TO PROTECT YOU AND DEFEND YOU, WHETHER YOU ARE RIGHT OR WRONG
First, a heads up that this post deals with sexual issues and is likely to be controversial. And with that trigger warning out of the way, here we go.
Donald Trump resents the fact that congressional Republicans aren’t protecting him. He overlooks the fact that some of them have spoken up in his defense, and the rest of them have turned a blind eye to his multiple high crimes and misdemeanors. You could argue that, six months into Trump’s presidency, he’s benefitted from the most docile Congress in living memory.
And working together, they’ve accomplished almost nothing. Keep it up, guys.
Discussion of Trump’s July 23 tweet, the one complaining about Republicans who “do very little to protect their President,” hasn’t generated much speculation about what Trump wants protection from. In a general way, of course, it’s obvious. Robert Mueller and NY AG Eric Schneiderman continue to investigate his campaign and his family’s finances, and nearly every day brings a new revelation of wrongdoing. Earlier this week, a White House leak suggested that Trump himself composed Don Jr.’s pathetic initial attempt to cover up his meeting with Russian spies in June, 2016. A day later, instead of just saying “no comment,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed this clumsy attempt at obstruction of justice. It must be fun being Trump’s lawyers.
But back to his “protection” tweet. My guess is that his comment was provoked specifically by the overwhelming bipartisan support (419-3 in the House, 98-2 in the Senate) for a bill that gives Congress the power to block Trump’s ability to weaken sanctions against Russia. I think it’s reasonable to wonder why Trump would want to weaken sanctions against Russia in the first place.
Throughout the seven months of his presidency, Donald Trump has been consistently inconsistent. He’s abandoned many of the policies he campaigned on, and broken too many promises to count. Apart from his inflated belief in his own self-worth, there’s only one position he’s consistently maintained: he’s never said a harsh word about Russia or Vladimir Putin.
And now Putin has made it clear to Trump that he wants sanctions lifted. If Trump signs the bill limiting his own power to lift those sanctions, Putin will be displeased. If he vetoes it, the margins of passage make it clear that Congress will override his veto, making him look weak. His only other option is to ignore it, let it become law without comment, and pretend that it doesn’t exist. That’s basically Trump’s M.O. in dealing with bad news, so if I were betting, that’s the way I’d bet.
But this dominance dance begs the question of why Trump is worried about sanctioning Russia, our traditional enemy and clearly a hostile foreign power. That’s the key question.
Trump knows little and cares less about foreign policy. He has no grand plan for an American-Russian alliance to bring peace to the Middle East, to destroy ISIS, or to destroy anything else – except maybe American democracy. Donald Trump is literally the first American president in history to worry about offending Russia.
My approach to this sort of conundrum is to use a modified version Occam’s Razor, the medieval principle that in choosing among competing hypotheses, you should prefer the one that requires you to make the fewest assumptions. If I’m missing a crucial piece of information, I try to connect the dots in the most direct way, as long as it mean I have to ignore inconvenient facts or rely on improbable coincidences.
Donald Trump has strong but unexplained ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. I’d like to know the nature of those ties, and how they came into being.
Before I try to connect the dots, it’s worth spending some time looking at all the dots on the board. A recent article in Foreign Policy magazine (link below) outlined seven theories that might explain the Trump-Russia connection. I’ll summarize them here, with my own comments in brackets.
1. There is no Trump-Russia connection. Every apparent connection is just a coincidence, with an innocent explanation. [This is the Pollyanna explanation. In order to believe it, you’d have to ignore all the facts and rely almost entirely on improbabilities and coincidences.]
2. There was Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the election, but Russia acted independently of the official Trump campaign, and Trump was unaware of the connections between Russia and some fringe members of his staff. [We know now that there were multiple connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that they included members of Trump’s immediate family. It’s highly improbable that Donald Trump wasn’t aware of them.]
3. There was Russian interference in the election, but it was aimed solely at weakening Hillary Clinton, not at helping Donald Trump. [This was my personal theory until a few months ago, when collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia became too obvious to deny. Every American intelligence agency agrees that Russia was trying to help Trump to win.]
4. Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign, but Trump was unaware of it, so there’s no reason to blame him for anything that happened. [I’m not saying that Trump was aware of every last detail, but his “Russia, if you’re listening” plea for hacking assistance makes it impossible to believe that he wasn’t aware that his campaign was getting help from Russia.]
5. Russian intelligence actively penetrated the Trump campaign, and Trump either knew about it or should have known about it. [Now we’re getting warmer. Trump not only should have known, he did know.]
6. The Russians have some kind of compromising information on Trump that is serious enough to keep him in line. [Bingo. This is what I believe the available evidence indicates.]
7. Donald Trump is a Russian agent. [Nah, Trump’s not smart enough to be a real spy.]
My hypothesis at this point is that Putin and Russia are blackmailing Donald Trump. But what are they blackmailing him with?
First, it’s a matter of public record that Trump family businesses have for years benefitted from infusions of Russian cash. It is also a matter of public record that Trump’s businesses broke laws against money laundering (e.g. the Trump Taj Mahal casino) as they helped Russian oligarchs move dirty money in and out of the United States. It’s not impossible that Trump is so deeply in hock to Russian mob figures that they essentially own him.
But while Russian money explains the origin of Trump’s affection for Russia, I would argue that it doesn’t account for Trump’s continuing obeisance to Putin. Those oligarchs still need their money laundered, and it wouldn’t be to Putin’s advantage to burn a reliable accomplice. Besides, at this point, there’s nothing Vladimir Putin can do to help Trump avoid prosecution on money laundering charges. If there’s dirty money in the Trump portfolio, Robert Mueller and Eric Schneiderman either know about it already or will find out about it soon enough.
