What Russia Has on Trump

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.

Risk Assessment

In response to my last post, Meaningful Numbers, I got this link from a reader. It will take you to a map that shows, on a county-by-county basis (and we all know how I feel about counties) what your chances are of coming into contact to a corona virus carrier at large in your community.

https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/

In using this tool, you should note the slide bar at the lower left, allowing you to view risk scaled to the size of the gathering you are contemplating attending. You should also note that the data assumes there are ten times as many infected people than are reported in official figures. I wouldn't have doubted that figure a few months ago, before widespread testing became available. Even now, the public's indifference to getting tested, even here in San Antonio, where testing is free and easy, leads me to think that ten times the reported figure probably isn't off by much; and it's best to err on the side of caution in this case.

If you're thinking of going where there'll be a number of other people, a place where social distancing will be difficult, unlikely or impossible, that web site will help you make an informed decision as to the risk it entails. But you should also remember that, if you go, and you're exposed, there is still the After-Time to think about: a time when you will return to the company of your loved ones, when you may yourself be the infected one, when you will be the source of illness and death for everyone around you.

Meaningful Numbers

 You see it all the time, on all the news channels: brightly coloured maps showing how many cases each state has. New York, California, Texas and Florida are dark red, because they have so many cases.

But that's not a particularly meaningful bit of information. Of course those states have the most cases: they have the most people. 

A better map would show the infestation of corona virus as a percentage of population. On that map, the dark-red states would be Louisiana, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey, Alabama and Georgia; each of those states has more than 2,000 cases per 100,000 people. 

Close behind would be South Carolina, Rhode Island, DC, Nevada, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Texas, Arkanss, Delaware, Maryland, Iowa, and Illinois, each with more than 1,500 cases per 100,000 people.

California would be in the middle group, along with Nebraska, Connecticut, Idaho, Utah, North Carolina, Virginia, Oklahoma, Indiana, South Dakota, Minnesota, New Mexico, Kansas and Wisconsin, each with 1,000 to 1,499 cases per 100,000.

All this shouldn't make the authorities, or the people, in Texas and California feel much better about the whole thing, but it would give a more meaningful sense of how bad things are in various states.

If you want to know where your state stands, go to https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-us-maps-and-cases/ and click the column heading "...per 100,000 people." Bear in mind, too, that the great majority of cases in the northeast -- New England, New York and New Jersey -- are cases that came up in the early stages of the pandemic, before we knew as much about how to stop the spread. 

An even more useful map would be one that showed the states' relationship based on positivity rates. Positivity rates are the best indicator of how fast the virus is spreading in an area. The worst places on that map would be Mississippi (21%), Texas (19%), Florida (17.5%), Alabama (17%) and Nevada (16%), Washington (15%) and Idaho (also 15%). You can find these statistics at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/testing-positivity, but I don't know where you can find an actual map to illustrate these statistics in a quickly-understandable way.

Condo Week 2020 Blog Posts

To read all the blog posts from our trip up to Jackson Hole, in order from first to last, click here, then at the bottom of each, click on the "newer post" link.