Trump-Russia: A Grand Unified Theory

The Trump-Russia scandal is difficult to follow because of its complexity. It is hard to understand how the many characters and elements fit together.

Two journalists have stood out in their tracking and insightful understanding of this story: Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo.com and Adam Davidson of The New Yorker. Their conversation in the most recent edition of Marshall's podcast is absolutely worth a listen. Marshall and Davidson try to piece together a Grand Unified Theory of the scandal which I will summarize here.

The theory begins with a set of macro-economic conditions that set the table for the relationship between Trump and Russia.

1. The fall of the Iron Curtain resulted in a scramble to seize trillions of dollars in assets that had been the property of the communist states. The most successful kleptocrats were those best positioned: former party officials familiar with the assets and the local levers of power (like Vladimir Putin) and local organized crime. 
2. Seizing these assets was only the first task for these kleptocrats. Second was the necessity of getting the loot out of the country and parking it in western countries where the rule of law and independent judiciary systems would ensure its safety. Otherwise, a bigger, more powerful shark could steal it from the original thief. Tens of trillions of dollars worth of dirty money began to flow west, largely to London and New York.
3. A short time later the vigilance and scrutiny of the US Government of possibly shady financial transactions became far more thorough and intense. This was partly due to 9/11 and the resulting effort to detect and interdict terrorist financing and partly due to a similar effort with respect to international drug cartels.
4. This resulted in a shrinkage of available ways to park ill-gotten gains. As Davidson explains, a Russian oligarch could not just invest his $300 million in Google or Apple stocks. Regulations and reporting requirements for banks, brokerage houses and other financial actors would set off multiple alarms. Real estate emerged as a potential avenue for such investment.

As these trends developed through the late 1990's and early 2000's, Davidson observed that "Donald Trump was screaming 'open for business!' " Trump has a long, well-documented history of sleazy business practices and, specifically, willingness to accept financing from criminal figures. It was an open secret that Trump's Atlantic City casinos were financed in part by the Italian-American mob. He has since participated in multiple deals with international organized crime figures.

Interestingly, contrary to many other Trump-Russia observers, Davidson does not think Trump started doing business with oligarchs from the former Soviet republics because they were his only financing option. He maintains that even after his string of personal bankruptcies Trump still had the opportunity to make the Trump Organization a legitimate financial player. However, he thinks Trump gravitated toward shadier deals because he lacked the temperamental qualities required for more legitimate global financial success on the scale that he aspired to.

Building an organization into a legitimate global financial entity is, to put it simply, a hell of a lot of work. There is a ton of due diligence. It requires real expertise in very complex and abstract business concepts as well as understanding of cultural and economic trends. It requires strategic planning and, above all, patience and persistence. Such a business structure also would involve multiple levels of accountability and loss of individual control. The payoff for all of that work is access to vast pools of capital in legal, above-board ways.

By all accounts, however, Trump possesses none of these qualities. He is impulsive, has a notoriously short attention span and little to no ability to delay gratification. He has a constant need for self-aggrandizement. Davidson believes these qualities led him to a series of quick deals with "third tier oligarchs in backwater countries" like Georgia and Kazakhstan. He was treated like a head of state and paid millions of dollars up front whatever the ultimate fate of the projects (like other Trump ventures, many failed). 

Fast forward to 2013 and the Miss Universe pageant. Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, pop-singer son Emin and publicist Rob Gladstone were reportedly dispatched to Las Vegas and the Miss USA pageant that spring to pitch Trump on bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in the fall. Agalarov is not in Putin's inner circle but is a huge step up in wealth and international prestige from the Georgians and Kazakhs Trump had been dealing with. Trump sensed a possible big step forward and bought it. His trip to Moscow has been (in)famously highlighted in the Steele dossier.

Despite Trump's insistence that he did not decide to run for President until 2015, there are multiple social media posts from during and just after the 2013 pageant in Moscow making reference to him running in 2016. Broadcasting his plans to his Russian hosts was apparently part of Trump's well-publicized effort to meet with Putin.

Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion GPS which hired Steele to research Trump's ties to Russia, posed what Davidson described as a "powerful question" in his Congressional testimony. Noting ongoing fruitless efforts by Trump and his children to leverage their relationship with Agalorov and Russia into a Trump Tower Moscow deal, what explains this persistence by the notoriously impatient Trump? Help getting elected President? Other financial compensation that has yet to come to light?

Marshall and Davidson agreed that there is "a lot of meat left on the bone" with respect to Trump-Russia--much still left unexplained. It seems clear that Robert Mueller and his team know far more than anyone else about this. It seems just as clear that the President's claims that this a "hoax", "witch hunt" and "made up story" hold about as much water as Trump's 3,250 other documented lies.