Donald Trump’s M.O. has been to sell the sizzle not the steak, the promise not the product, and to distract from the con by such misdirection. Overpriced real estate was fool’s gold. A fake University promised success, while picking the students’ pockets, and American was made great for the working man by letting oligarchs loot, pollute, and move jobs and profits overseas.
As a candidate and president, Trump’s misdirection took many fraudulent forms — the Kenyan’s missing birth certificate, crooked Hillary’s emails. Mexican rapists, caravans of invading Middle Eastern terrorists. And now we hear a rising, hysterical crescendo to the familiar refrain — no collusion, conflicts of interest, witch hunt, McCarthyism, anything to illegitimize the investigation by Mueller into Trump’s stolen election and financial crimes.
it is worth recalling what we already know. Vladimir Putin, himself a ruthless, murderous head of a kleptocratic mobster regime, set out to elect a pliant American president and succeeded. His plot involving a dedicated cadre of cyperoperatives working through Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica, Wikileaks, American dupes and collaborators, including many connected to the Trump organization or campaign.
Those with business or other ties to the Russian network of criminal oligarchs include not just members of the Trump family who boasted of their many profitable deals with shady Russians, but campaign manager Paul Manafort, his partner Rick Gates, campaign advisors George Papadopoulos,and Carter Page, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Republican dirty trick artist Roger Stone and conspiracy theory entrepreneur Jerome Corsi — both with connections ro Wikileaks, Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen with family ties to domestic mobsters and business dealings on Trump’s behalf with Russian mobsters.
If Trump won the presidency because he was abetted by the efforts of Russian propagandists who orchestrated the release of stolen emails harmful to his opponent and an internet campaign of hate speech that targeted gullible voters with disinformation, what did Putin get?
Well, a Trump administration willing to change the party platform to go easy on Russia, and a president willing to ignore Kremlin attacks on Ukraine, the murder of its critics, and other atrocities that Clinton, like Obama, would have condemned and sanctioned. Trump, by contrast, has consistently turned a blind eye, praised Putin, and declined to challenge his autocratic behavior at home and abroad, famously in his groveling Summit performance in Helsinki.
Some believe, as the Steele dossier suggested, that Putin has more dirt on Trump than anyone ever provided on Hillary, and that it has allowed him to control a President of the United States by blackmail. It’s not impossible, but it is also possible that Trump is just conducting business as usual, cheerfully working with another kleptocrat that he admires for being tough, smart, rich, and strong, all the things he claims to be — and isn’t.
Until Mueller penetrates the Trump organization’s business practices, reveals his tax returns, and follows the money, we won’t know the full extent of the president’s corruption. We do know that Manafort was convicted of tax crimes, bank fraud, money laundering and so forth. And he was small scale player compared to Trump.
We also now know that Manafort’s plea deal in exchange for cooperation wth the investigation was a Trojan Horse. Instead of cooperating with Mueller, he continued to lie to him
while serving as a mole for Trump, reporting back information on the progress of the probe from the inside. That explains Trump’s recent rants about Mueller’s cruel attempts to bully admitted criminals into fingering the boss.
This clever plan is about to backfire spectacularly. Manafort may now face even more jail time than before the plea deal for the new crime of trying to undermine it. And Trump may find himself culpable of another instance or obstructing justice, as well as the charge of witness tampering.
We also know that dirty money from oligarchs has passed through both the Trump and Kushner family real estate businesses, and that Trump properties have been implicated in money laundering schemes in New York and Florida, and as far afield as Panama and Azerbaijan.
We do know that Trump always said the red line Mueller couldn’t cross was looking into the inner workings of the family business, which ought to have been a tipoff that there was something to hide. Yet Mueller is already there and digging, with the assistance of cooperating witnesses Michael Cohen, the convicted fixer, and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump organizations’s accountant who for decades dealt with mob bosses, oligarchs, crooked unions, politicians, and hush money for bimbos.
No wonder Trump has been yelling hoax, witch hunt and McCarthyism louder and louder lately. It seems obvious that where’s there’s such a copious smokescreen, there must be a hell of a fire that he’s trying to hide from prying eyes, and it threatens to consume his presidency. Perhaps a businessman for president is only good idea if his business is legit.
How have we come to this? Millions of people listened to a grifter and bought the con. Millions more didn’t bother to vote, or did so in spite of his character, because they wanted to believe in the promised tax cut, a return of their long lost jobs, a government willing to discriminate against people of the wrong color, religion or place of origin, a promise to install a reactionary Supreme Court, or to isolate America from a changing world.
As World War II began, W.H. Auden wrote that “the living nations wait,/ Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace/ Stares from every human face,/ And seas of pity lie,/ Locked and frozen in each eye.”
We thought a Putin-style government as criminal conspiracy couldn’t happen here, and then we voted to throw democracy to the wolves, selling, like Esau, our birthright for a mess of pottage.