Russian oligarchs had turned faux billionaire Trump into an actual billionaire. Donald Trump’s business wasn’t real estate development. It wasn’t licensing the Trump name. Donald Trump made his fortune laundering capital. Even the golf courses that Trump has spent his time vacationing on since sitting down at the White House were products of this relationship.
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Millian arranged for Russian funds to flow into Trump apartments and condos. The primary requirement for Trump on these deals and others was not an attention to details–it was the opposite. Trump had to simply cash the checks and turn his back. With both Bayrock and Millian, this was the principal quality that defined Donald Trump–an ability to look away and ignore both the source of the funds pouring in and the nature of the deals they were making.
This article is a must-read — the most comprehensive compilation on Trump’s questionable wealth and connections to dirty Russian money, and possibly Putin and the Russian state itself (while some of the assertions about Russian hacking and Russian state motivations are questionable, they’re extremely tangential in this article).
If we were starry-eyed Trump supporters (i.e., rather than being independent, free thinkers), we’d feel extremely sick after reading this article.
What’s really shocking is, given how much of this is public record (a hefty amount coming from Trump’s or his son’s words, or Trump’s public actions), that no one else has pieced it together. Guess it’s just a truism that Trump successfully “drives the news cycle” and distracts everyone (including virtually 100% of the media) with his continuous foibles and dramas.