Similarly, there is a growing body of evidence that people close to Trump, including some of his family members, worked hand in hand with Russian agents to influence the outcome of the election. Some of the collaborators undoubtedly expect pardons; others are probably hopeful but uncertain. Some of the folks in the latter category may already be telling their stories to Robert Mueller, offering evidence against bigger fish in return for leniency.
But as with the money laundering issue, the collusion toothpaste is out of the tube. Mueller and his team know most of the story at this point. They have wiretaps and other communications intercepts, as well as (in all likelihood) plea bargained testimony from some of Trump’s frightened underlings. Vladimir Putin can’t be compelled to testify, and he has ways to keep his own agents quiet – up to and including murdering them – but there’s nothing he can do to derail the case Mueller is building against the Trump family on election tampering.
So far, then, we can credibly account for the origins of Trump’s Russian connections, and we can account for some minor and major criminal activity that Trump would love to keep secret from American courts and from the American public. But none of it is sufficient to explain why he continues to worry about keeping Vladimir Putin happy.
I can think of only one other possibility. It’s a doozy, so fasten your seatbelts.
I’m beginning to believe that the answer to my question, or something close to the answer, was revealed last fall, and was quickly brushed aside by a press corps that was struggling to come to grips with the fact that Donald Trump was elected president. I’m talking about the Steele Dossier – that memo from former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Steele Dossier had its fifteen minutes of fame last fall, largely due to the fact that Steele mentioned a rumor about what came to be known as the “Pee Tape.” Steele, to his credit, noted that the existence of such a tape could not be verified. The press, citing Trump’s well known germ phobia, scoffed and moved on.
Months passed. And then out of nowhere on July 19, Trump brought up the Steele Dossier in an unhinged interview with the New York Times. Why would he do that? Why would he be worried about a report that had faded from public memory months ago?
Here’s how I connect the dots. I believe that it is entirely possible that Russia did indeed secretly record Trump sex tapes. They probably did NOT involve poop or pee, but they might involve something less risible and more scandalous. Rumors about such recordings are building.
Are these rumors credible? In some ways, they’re too good to be true, so I try to maintain a healthy skepticism. That said, I find them plausible enough to be worth sharing. If this is the missing piece of the puzzle, it would account for Trump’s ongoing refusal to criticize Putin or Russia.
Let’s review a few things about Donald Trump that are matters of public record.
Item one: He has bragged often and publicly about his sex life, and his preference for younger women. He palled around with Jeffrey Epstein, and told New York Magazine in 2002, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein served time for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Definitely a terrific guy, lots of fun to be with.
Item two: Multiple girls who participated in the Miss Teen USA beauty pageants have reported that Trump walked into their dressing rooms unannounced while some of them were naked. When his older daughter Ivanka was 16, Trump said she was exactly the kind of girl he’d like to date when she was a few years older. When his younger daughter Tiffany was a baby, Trump speculated about what her legs and breasts would look like when she reached sexual maturity. He looks at underage girls, including his own daughters, and sees sex objects.
Item three: We know that Trump has visited Russia. We know that in 2001, he warned men visiting Russia to be careful, because hidden cameras are everywhere. He offered that advice on a Howard Stern radio show in which another guest quoted Trump as bragging that “I was just in Russia, the girls have no morals, you gotta get out there.” Note that he said girls, not women.
What is not in the public record (yet) is a rumored investigation by New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s Organized Crime Task Force (OCTF). The OCTF is reported to have two active Trump investigations, one of which allegedly involves Trump Model Management. Not all of the models represented by Trump Model Management were from Russia, but some of them were. Not all of them were under 18, but some of them were.
You can google Trump Model Management and find multiple articles describing its unsavory activities, which include underpaying its models (as you’d expect from a Trump business), ignoring visa requirements, falsifying the age of some younger models – and hosting parties for Trump’s friends and clients using under-age models as bait. Daily Kos (links below) was on the story shortly before the election, but it got lost in the nationwide hysteria about Hillary Clinton’s email security.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, there’s a theory among citizen journalists that the Steele Dossier is on Trump’s mind because Russian intelligence recorded him having sex with underage girls. Maybe he knew they were minors, or maybe he just didn’t bother to ask questions when teenage girls knocked on his hotel room door. Putin, the theory goes, set him up, and then made sure that Trump knows the tapes exist. Now Trump is worried that copies of those recordings have found their way into the hands of western intelligence agencies. And according to this rumor, that’s exactly what has happened. Mueller and Schneiderman have copies of the tapes. They know his secret.
We know Trump had the motive (he likes sex with younger women), the opportunity (he has visited Russia), and a history of recklessness in sexual matters (cheating on all his wives, and a “grab ‘em by the pussy” attitude). But until the final piece of the puzzle – an actual sex tape – materializes, it’s still just speculation. Informed speculation, to be sure, but speculation nonetheless.
Perhaps you’re inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Fair enough.
While we’re waiting for more pieces of the puzzle to emerge, I invite everyone to try to come up with another explanation that accounts for all of the information in the public record, that doesn’t contradict or exclude any of that information, and that explains Donald Trump’s ongoing fealty to Putin and Russia.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/19/the-seven-circles-of-donald-trumps-russia-inferno-collusion/
http://www.gq.com/story/howard-stern-donald-trump-russia-brag