I don’t know. I don’t have a research agency, let alone international intelligence, to work off of. And even if what I think is more or less what happened, I’m sure I don’t fathom the details. But here’s what I think.

(Oh! by the way! this is about Trump)

Let’s start with Fred. Fred Trump, I suspect, was doing business with the Russian mob in New York, maybe elsewhere. It might not have been much – a favor here, a deal there – or it might have been a lot. But whatever the extent, I believe this is where Donald Trump’s original connections to Russian business and banking interests originated. And maybe the mob? Probably the mob.

So, it seems that Trump is a financial shitshow. He’s kind of his own internal Ponzi scheme. He has lots of assets, but lots of debt. If he’d left the bazillion dollars his dad gave him in a low-interest savings account, maybe he’d have more wealth than he apparently has right now. Is that true? I don’t know. What I do know is that he declared bankruptcy for a casino, doesn’t pay contractors (or cities he’s held rallies in, apparently), has gone belly-up in venture after venture, and can’t get a loan from an American financial institution. There are a gazillion other examples of his bad business practice. And here is where I believe unscrupulous deals (Deutsche Bank ?) and unscrupulous lenders (Russian oligarchs?) enter the picture: no longer able to secure normal funding for his projects, he went outside of regular channels.

And did he get involved in money laundering for the Russians, or others, along the way? probably. It’s almost a sideline at that point. Or maybe a means to an end. But in any case, he was definitely negotiating opening one of his hideous Towers in Russia, and word on the street is, in order to do certain kinds of deals, you work with certain kinds of people….

And all this time Trump is leveraging off his name, improving his brand, living life high on the hog, and apparently covered in gold, and come to think of it, the decor in his trash palace penthouse is a bit reminiscent of some gilded Russian palace, but I digress.

Let’s switch gears.

It would seem Putin has been messing around in our and other nation’s internal politics for a while. Brexit has his stamp on it, as does of course our 2016, and 2018 elections. In 2016 it was fairly certain in the early months that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. And I don’t think Putin wanted that even one little bit. Hillary is onto his game, schooled in it over her years in the Senate and as Secretary of State. And Putin knows she’s onto his game. He did not want her to win the presidency.

I don’t believe Putin was backing Trump initially. If anything, it would have been an amusing sideshow at first, this idiot who’s been trying to rub shoulders with the oligarchs for years making his pitch to be a world leader. I think early in the 2016 campaign, Putin was using social media, hacking, etc etc etc to destabilize the election, encourage support of candidates (Bernie, Stein) that would break up the Democratic party into smaller voting blocks. And maybe pumping up Trump was in that mix, but I’m not sure Putin groomed Trump for the campaign from the beginning.

When did Russia start backing Trump? hard to say. Ok, maybe they did groom him for the candidacy, but I think it more likely they hopped on its bandwagon when he begin to surge. At some point, someone, some group (who even knows?), managed to change the GOP platform position on the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which I think was meant to get Russia back on the G7/G8, and possibly pave the way for removing the sanctions of the Magnitsky Act. Did Trump help facilitate that? It’s hard to imagine; details and effects of complex legislation is not exactly Trump’s strong suit. I think it more likely that a coalition of Trump’s people (Giulianni, Manafort, etc) and GOP leaders either invested in or even beholden to Russian investors worked on that platform change. But Trump wouldn’t have been an obstacle.

Theoretically.

Anyway: with Trump strong in the 2016 election cycle, and then winning, I suspect Putin just kept working with the asset his people had cultivated. I don’t think he thought Trump would win, I think he sought to destabilize our nation, and whether Trump or Clinton had won the 2016 election, that happened. It’s just so much worse with Trump fueling the fire.

In this latest episode of The Horrible Timeline That Is The Trump Administration, the impeachment was based around the pressure Trump put on Zelensky to create soundbites in Trump’s effort to beat Biden, but even that goes back to Russia, who is invading Ukraine even as we speak, and would prefer to either be back in the G8, or destroy that alliance altogether.

Pelosi was right: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.

Well, thank you for coming to my TED talk, tip your waitress (or your preferred candidate), and try the veal. This has been another episode of Setting Down a Marker.