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How Trump Got Owned By The Russians
And why he says that NATO countries are on their own
BARRY GANDER
FEB 12, 2024
Trump has been destroying America’s interests abroad for a decade, so his recent comment that NATO countries would be on their own if they were attacked by Russia should surprise no one.
At a time when 7 out of 10 Americans think their country should be taking an active interest in world affairs, Trump has been dropping international agreements as if they were infected with Covid…no, faster, because Trump’s inaction on Covid killed 700,000 Americans.
NATO — and of course he does not care about this — is one of the triumphs of American foreign policy. It is the largest military alliance in the world, with a specific focus: Russian aggression. The only qualification for membership is that a nation has to pledge to spend 2% of its GDP on defense. All NATO countries now do this. There are no “membership fees”, which the Orange Hitman raves on about.
When he was president, Trump’s handling of US foreign affairs was so shaky that the Germans, for example, did not know whether the United States (37 percent) or China (36 percent) was their closest partner. Just 28 percent of Britons trusted the United States to act responsibly. Confidence in Trump was only 36 percent in Japan, 32 percent in the United Kingdom, 28 percent in Canada, 28 percent in Brazil, 20 percent in France, 13 percent in Germany, and a mere 8 percent in Mexico, while favorable views of the United States fell from 64 percent in 2016 to 53 percent in 2019.
In Trump’s psyche, to find out why he created this chaos you just have to follow the money.
It’s no secret that Putin is Trump’s boss and paymaster. When Prigozhin came close to toppling Putin, Trump was the only world leader who sounded alarmed and asked the world to help crush Wagner Group.
Putin is protecting an estimated $1.2 trillion of money that he stole from Russia, moved to the West, laundered there and hid it. The never-ending corruption in Russia has helped several immensely wealthy oligarchs prosper. His only goal is to expand his power at all costs. Ratings low? Go to war in Chechnya. Ratings low again? War with Georgia. Ratings low for third time? War with Ukraine.
It was Russian money that saved Trump from bankruptcy many times. And Trump personally is a fan-boy of Putin.
So when Trump promotes the disintegration of NATO, you know on whose behalf he is doing it. His approach not only undermines the credibility of the US but makes an attack on a NATO member more likely. Trump falsely claimed that NATO was “ going down like a roller coaster” when he took over and pretended to have persuaded allies to contribute “hundreds of billions” of dollars more to the alliance. In fact, defense spending in Europe has been rising since the Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years before Trump took office. Trump’s repeated argument that the United States pays up to 90 percent of the costs of defending Europe reflects either deep ignorance about NATO and defense budgeting or, worse, a deliberate attempt to mislead his supporters into turning against the alliance. It also failed to recognize that U.S. spending on NATO — a fraction of the overall defense budget — is not a charity project: European allies provide land, infrastructure, and financial subsidies for American bases that are used to protect U.S. interests not just in Europe but in Africa and the Middle East.
And the majority of Americans — close to 80% — want to increase ties with NATO.
In Asia, he threatened to pull back support for Taiwan to satisfy China. He repeatedly threatened to pull U.S. troops out of Japan and South Korea. In fact, as part of his failed courtship of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump agreed to scale back joint exercises with South Korea — a decision he made without informing the U.S. Defense Department or the South Korean government.
He pulled back support for the democracy protesters in Hong Kong while lavishing praise on China’s Xi.
He ignored opportunities to develop new alliances in Africa and Latin America. He referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House. Africa boasts 1.2 billion consumers, an increasingly innovative and technology-based business environment, and seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world. Now they are part of China’s sphere through its Belt and Road Initiative. Trump threw an entire continent to the autocrats.
In the Middle East he presented a so-called peace plan that had no chance of being adopted and was rejected by the European Union, the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and most other countries around the world. Then he unilaterally moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, outraging the Arab states. Screw them, eh Donald — his base included right-wing American Zionists and evangelicals whose voice was amplified by the devout Christian in the White House, his VP Mike Pence. Who he later tried to throw to he wolves in his uprising in January.
Trump’s interweaving of personal interests with Russian policy is hard to pull apart.
When, for example, FBI agents charged into Trump’s residence and seized boxes of illegally-stowed files, the Russians just sneered. They already knew about the boxes. In fact, their TV coverage boasted that they had already read America’s nuclear weapons secrets.
They have been paying Donald Trump for years. His role is almost indistinguishable from that of an agent of their FSB security agency.
Under Trump the United States announced the unilateral withdrawal of some 10,000 U.S. troops from Germany without consulting or even informing the German government; rejected allies’ pleas that it remain party to the Open Skies arms control treaty; found itself all alone on the United Nations Security Council trying to extend an arms embargo on Iran on dubious legal grounds; alienated all its G-7 allies with a proposal to invite Putin to the group’s next meeting; and terminated its relationship with the World Health Organization during a pandemic, drawing widespread criticism from allies while increasing China’s leverage in that organization.
