THERE IS ENOUGH TRUMP CORRUPTION

Spencer Thayer
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

Connecting all his criminal financials to treason isn’t going to work.

I respect those journalists who are tirelessly digging into the corrupt, and likely criminal, dealings of President Trump. I wish they would have taken him seriously enough to have started this in 2014 but that isn’t the world we live in. In the world in which we live, we as American’s are rapidly learning about the corruption endemic to our President’s business dealings over the bulk of his career.

It’s one thing to follow the money on Trump and expose how painfully obvious it is that he has been laundering money for the Russian mob. It’s also crucial to document his connections with organized crime, plutocrats, and officials of foreign governments. Understanding these connections allow us to determine why our President may be sympathetic to policies concerning Russia, policies it is worth noting, that he is likely to profit from greatly.

NEW YORK, JUNE 29, 2005 — Trump at fundraiser washing clothes.

It is an entirely different thing to laughably argue that Putin has “weaponized” the mob and is using Trump as a proxy in a new cold war against America. This, however, is exactly the conclusion Craig Unger comes to in his New Republic article “Trump’s Russian Laundromat.”

Unger goes through a historical analysis of Trumps underhanded, and likely illegal, financial dealings with Russians connected to criminal organizations. He constructs a compelling argument that an investigation with powers to look into the shell corporations that boosted Trump could result in prosecution. He then proceeds to ruin his otherwise wonderful article by speculating on how the Kremlin uses organized crime as a means of conducting asymmetric warfare with Trump at the center.

Why is that next absurd step so necessary!?

It’s as if money laundering and corrupt policies to enrich oneself aren’t enough. Is this because focusing just on those criminal acts exposes others who are in power to the same critique? It must be treason. Otherwise, we have to look at how capitalists both Republican and Democrat behave.

For the liberal commentariat and their unhinged conspiratorial contemporaries, these criminal actions must be the threads in a greater tapestry of treason. Pulling too much on Trump’s threads may reveal how their own liberal heroes possess a similar fabric sewn throughout their pantsuits.

Instead of prosecuting Trump for concrete criminality, the defenders of the Russian conspiracy are tilting at windmills. And they’re not going to succeed. Change the narrative now; ditch the treason nonsense and make this about criminality. Or…don’t be surprised to see Trump win in 2020.

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