonable conventional wisdom
is that the Special Counsel knows a great deal more – none of it good for the
President. And yet, just the public scandals that have come to light since
the Narcissist-In-Chief became the world’s most scrutinized man are so numerous
and convoluted that careful and conscientious news consumers are at risk of
drowning in a tsunami of confusing details.
Second on that long & depressing list is the realization that single scandals of comparatively minor seriousness used to end political
careers abruptly, whereas, in Trump’s case, we learn almost weekly of new major scandals – any one of which would
have been a political death knell in normal times. Yet, there he remains, rage tweeting his bile
at all who challenge him, to the shame and embarrassment and genuine risk to our
country. Third on the long &
depressing list is the degree to which even harsh critics, to say nothing of
the general public, are growing numb to all of it. Stay awake, people!
Modern partisan warfare perhaps makes too much of the
exasperated trope “what if [the other guy] had done that?!?” But in Trump’s case, it really seems more
than fair to wonder what would have happened if any of his predecessors had
done any one of the following: (i)
paid hush money to a porn star weeks before an election, (ii) received $400
million in illegal tax-free transfers from his father, (iii) disclosed highly classified
information to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office the day after
firing the FBI director for insufficient “loyalty,” (iv) paid $25 million to
settle a civil fraud case alleging the bilking of consumers with phony get-rich-quick
schemes (Trump University), (v) ran a private charity as an illegal tax-free
slush fund, (vi) established secret back-channels to Russian and Emirati
officials during the presidential transition, (vii) received $30 million in
campaign contributions from the Russian-infiltrated National Rifle Association,
(viii) collected unheard of sums of money for his inaugural fund, the sources
and destination of which are now shrouded in suspicion, (ix) hired the most
corrupt cabinet possibly in American history, (x) praised neo-Nazi thugs after
one of their number murdered an innocent protester, (xi) accepted millions in
private profits paid by foreigners to his various businesses in violation of
the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, (xii) covered for a grizzly
murder ordered by a foreign tyrant, in this case, Mohammed Bone Saw, (xiii) sided
with Vladimir Putin’s denials of election interference while publicly calling
into doubt the contrary assessments of his own intelligence experts, (xiv) hired
illegal immigrants at one of his golf resorts under circumstances involving
forged immigration documents (per reporting just this weekend), and (xv)
generally demonstrated consciousness of guilt with his repeated and unprecedented
attacks on the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Special Counsel
investigating him.
The above is just a partial list rattled off from
memory as I sit here at my keyboard. Yet
even this partial list is enough to take your breath away.
These swirling scandals – some related to each other
and others probably independent – all appear to have financial greed & corruption
somewhere at their core. Americans are
learning in depressing detail what the New York business world has known for decades:
at root, Donald Trump is a common thief on an uncommon scale. Shame on major press outlets like The New York
Times for not reporting during the election the business community’s open secret
that Donald Trump is almost certainly a career financial criminal. Want to be
depressed by how the New York establishment enabled Donald Trump for decades? Read this.
Welp, better late than never, I suppose. With all we now know, the chances that the
sitting American President has not been up to his eyeballs in white collar
crime, very possibly Mafia-related (first Italian, then Russian), for his
entire adult life seem vanishingly small.
His three oldest children, Don Jr., Eric, and the truly God-awful Ivanka
appear to be chips off the old block.
Disclaiming any crystal balls, 2019 is shaping up to
be the Year of Reckoning for one Donald John Trump, his spawn, and the cast of
cartoon characters surrounding them (e.g. Jared Kushner, Roger Stone, etc.). I think financial corruption exposed by the
New York Attorney General’s office or the federal prosecutors in Manhattan will
get this rogue’s gallery before Mueller does.
But I think Mueller will eventually get them, too – leaving the theocrat
Mike Pence to mind the store for about a year as history’s greatest ever lame duck. Our nation will then have a great deal of
soul searching and house cleaning to do – that is, after the collective hot
showers, the initial celebrations, and the orgies of schadenfreude.
Certain cable news outlets, Democratic partisans, and
anti-Trump Twitter celebrities have received a great deal of grief and criticism
for following every twist and turn in the Trump-Russia saga at the expense of
other important stories. I do not agree
with this criticism. The media landscape
is broad and diverse. There are plenty
of news organizations reporting other news.
