Donald Trump has been very cagey about his financial empire’s condition. Speculation about his refusal to release his tax returns has focused on the possibility that he’s not anywhere as rich as he claims — but what if there’s more to it than that?
Add in his open admiration for Vladimir Putin — and Putin’s own compliments. Then add in Trump’s casual remark that America shouldn’t be in a rush to defend the Baltic States despite membership in NATO, his remarks on the Ukraine….
Paul Krugman and The Siberian Candidate
On July 22, Paul Krugman’s column raised some troubling points. In Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate, he didn’t pull any punches.
I’m not talking about merely admiring Mr. Putin’s performance — being impressed by the de facto dictator’s “strength,” and wanting to emulate his actions. I am, instead, talking about indications that Mr. Trump would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.
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Krugman goes on to note that Trump is not alone among those on the right who have openly envied Putin’s ‘strength’ as a leader. The rabid authoritarian streak that now seems to be running rampant among Republicans would like to do to Hillary and the Democrats what Putin does to his opponents. But it goes beyond that in Trump’s case.
Krugman observes that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort has ties to a number of dictators and associates of Putin going back years. More to the point, Trump’s financial empire has connections that could bear some scrutiny.
...Remember, we know nothing about the true state of his business empire, and he has refused to release his taxes, which might tell us more. We do know that he has substantial if murky involvement with wealthy Russians and Russian businesses. You might say that these are private actors, not the government — but in Mr. Putin’s crony-capitalist paradise, this is a meaningless distinction.
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Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo Has More
On July 23, Marshall’s TPM Editor’s Blog goes into more detail with Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing. He gets right to the heart of it in the opening paragraph:
...At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.
Marshall lists some facts that should raise eyebrows — and more. To take his first one,
1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.
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Marshall goes on to add more points, such as the Trump empire’s increasing reliance on Russian sources for financing, lawsuits that have disclosed infusions of money from questionable sources for some of Trump’s projects, and other connections. While Marshall also takes note of Paul Manafort’s ties to Russian Oligarchs, he adds another connection.
Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage...
Putin has been directing state controlled media to give favorable coverage to Trump, part of a larger effort to support right-wing, nationalist figures in other countries and/or otherwise stick a finger in where stirring up trouble forwards his aims.
And if you wonder how important the RNC platform is to Trump, Marshall picked up on a key tell. While Trump largely ignored it, there was one item that got special attention:
...Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.
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Josh Marshall has connected some troubling dots. Read the whole thing. Considering all the Congressional and media attention focused on Benghazi and email servers over the past few years, not to mention the right wing media obsession with the Clinton Foundation, there’s no way Trump should get a free pass on any of this. Marshall’s concluding paragraph sums it up:
There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.
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It remains to be seen if this will prove to be another case of IOKIYAR on steroids. If the Clinton Campaign doesn’t pick up this, let’s hope somebody does.