Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump
(Michelle Goldberg, NYT)
A plea to read this article. That is all I can do. Odds_Are_Russia_Owns_Trump Except excerpt heavily from it (with apologies to Ms. Goldberg)
Three months ago, The Washington Post reported that even as Donald Trump ran for president, he pursued plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The next day, The New York Times published excerpts from emails between Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian organized crime, and Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers and Sater’s childhood friend...Sater was apparently an intermediary between Trump and Russia, and in a Nov. 3, 2015, email to Cohen, [Sater] made the strange argument that a successful deal would lead to Trump’s becoming president. Boasting that he was close enough to Vladimir Putin to let Ivanka Trump sit in the Russian president’s desk chair, Sater wrote, “I will get Putin on the program [to build a Trump Tower in Moscow] and we will get Donald elected.”
These stories...[a]t a minimum, they showed that Trump was lying..., that he had “nothing to do with Russia.” Further, Sater’s logic — that Putin’s buy-in on a real estate deal would result in Trump’s election — was bizarre, suggesting that some part of the proposed collaboration was left unsaid.
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...One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much.
[I have written the same thing. The Mueller investigation seems to be going so fast because there is so much readily available evidence.]
Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win”is so essential...I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.
[Ah, but that's the rub, Ms. Goldberg. The Russian project goes back, as you quote Luke Harding saying to 1987-88. The parts of the country "under the swary of right-wing propaganda" are really under the sway of Russian propaganda. They will not read "Collusion," they will not read your column, they have been conditioned, by Russian propaganda, to believe the Big Lie and to ignore and denounce when they are not ignoring, anything to the contrary. Thus the attacks on the media. The Big Lie, the semi-truth and half-truth, the media attacks, and fallacious arguments such as "whataboutism" have been adopted wholesale by the American right, from whom, according to an Al Jeezera article I excerpted and cited in an earlier post, Putin "plagiarized" his authoritarian, nationalist, pseudo-Christian, White Man's ideology--and then loosed it back on a primed America in the 2016. It is too late. Thirty-five to forty percent of America is under the thrall, as you describe Trump of Putin, of Trump and therefore Putin. Original America is gone. We now have America 2.0]
Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian...describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive.”
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There’s no longer any serious question that there was cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia,..
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...Harding’s book is invaluable in collating the overwhelming evidence of a web of relationships between the Kremlin, Trump and members of Trump’s circle. He suggests, convincingly, that Russia may have been cultivating Trump since the 1980s. At that time, Harding writes, the K.G.B. was working to draw “prominent figures in the West” — as the K.G.B. described them — into collaboration. According to Harding, a form for evaluating targets asked, “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”
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...Ivan Kurilla, a Russian historian and America expert: “American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life. They try to portray him as something created by Russia.”
...Trump... is a quintessentially American figure. His campaign of racial and religious grievance drew on the darkest currents of American history. At most, Putin appears to have recognized an opportunity that American political dysfunction created.
[That is precisely correct.]
America, stunned and divided, appears incapable of metabolizing all we’re learning about the man in the White House....the substantial evidence that the president is not a patriot...
It wasn’t Putin who fashioned a Republican Party willing to tolerate something close to treason...
[It was the Republican Party, both willfully blind and blindsided, and at base, it was Trump's base base. The sign carried by a Trump supporter in St. Paul, Minnesota on March 4:
Taunting the media.
Taunting anti-Trump protesters, the sign in background.
Closeup
It was him, it was them. Russia put out the fake news, flummoxed the rest of us at least initially with their "dog whistle" rhetoric, but more than 2.8 million more of us than than there were of them, saw glimpses of the manipulation, recognized the rhetoric as foreign, tinny, realized the horror of Russia's project, and voted for Hillary Clinton. They could have too.They did not. They willfully bought the whole thing, it seemed so American to them. And it was. It was from here, America, according to Al Jezeera, that Putin "plagiarized" his ideology of White Christian Nationalism. Russia's seeds took deep, eager root, in receptive soil here. The day that Trump captured the GOP, we can say but only with useless hindsight, that that was the day America died. Even if a few hundred thousand of Hillary Clinton's plurality were sprinkled more strategically and she had won the Electoral College on November 8, she would never have become president. They would have assassinated her. That too, is quintessentially Russian politics.
