Useful Idiot
A good deal of the left seems to be pinning its hopes on kompromat from Russia to trigger an impeachment and bring down the Trump administration. While I’m sure Trumps hands aren’t entirely clean, barring the sudden appearance of actual video evidence of him cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow, I don’t think it’s likely to happen.
For one thing, the kind of machinations that are alleged are exceedingly difficult to prove. Money laundering, shell corporations, foreign banks — all these create incredibly complex webs that are difficult to unravel. The leak of the Panama Papers, which are from just a single law firm in a single country, consists of over 11 million documents and took a team of reporters over a year before they were untangled enough to break the first story.
Secondly, there are simpler explanations for the Trump/Putin coziness that don’t involve any quid pro quo. For Trump, Putin is a figure of envy because he’s a strongman. While Trump is forced to deal the checks and balances of the American Constitution, where as Putin’s authoritarian powers are something Trump can only dream about.
On the other hand, Putin’s unquestionable attempt to influence the 2016 elections had nothing to do with Trump. They were rather all about Hillary. That was sufficient to drive the hacking of the DNC and attempt to discredit Clinton as a candidate. In this interview with Moscow Times editor Mikhail Fishman, Fishman notes that Trump “displays his ignorance every single day” and that the Kremlin considers Trump “him a stupid, unstrategic politician.” This is not the kind of person that someone as wily as Putin would choose as a partner. Especially when he can simply be manipulated as a “useful idiot.”
So while Fishman and I both consider some partnership to throw the election as extremely unlikely, that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t vulnerable. As the Trump University fraud case showed, Trump is a con man. He’s not selling products, he’s a lifestyle brand like Gwyneth Paltrow, only instead of selling new age woo, Trump is selling gold-plated reflection based on the magic of the Trump name, purveying frozen steaks and mediocre vodka (albeit in shiny packaging) to paunchy real estate moguls hoping to trade in their second wives for a younger model.
And their lies Trump’s vulnerability. Because much of his business relies on selling the brand name Trump, the many failures along the away have left a paper trail that is worth pursuing. Trump is notably litigious, racking up several thousand lawsuits in state and federal court, many of them requiring testimony from Trump himself.
Here is where things get interesting. Attorney Susan Simpson has been looking into some of those lawsuits, and may have uncovered evidence of perjury. Ironically, his conflicting statements under oath revolve around a shady Russian-American stock scammer named Felix Sater. Trump and Sater worked together on the Trump SoHo Condo project (a failure), and in a deposition, Trump claimed not to have been aware of Sater’s criminal record, despite having a close working relationship with him for many years, and knowing full well about his conviction.
If this all checks out, then Trump was lying under oath, surely a sound reason for impeachment, given it was used against Bill Clinton. This could also be the reason that Mike Pence is currently on an apology tour across Europe: the GOP elite knows that Trump may not survive for four years and is sending out the second string to make it appear we have a coherent set of national policies.