It is the easiest thing in the world to follow the BBC on Twitter. As already noted, the worst possible version
of Trump-Russia is truly staggering. The
story deserves all of the investigatory attention (Mueller, SDNY, NY AG, incoming
Democrats) and all of the news coverage it is receiving. We can walk and chew gum at the same time,
people. News consumers, like yours
truly, who want to be informed about other important stories know how to turn
off MSNBC and to open an issue of The Economist or any other reputable
newspaper that continues to cover world and national events as before. The national conversation can endure a few Trump
obsessed outlets.
There is one point of criticism that the CNNs and MSNBCs
of the media landscape perhaps deserve.
There has been a tendency to treat each new major revelation as the “turning point” or the “walls closing in” moment. (YouTube progressive
gadfly Jimmy Dore recently highlighted this hilarious video mash-up of such
coverage.)
Contra Jimmy Dore, however, there have been some actual
major turning points. The most significant
of these, in my view, was the raid on Michael Cohen’s office earlier this year
and the former Hannity lawyer’s subsequent decision to cooperate with Robert Mueller.
There are good reasons to suspect that Michael Cohen has
his own connections to Ukrainian mob figures from long before he ever met
Donald Trump. His relatives in Queens have
been long suspected of connections to Ukrainian mobsters. And his recent TV lawyer, Lanny Davis, has represented
a Ukrainian oligarch with close connections to the notorious and violent mobster
Semion Mogilevich. Indeed, one wonders
what else could explain the strange fact of a long-time Clinton loyalist coming
out of the woodworks to represent someone like Michael Cohen. Did he need to be managed? Or warned?
If there is anything substantive to Cohen’s reputed Ukrainian mob connections,
then his unwillingness to cooperate fully with the SNDY investigation on the white-collar-crime
side of things, as opposed to his more robust cooperation with Mueller on
Russian collusion, makes perfect sense. Three
years in prison is certainly preferable to seeing your family get whacked as
revenge for ratting out routine money laundering. (Consider, in this context, Trump’s tweet
calling Cohen a “rat” – a classic mob term.)
I am an unapologetic Russophile. The summer after ninth grade (1982), I took a six-week
class in the Russian language that first gave me the Russia bug. In college, I
majored in something the U.S. Air Force Academy used to call “Soviet Area
Studies” and minored in the Russian language.
I have a lifelong fascination with the country, its history & culture,
and its unique and important geopolitical position between East and West. The woman I love most in the whole world grew
up in the Soviet Union and is now a dual Russian-American citizen. I traveled to Russia with her in the summer
of 2017 and found it to be as fascinating a place as I could have ever hoped. St. Petersburg must be on everyone’s short
list of the most beautiful cities in the world. You have not known hospitality
until you have had three Russian ladies of modest means try to force copious
amounts of food and vodka on you. You
have not known sensual pleasure until you have spent time in a rural Russian
banya (sauna). Long term, I wish for better relations between our countries. NATO expansion was a grave error and an
unnecessary stick in the eye to a justly proud nation having ample historical
justification to worry about invasion. I
fear the New Cold War being pushed by the West’s militant Russophobes (some of whose
scholarship I actually greatly admire, e.g.
Anne Applebaum). Garry Kasparov’s raving and ranting -- to cite one example -- is just interminable.
And yet . . . and yet.
Russia has been poorly governed for much of its
history. It is currently an
authoritarian kleptocracy. (Its citizens
all know this, by the way; they are not stupid; they just greatly prefer the
present regime to those that came before.) And although even corrupt
kleptocracies can have legitimate national security concerns (as Russia certainly does), any Americans who
conspired with Russian intelligence to interfere with an American presidential
election are traitors who must be prosecuted and punished. If, in the process
of smoking out these fucking traitors, American law enforcement uncovers decades
of financial corruption by Donald Trump and his family – so much the better. At its core, Trump-Russia is a financial scandal and very possibly a mob scandal.
I look forward to seeing the President and his
children in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits before this time next year.
No predictions, though. Time alone will tell.
