Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing
Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. 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.

Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Other urls found in this thread:

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing
washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-campaign-guts-gops-anti-russia-stance-on-ukraine/2016/07/18/98adb3b0-4cf3-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html
russia-insider.com/en/politics/unexpected-ally-russia-emerges-west-its-known-alt-right/ri15784
baka.com.au/world/us-election/us-fears-over-donald-trumps-connections-with-vladimir-putins-russia-20160723-gqcg8p.html
slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/vladimir_putin_has_a_plan_for_destroying_the_west_and_it_looks_a_lot_like.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

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.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...

Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."

Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. 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. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: 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.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

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.

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-putin-yes-it-s-really-a-thing

will pol give a shit? i've seen you retards praise putin

>a

>fucking

>white

>TRAITOR

bump

>(you)

come on, trump retards how will you respond? this shit is trending and will blow up by monday. he's fucking finished

washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-campaign-guts-gops-anti-russia-stance-on-ukraine/2016/07/18/98adb3b0-4cf3-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html
The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.

Still, Republican delegates at last week’s national security committee platform meeting in Cleveland were surprised when the Trump campaign orchestrated a set of events to make sure that the GOP would not pledge to give Ukraine the weapons it has been asking for from the United States.

Inside the meeting, Diana Denman, a platform committee member from Texas who was a Ted Cruz supporter, proposed a platform amendment that would call for maintaining or increasing sanctions against Russia, increasing aid for Ukraine and “providing lethal defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian military.

“Today, the post-Cold War ideal of a ‘Europe whole and free’ is being severely tested by Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine,” the amendment read. “The Ukrainian people deserve our admiration and support in their struggle.”

Trump staffers in the room, who are not delegates but are there to oversee the process, intervened. By working with pro-Trump delegates, they were able to get the issue tabled while they devised a method to roll back the language.

On the sideline, Denman tried to persuade the Trump staffers not to change the language, but failed. “I was troubled when they put aside my amendment and then watered it down,” Denman told me. “I said, ‘What is your problem with a country that wants to remain free?’ It seems like a simple thing.”

Finally, Trump staffers wrote an amendment to Denman’s amendment that stripped out the platform’s call for “providing lethal defensive weapons” and replaced it with softer language calling for “appropriate assistance.”

Putin wants a wall so no one will notice our brand new Russian bases.

That amendment was voted on and passed. When the Republican Party releases its platform Monday, the official Republican party position on arms for Ukraine will be at odds with almost all the party’s national security leaders.

“This is another example of Trump being out of step with GOP leadership and the mainstream in a way that shows he would be dangerous for America and the world,” said Rachel Hoff, another platform committee member who was in the room.

Of course, Trump is not the only politician to oppose sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. President Obama decided not to authorize it, despite recommendations to do so from his top Europe officials in the State Department and the military. The United States has provided Ukraine with non-lethal equipment and aid.

Kill yourself

maybe people would bother replying if you dind't go full autismo with the copy/pasting

go back le reddit

Trump’s view of Russia has always been friendlier than most Republicans. He’s said he would “get along very well” with Vladimir Putin and called it a “great honor” when Putin praised him. Trump has done a lot of business in Russia and has been traveling there since 1987. Last August, he said of Ukraine joining NATO, “I wouldn’t care.” He traveled there in September, and he told Ukrainians their war is “really a problem that affects Europe a lot more than it affects us.”

all circumstantial smoke and mirrors, where is the proofs

also how much did they pay you to make this thread? you tried really really hard, I hope it was at least a dollar

What Donald Trump is doing on the campaign trail
View Photos
Businessman Donald Trump has become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president.

For Trump, the biggest threat to Europe is not Russia, according to people familiar with his thinking. He believes the United States should focus on helping Europe fight Islamist terrorism and open borders, not confronting Putin. He has called for a reduction of the U.S. commitment to NATO. He simply doesn’t see Russia as a dangerous threat.

For Denman, the Trump campaign’s actions betrayed the U.S. commitment to supporting struggling democracies around the world, which she considers a core Republican value.

“The Ukrainian people are trying to come out of the past and stay free. We owe to those who are fighting for freedom still to give them a helping hand,” she said.

>View Photos

never mind what I said about trying hard. you're hardly trying at all. if your manager reads this, I hope he tells you to apply yourself

go force this "Donald Trump is a Russian provocateur" narrative elsewhere.

“I’m very passionate and supportive of the Reagan foreign policy of peace through strength.”

Trump too often invokes Ronald Reagan when talking about America’s role in the world. But although Reagan negotiated with the Soviet Union, he also stood up to Russian aggression in Europe and defended democratic principles abroad.

When the platform comes out, Republicans will see how far from the Reagan doctrine their party has drifted, thanks to Trump.

tell me, what stops you trumpfags from reading, let alone acknowledging anything remotely negative about trump?

what's the pol definition of proof? because everything is clearly cited and leaves no doubt in trump - putin coonnections

so how much are you personally chipping in for MUH WALL?

Jesus. Weaponized autism itt

i won't have to, trump will send me to die for russian interests

So we can finally get some Russian kalashnikovs in the US? Sign me up

Not all of us really care.

I of hope so


A russian-american alliance really ought to improve stability across the planet

I doubt you could be a solider

It's funny that OP doesn't realize that the majority of Sup Forums are pro-Putin and pro-Russia.

i think i have to post memes to get responses out of pol?

