Donald Trump’s actions in holding an allied nation hostage to his personal need for dirt on a political opponent may sound shocking, even to Americans already jaded by three years of living with him. But an interview in The Daily Beast makes clear that Trump is perfectly understandable to those who know what it is to live under the corrupt oligarchic chaos that follows the collapse of stable government. A senior Ukrainian official gave reporter Anna Nemtsova a perfectly on-target description of Trump’s actions in that country: “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”
That’s direct enough. Though, to be perfectly clear, Trump doesn’t give a damn about Manafort or his prison sentence. Trump only sees his campaign chair’s jail time as an insult to Trump. He’s incapable of empathy.
That official isn’t the only person in Ukraine who has no trouble seeing what Trump is about. On the day of their phone call, incoming President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a summary of his conversation with Trump. That post says that Trump expects the new Ukrainian government to quickly “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”
What corruption cases are in the way of relationships between the United States and Ukraine? Officially, none. Unofficially, but very visibly, the “case” is the one that Rudy Giuliani wove out of whole cloth and has been pushing for months in an effort to get someone in Ukraine to say there was an investigation into Joe Biden.
Understand, Giuliani and Trump were not requiring evidence, and certainly not demanding a conviction. They were just looking for someone who would say, “Sure, we’re investigating.” But they couldn’t even get that much—because there is no investigation, and nothing to investigate.
Giuliani did have a former prosecutor lined up at one point to say that he was looking into Biden. Unfortunately for Rudy, no sooner did he trot this guy out as the center of his “Biden is bad” act than the prosecutor involved got cold feet about pitching such an elaborate lie and backed out of the deal. The former prosecutor admitted that not only was there “nothing to the claims,” but also that he was “simply trying to show Giuliani that he could be ‘useful.’”
Now Trump and Giuliani are forced to move on to the other way of smearing Biden—simply doing it themselves by implying that everyone, including Ukraine, the media, Congress, the intelligence community, and the whistleblower are all part of Biden’s “deep state” network. All funded by George Soros, of course. (No, seriously. Giuliani has already gone there.) For Trump supporters, there’s no reason to believe that Trump claiming there should be an investigation will be one whit less effective than there really being an investigation.
But there’s another facet of the Daily Beast talk with the Ukrainian official that raises a big note of hmmmm. In the conversation, the official says, “We do not investigate Biden in Ukraine, since we have not received a single official request to do so.” Trump was on the phone with Zelensky. He made it clear that he wanted that investigation of Biden before he would stop standing in the way of military aid.
But there was no official request. Nothing in writing. It’s almost as if … Trump knew he was doing something illegal.