Putin is Still the Best Explanation for Everything

  

“The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help.”

Trump wrote those words, or had them written for him. They appeared in a full-page ad in the New York Times on September 2, 1987, almost four decades ago.

Trump paid for the ad — roughly $94,000 out of his own pocket, or somebody’s. With a few variations, it sounds like something he might have said last week, though the prose is more coherent than anything he could pull off these days.

The ad carried this headline and subhead:

“There's nothing wrong with America's Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can't cure.

An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”

The “letter” puts forth a number of specious but now highly familiar grudges that Trump has long harbored against America’s allies. The villains are different today, but his themes are the same: America is being ripped off by other countries. They’re taking advantage of our generosity. They’re playing us for suckers, even as we pay for their prosperity.

It was hokum then, it’s hokum now. It was the sort of argument you might have made back then if, say, you were following talking points designed and propagated by Russian intelligence, the KGB. Stick a pin in that.

By 1987, Trump was a known public figure in New York, a rich playboy with a fetish for publicity — positive or negative, didn’t matter. He was famous for real estate, especially Trump Tower — the gaudy prototype for the White House ballroom — which was finished to great fanfare a few years before. He also owned the ill-fated New Jersey Generals, of the ill-fated United States Football League, and played a prominent role in both their ill fates.

But there was a lot going on beneath the glitzy surface. There were fights with the city over his racist housing policies. There was his relationship with Roy Cohn, now the stuff of legend, not to mention books and movies. There were shady relations with organized crime that go back to his father’s time. There were ties to Russian and Eastern European mafias, which were intermingled with the intelligence services of Iron Curtain countries. A Trump real estate holding was, at the time, a golden opportunity to brag to the media, manipulate the tax code, and launder foreign money.

This has all been profusely documented over the years, from multiple journalistic sources, and from copious law enforcement filings. Indeed, I’ve written about it myself. The mainstream press won’t go there.

Which is interesting, because that ad, strange as it was in retrospect, wasn’t quite as strange as the article the Times ran on the very same day, on the front page.

That headline read “Trump Gives a Vague Hint of Candidacy,” and the opening paragraph reveals much about both Trump and the Times:

“Donald J. Trump, one of New York's biggest and certainly one of its most vocal developers, said yesterday that he was not interested in running for political office in New York, but indicated that the Presidency was another matter.”

Talk about chutzpah. There had been no previous allusion to Trump being interested in running for anything, much less president. But there he was, denying a rumor that he himself had undoubtedly started. And there was the Times, getting sucked into his con, even back then.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that there was a quid pro quo with the Times involved — “I’ll buy ad space in your paper, if you run a star-struck puff piece about my presidential ambitions.”

But the best part comes in the second-to-last paragraph of the article, right after reporting that Trump has “no particular background” in foreign policy:

“He did, however, travel to Moscow in July, where he met with the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The ostensible subject of their meeting was the possible development of luxury hotels in the Soviet Union by Mr. Trump.”

This was not quite burying the lede. It was the Gorbachev era, after all, and Trump wasn’t the only Western businessman cozying up to Russia. Even so, the word ‘ostensible’ carries a lot of weight here, because in the years since, that trip to Russia has taken on new meaning, circumstantial but compelling.

In 1987, Trump spent the 4^th of July in Moscow. This trip was, apparently, the culmination of a recruiting effort by the KGB, who had identified Trump early on as a promising intelligence asset, one who could be easily bribed, manipulated, and blackmailed. What sort of kompromat they had on him we can only guess, but they may not have needed much — in matters of corruption and scam, Trump has always been a self-starter.

Regardless, he got home from Moscow, and two months later he ran the ad trashing America’s allies, laying out the same set of grievances he uses to this day, grievances formulated by the KGB, long before Putin rose to power. And on that same day, the Times gave him the platform to let him float, for the first time, the concept of a Trump presidency.

Think of it as the day the KGB launched Trump as a Manchurian Candidate. They were playing a very long game, and success was an extreme long shot. But it was a game that survived the fall of the Soviet Union and the rebranding of the KGB. And it paid off thirty years later, in spectacular fashion, with the installation of Trump as president in 2018.

The only through line for every one of Trump’s insanely destructive policies — mass deportation, tariffs, Iran War, Canada war, alienating allies, eviscerating public health — is that they all hurt America and help Putin.

Seen through that lens, every action achieves a coherence, not to mention a consistency, that is nowhere else in evidence in either his words or his deeds. He has single-handedly wrecked America’s standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably, and who benefits from that more than Putin? Trump acts like a Russian asset, whether he actually is one or not.

It’s appalling that the public knows so little of this, and for that I blame the mainstream press. The failure of the Times and others to investigate Trump’s past — especially his relationships with Russian intelligence, and with organized crime syndicates both foreign and domestic — amounts to journalistic malpractice. The information is there. The threads are everywhere. It’s the story of the century, but they won’t touch it.

In a single issue of the Times almost 40 years ago, we got an eerie glimpse of the future. We got a foreshadowing of the insanely dangerous path Trump would take the country, were we ever to be stupid enough to elect him president.

And we saw how easily the Times itself could be taken in by such an obvious con.