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| rawstory.com |
On a recent show, Rachel Maddow asked Michael Cohen about a time when Trump flipped a house in Palm Beach, Florida, and made a profit of about fifity million dollars. What Trump said, according to Cohen, was that the purchase of the house by a Russian oligarch, presumably one of the criminal coterie surrounding Vladimir Putin, was a means for Putin to launder his personal fortune. (“‘The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,’ Trump told me. 'He puts them into wealth to invest his money….'”) Putin, in Trump’s mind, controls substantially all the money in Russia.
Like many people, I’ve often wondered what vile secret Russia holds over our 45th President. There have been rumors of the most salacious sorts, involving sex and prostitutes and lies and cover-ups. Imagination has run wild, there being nothing in Trump’s life story to restrain it; indeed, since a man is known by the company he keeps, and Trump keeps the worst sort of morally-challenged company, imaginings can take on a life of their own, and become a sort of entertainment. No form of corruption seems implausible for Donald Trump.
But it occurred to me, while listening to Cohen talk about his former boss, that imagining all those tittilating perversions are, in Trump’s case, unnecessary. His lust for power, and its surrogate, money, is so great as to suffice to explain Trump’s obsequious fawning over Russia; and all it would take for that particular spectacularly venal upscale grifter to sell out his country, to expose its secrets, to betray its interests in favor of his own, is the lure of future payment on a scale worthy of the Romanovs. I now think that Trump is kowtowing to Putin because Putin has enough money — who knows from where — to keep Trump rolling in gilded luxury for the rest of his life after he leaves office.
That belief, that it’s just pure greed keeping Trump in Putin’s corner, got another boost when I heard Peter Strzok promoting his book on the same program a day or two later. Near the end, as Strzok talked about his conviction that Russia “has something on Trump”, Strzok said Trump was compromised by the lies he’s told. But Strzok referenced the shame, the embarrassment, that an ordinary person would feel when caught in a blatant lie; that shame is why liars can be coöpted by a foreign power.
Trump, though, is no such ordinary person: he has no shame whatsoever. Truth is irrelevant unless useful. Being caught in a lie is an inconvenience to Trump, not a moral stain. In other words, Trump isn’t being blackmailed into betraying his country; I now think he’s doing it as an investment.
This discussion between Maddow and Strzok took place on the day after Trump’s recorded interviews with Bob Woodward first surfaced, and on the very day that saw Trump insisting, falsely of course, that he hadn’t lied to the American people about corona virus when he’d called it a hoax, and the day he claimed that he had brought “so many car plants” to Michigan — he brought one, at the most; and just a few days after he started denying, despite independent confirmation, reports that he’d called our war dead and wounded “losers” and “suckers”.
When Trump gets caught in a lie, he doubles down. We’ve all seen it, ever since he glided down the fools-gold escalator. He denies saying what he said, and lies bigger, and if that doesn’t work, he just walks away from it like from a debt in a bankruptcy, knowing that soon we will all have forgotten about the lie he told and the lie he told about the lie, and we will have moved on to some other ludicrously false bauble sprinkled on the public consciousness.