Structurally in the US, he ran down the U.S. State Department, putting his son-in-law in charge of policies like extracting billions of dollars from the Saudis.
Bill Browder wrote an excellent book on this called Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Putin’s Wrath ( preview here).
It’s a true story of how one man sold his country to a foreign enemy, in pursuit of profits for himself. In fact, he tried to sell other countries as well, like Ukraine and Europe, but did not have quite enough time before he was voted out (for now).
The story of Russia’s entrapment of Donald Trump starts slowly, before the Russians were aware of how promising a dupe he would prove to be.
Putin’s gang took over the Russian economy by stripping assets from the state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom, and creating financial giants controlled by Kremlin favorites. They surrounded Trump long before his White House bid, using him as one of their convenient vehicles through which to funnel funds into the U.S.
Russian billionaire and Putin pal Shalva Tchigirinsky was one of the first to spot Trump’s potential for furthering Putin’s interests.
Shalva Tchigirinsky was one of these players. He was already rich enough to be a casino high roller when he entered Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in November 1990. He liked what he saw. That night, he began to forge a relationship with Trump that evolve into a network of Russian intelligence operatives, organised-crime associates that has clung to Trump since then.
Tchigirinsky pushes back on the ‘organised crime gang,’ label; he said the ‘There’s just a group of people who support and protect each other’.
Like, a gang.
Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov ran a money laundering operation out of Trump Tower, three floors below the Trump penthouse.
Never mind the semantics — their deals with Trump were varied: some of them joined Trump in real-estate ventures, some helped bail him out when he fell into financial difficulty, others offered lucrative construction deals in Moscow, and one — Agalarov — organised the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow for him.
Between them, they literally ‘saved Trump from bankruptcy’.
Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB. in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. He was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.
When Trump started to circle the edge of the toilet at the time he built the Taj Mahal resort — he had poured more than $1-billion into it — he said ‘I was worth minus 900 million.’
The Russians were among the first who jumped forward to bail him out. The Taj Mahal became such a popular spot for Russian émigrés that part of a Russian movie was filmed there, a comedy that featured a casino owned by the Russian mob.
While Trump climbed out of near-bankruptcy, Tchigirinsky stayed close by. He nearly bought Mar-a-Lago, but decided against it because he was told there were too many low-flying planes.
Tchigirinsky’s fellow Georgian associate Tamir Sapir Sapir and a business associate of Kislin, a former Soviet trade official named Tevfiq Arif, joined forces to bankroll the construction of a Trump Tower in Manhattan, SoHo, just at the time when Trump most needed cash.
The Moscow billionaire who was later to invite Trump to hold the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant in Moscow — and would set up a fateful meeting between Trump and a mysterious Moscow lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy — was Tchigirinsky’s protégé, the construction tycoon Aras Agalarov.
A good play-book to follow is the tome “ Putin’s People”, by Catherine Belton.
Chart showing Trump’s links with Russia.
Kin in the game: More than skin deep, Trump’s Russia ties extend to his family: Trump’s daughter Ivanka is a close friend of Dasha Zhukova, ex-wife of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who is in turn a friend of Putin.
One by one, a string of former Soviet businessmen came to him with proposals to build a succession of Trump Towers. This could not have come at a better time for Trump. Few questions were asked. ‘Donald doesn’t do due diligence,’ a former senior Trump Organization executive said later.
Most of the businessmen who came to Trump then were connected to the same nexus of KGB-linked money men, some with ties to the Solntsevskaya crime syndicate.
From 1984 to the present day, a total of 13 criminal masterminds associated with Solntsevskaya and its partner criminal organizations, owned real estate in the Trump Tower in New York, or at other Trump buildings.
They offered Trump a compelling deal: they would take on the financing and construction of a series of luxury developments, paying Trump a licence fee for the honour of using his name. A luxury condominium-hotel resort at Fort Lauderdale in Florida was announced, as was a $200 million Trump International Hotel and Residence in Phoenix, then Trump SoHo, a $450 million forty-six-storey glass tower, and the $500 million Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto . Trump was to be given an 18 per cent equity stake in the project, and a steady stream of management fees, despite not having to contribute a cent. The deals were a life-saver for Trump; the casino and hotels branch of his empire was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
For the Russian mob, real-estate developments offered a way around the strict US banking regulations. It became a model for the Trump Organization all over the world.
When the US was entering the credit crunch at the end of 2007, Trump showed off his properties as proof that he was a business genius. Just pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.
