Reporting from the Financial Times explains how financial ruin put Donald Trump in the pocket of Russian crime bosses. (The only Russian criminals not in prison or dead are those who are close to Putin.) They put Trump back on his feet with laundered money looted from the Russian economy.
Following the money makes it very clear that Trump is not a business operator at all, not since his bankruptcy in the 1990s. He is instead a front man for shadowy Russian mobsters who are proxies for the Russian dictator.
Trump is their spokesmodel, selling and advertising their properties around the world, which they have stuck Trump’s name on. Trump is their prize poodle. Putin’s prize poodle.
The money comes from the Russian kleptocracy, which stole it from ordinary Russian citizens. It’s been looted from the Russian economy. While Russians live in squalid cold cramped apartments and drink themselves to early death, their national wealth has been laundered and invested in luxury towers in other parts of the world. That is Trump’s business model. Trump’s nominees to head various departments of our government share this kind of mindset: the selfish belief that the economy––which ought to work for all the citizens who work in it ––is there to be looted and pocketed by the people in positions of power. A kleptocracy. Trump and his mob seek to refashion America on the sad Russian model.
Daily Kos has this useful summary of the Financial Times series.
Scott Horton’s close analysis of the Financial Times story says this:
Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ...
The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources.
He was their man.
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