THAT'S IT. THIS SHIT FINALLY DID IT FOR ME.

I'm now a #HillaryMissile

what? have you heard of some thing called the cold war?

Exactly. Getting something in 5.45 won't be a complete waste then.

wtf i love russia now

i dont think ive ever seen such a concerted effort to shill, for such a miserable return

OP did you work on the Jeb! campaign by any chance?

How is this negative. If anything it means it's in his benefit to work with Russia for it to become prosperous.

Underrated

A FUCKING LEAF

Hillary shill detected

GOOD

trump will give europe to putin.

>1 post by this ID
Tr*mp shill detected

did you read a word of the article? he's giving america to putin first, you retard

Shut the fuck up you filthy piss smelling redneck.

tldr

>authoritarianism
>good
>prosperous

the fuck???

Putin doesnt flood russia with shitskins so he is a ok guy to me.

not surprised guncucks are willing to sell out the country for the gun industry profits

...

russia is 30, 40% churkas, the rest are churkified slavs

>tfw some faggots yesterday didn't believe me when I posted that TrumPutin weren't BFF

...

are you stupid? dark skin pigmentation is dominant to white. the human population just needs to keep growing for whites to die out, putin has literally no control over that

All these posts and no dubs, GTFO faggot KEK wills it.

>this is what OP actually believes.

well, the shill isn't even trying to be subversive anymore.

>russia is 30, 40% churkas, the rest are churkified slavs
30% muslim*

What stops them is the fact that most Trumpfags here are actually Russian shills and know everything you are presenting us with already. Those that aren't actual Russian shills are just rednecks blinded by their hatred for people that aren't like them and so they aren't willing to hear anything negative about this traitor.

...

...

there's a reason your darker colored wife will have a darker colored son and it's not because of the jews

...

my wife is blonde hair blue eyed and so are my kids....

you must still be in high school to assume people here aren't already married.

dumb ass shill

>all that text
>not a single source to back up any of the "facts"

I'm sure it'll trick people like pic related.

nice try, golem

>I have been brainwashed by the white man to believe that Africans have not been behind every technological advancement

>about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin
and?

bush was an utter retard, why would anyone admire him?

...

>pol
>married
>women
>implying pol isn't infested with elliot roger and dylan roof betacucks

TOPKEK

So what you're saying is:
>Trump announces he's running for president
>the Jewish bankers blacklist him so he can't get funds for investments or capital
>while fighting the Jews on the campaign trail and BTFO'ing Low Energy Jeb, Hungry Kasich, and Lyin' Ted, he looks for other investors
>rich Russians connected to Putin give him loans
>he's BTFO every other candidate
>has debts to rich Russians in positions of power
is that the summary?
So you're claiming that he's saying he wants to get along with Putin because of his investors?
A good relationship with Russia would benefit both countries, but I certainly don't like him having debts to slav loan sharks.

...

>t. reddit in collusion with 9gag

Reminder that Sup Forums has been taken over by Russian shills working under the Dugin ideology and that want to start a race war in the United States.

Fuck off Pablo

jewish bankers blacklisted him for shady practices and being a bankrupting failure of a man. his business ventures are something a high schooler would come up with. don't pretend like trump and the entirety of the republican establishment aren't unconditionally sucking netanyahu cock to keep milking the war economy scam.

This thread is sad OP. Besides, I'd rather out president have financial ties to a nominally good country instead of fucking Saudia Arabia like Clinton.

>retard
>retard
>retard
>retard
It's nice to hear you comparing your negative feelings to the serious disabilities of others.

wtf i love memes now

What's it like getting paid to try to convince autistic people on a chinese cartoon forum of shit nobody cares about?

Lurk moar, faggot.

Better yet, go "Correct the Record" someplace else.

>38 posts by this ID

Holy fuck OP you're committed

OP do this one next

russia-insider.com/en/politics/unexpected-ally-russia-emerges-west-its-known-alt-right/ri15784

COMMITTED TO THE ALMIGHTY KEK PRAISE THE KEK

baka.com.au/world/us-election/us-fears-over-donald-trumps-connections-with-vladimir-putins-russia-20160723-gqcg8p.html

You sure are a desperate faggot, aren't you? What do you want to bet you wrote this garbage article yourself?

Great source-less article. All it says is that trump sells a lot of his property to Russians, which isn't any big surprise because the oligarchy there is mega-rich. That's like saying Ferrari is selling out to the USA because people in Beverly Hills buy lots of their cars.

Your article cites no sources, and the writer is a typical (((anti-Nationalist liberal asshole))).

All this copy pasta and you still make a shitty shill.

saged

hidden

Come on, not like he sold 20% of the US Uranium supply to him

Here's your (you)

Hope your manager is happy.

>This is what Balts actually believe.

How much did the DNC pay you? You're a slimy fucking shill and should be banned from Sup Forums.

...

>Ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a logical fallacy in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.[2]

why are you comparing ferrarri to DRUMPF running for president of the USA? he owes billions to russia and blatantly altered the republican party platform to pro russian interests

slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/07/vladimir_putin_has_a_plan_for_destroying_the_west_and_it_looks_a_lot_like.html

Prove it. Your link is nothing but (((liberal garbage))), and propaganda.