As Trump started his bid for the presidency, the Russian network extended more tentacles.
A set of charts showing the interactions between Russian influencers and Trump’s America is so depressing that I urge you not to look at them.
At a meeting between a Moscow lawyer he was close to, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Donald Trump Jnr., Veselnitskaya offered information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.
2016: Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s son Donald Jr meet at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who offered information that could be used against Hillary Clinton in return for a lifting of US sanctions against Russia
A few days later, news broke that the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers had been hacked, apparently by a Russian group calling themselves ‘Guccifer2.0’. One month before the election, WikiLeaks began releasing a series of emails hacked by the Russians from the account of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign.
The storm that this created lifted Trump’s claims that Washington was a swamp, and his opponent was corrupt.
When Trump won in November 2016, the Russians were stunned. In the Russian parliament when the news was shouted out, everyone jumped up in raucous applause.
For its part, the FSB at least believed it had recruited Trump. Trump ran a full-page ad in three US newspapers declaring that America should withdraw its support for key strategic allies in Japan and the Persian Gulf. ‘It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan and others who can afford it, pay.’
Trump did his part in the break-up of Europe, helping the Brexit forces move the U.K. out of the EU.
With Trump’s election and Britain’s departure from the EU, the prophecies of “Putin’s brain”, Alexander Dugin, were beginning to come true. Trump pushed Britain’s then-PM Theresa May and her successor Boris Johnson to deepen the UK’s split from Europe, threatening to withhold a trade agreement with the US unless they did so.
In 2019 he withdrew US troops from Syria, a devastating move that abandoned the US’s Kurdish ally and left Russia and Iran to fill the resulting power vacuum. He was characterized as erratic, unpredictable, and his every statement seemed to undermine American leadership.
He pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran, leaving that bitter and betrayed country to its own devices to re-build its nuclear momentum and its military technology. Unmoored from the US, it is now a prominent supplier of drones to Russia for use against Ukraine.
Foreign policy was deployed to promote Trump’s own interests. The former US ambassador to Ukraine, recalled from her post by Trump, said the State Department was being ‘attacked and hollowed out from within’. By 2019 Trump was even publicly lobbying for Russia’s reinstatement in the G8.
It got so bad that in March 2018, Vladimir Putin announced on Russian television that Russia has developed a new nuclear missile aimed at the USA. He clearly stated that the target is the USA. He even showed a video simulating an attack on Florida. There followed not a single word of condemnation from Trump, a man known to tweet on just about everything.
Under his watch US democratic institutions were eroded, and US society became ever more divided. When it looked like Mueller was going to blow the whistle on Trump’s role with Russia, the KGB had nothing but scorn for Mueller’s investigation. It was expected to be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, but it turned out to be an investigation of crime-related issues. These masters of interrogation called it ‘no more than a collection of interviews.’
The liberal idea appeared to be obsolete. ‘It looks like the whole of US politics is for sale,’ said a former senior Russian banker with ties to the security services. ‘We believed in Western values … But it turned out everything depended on money, and all these values were pure hypocrisy.’ The system of KGB capitalism took over.
Tchigirinsky was delighted by his man Trump. ‘Everything he’s promised he’s doing,’ he said. Dugin’s dream that Europe, left without US military support, would dissolve into battle between its nation states, could even become reality. ‘Then there will be nothing left but for the Russians to come and take all the women,’ Tchigirinsky laughed.
It got to the point in their alpha-male tiering that in meetings between Putin and Trump, the US was seen to be bowing to Putin. Trump praised his idol for how he’d conducted the recently-concluded football World Cup, kowtowing to the Russian leader as a ‘good competitor’. Trump directly contradicting the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Facing a packed press hall, a smirking Putin took the lead in almost everything.
Who’s the Apha Male in this picture?
Trump was just part of Putin’s feudal system in which various barons looked to him as the source of their power.
A list of Trump’s other crimes against America is not needed; it is being well covered. A hasty shopping list is horrifying and well known, starting with the 91 indictments for crimes related to the election in 2000.
Now, top the cake with this: he sold out America to its enemies, for his own personal profit. And he tried to sell out its allies as well, going so far that he unstabilized the world order.
The last leader to cause this much damage was Jefferson Davis.
Compare the erosion of Republican pride between Reagan, who said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and Trump, who effectively told Putin to take what he wanted.
America has to ensure that a “Trump” never happens again.
At the least, every presidential and congressional leader should be investigated for foreign ties and entitlements, before being allowed to run for office.
There is no time better than the present, to push this forward. The danger is too real; the escape too close for comfort.
How Trump Got Owned By The Russians - by BARRY GANDER (substack.com) |
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