The idea that Putin was behind the leaked emails is absurd. It was obviously the Bavarian Illuminati.
So naive. The OP must never have owed Vladimir Putin money.
I think the idea that Putin is encouraging Trump to act in ways that favour Russia rather than the United States is certainly on the side of "possibly true"; that Trump is a conscious agent of Putin less so, though far from impossible. That Putin has no interest at all in Trump seems inconceivable to me, given that it's mainstream now to understand that he has his fingers into Nigel Farage and Marine le Pen. I presume he's throwing money at a whole bunch of European right wingers, so why not Trump as well?
Given that Trump's taxes still haven't been released, I'm assuming there's something really awful in there and I assume it's Putin-related.
Given Trump's dominance-based worldview of binary Alpha/Gamma categorization I doubt he is consciously working on behalf of Putin (see eg humiliation of Christie), but it seems pretty likely that Putin is aiding/manipulating him and Trump has pretty much said he thinks Putin is a good guy.
Trump, and his family, and many of his staff, incontrovertibly have good personal financial motives to stay on the good side of Putin because Putin can ruin them at will if they piss him off. But Trump has other motives too - he was publishing advertisements calling for the US to pull out of NATO back in the 1980s, when he had lots of US investors and Putin was still just a little creepy man sitting in a comms shack in East Berlin with blue tabs on his uniform, so his anti-NATO beliefs may be sincere. So Putin also has a good incentive to keep Trump afloat, financially and politically, as long as Trump goes on saying what he's saying. There doesn't need to be any communication channel between them.
What are the odds that hackers will release trumps' tax return before November?
The hackers work for the tsar, as does Assange.
Kevin Drum is musing on the same topic.
As he says, a few of those positions would make sense in anyone. But all 10?
I still think his refusal to release taxes is about his actual wealth level or his shady tax practices or both. If he were getting some kind of payoff, or loans on easy terms or something, wouldn't that be hidden in the books of one of his many corporations, which I assume are not part of the standard presidential infodump?
"Shady tax practices" could be spun as objectively pro-small government. And, if he wealth is low enough that he can't let people know he's that poor, I think there are pretty good odds that he's also taking money from somebody in Russia to hold the empire together.
Someone should leak a fake tax return suggesting Trump is worth maybe $370M. High enough to be plausible, low enough to be embarrassing. The only way he'll release his returns is if his idiot ego makes him.
11.1 doesn't preclude hiding Russian money as well. And it makes no difference whether Trump personally is, or believes himself to be, a Russian agent; he's clearly a Russian agent of influence based just on public facts about his advisers. Hopefully the FBI earns its keep and swoops down like Thorondor to cast the balrogs into the abyss.
Or at least into Florence, Colorado, if there's a difference. 13 is smart and should be communicated to Mrs Clinton.
I wonder how a poll of our intelligence agencies would come out.
I still think his refusal to release taxes is about his actual wealth level or his shady tax practices or both. If he were getting some kind of payoff, or loans on easy terms or something, wouldn't that be hidden in the books of one of his many corporations, which I assume are not part of the standard presidential infodump?
Yeah, I've been trying to persuade some people of this on another forum. There's clearly a reason why he's not releasing his tax returns, but the chances of it having anything to do with Russia are vanishingly slim. Even if the very worst version of the links reported so far is true, it's not going to show up in the returns. Even as theorised, it's all funneled into Trump or previously Trump-related companies through other companies that aren't even themselves Russian. We're talking multiple removes from what presumably shows up in his returns as dividend income or capital gains.
16. Leon Panetta says Trump is unfit to be POTUS. Whether he regards Clinton as fit either is another question.
ajay is right, no communication necessary or likely. But having Trump as even a candidate helps dictators everywhere-- "Look here, you people, all the democracy in the world and people of America choose stupidly and badly, they wind up wanting a dictator."
Separately, I expect that a Trump presidency would result in T trying to enrich himself at the expense of foreign policy-- pay to play foreign policy intervention, with the payee being maybe the US government and maybe some member of his family.
Fortune magazine had an analysis of Trump's likely wealth. He makes most of his money from a handful of large Manhattan buildings, according to them. No significant revenues that they mentioned from foreign sources, though since they're basically doing analysis of real property, any such sources would be invisible to them. Why he bothered with the small gains from a shitty scam like Trump U is beyond me. His advisors are another story, I think they are bought and paid for-- Carter Page, his main Russia guy, is paid by Russia more than by Trump. Manafort has at least been paid by Russian oligarchs in the past, possibly still.
13 is smart and should be communicated to Mrs Clinton using old school spycraft. A thinly coded classified ad would do nicely.
Does Gazprom or whatever pay dividends? Because that would be on his taxes if he had a bunch of it.
13: It should have multiple orders of Enzyte listed as deductions for unreimbursed medical expenses.
13. What does he do if he's actually worth $365M?
The way it would be done, if Putin wanted to keep Trump afloat, is in absolutely plain sight: his people invest in Trump ventures on terms which don't make sense to anyone else, or do deals which grossly advantage Trump. At which Trump say that this shows how brilliant he is at doing deals.
The obvious precedent is Prince Andrew being paid off by some sleazeball dictator who bought his mansion at a very large premium to the market value
He's probably regretting including "stipend from my Soviet paymasters" as a line item.
23: Break the habit of a lifetime, lie and bluster?
I guess I would be shocked to learn that Trump was genuinely a bought and paid-for Putin proxy, and not be shocked by anything else, including that Putin indirectly has massive financial hooks in him - which it's not even necessary, at this juncture, for Trump to understand himself. Several months ago he seemed a bit unclear on the mechanisms by which POTUSes conventionally place their finances into a blind trust; someone should revisit how exactly he intends to balance his private business with his public service. My uncertainty is that I'm still not entirely convinced I understand who Trump is and all the reasons he's running.
There's a sliding scale in my brain: at one end, Trump is motivated solely by his ego and a sincere thirst for power and adulation; at the other, Trump is a failing con man who's decided the White House is the only con big enough to save his image. I think both are true, but the closer the balance is to the "failing con man" side, the more likely it is that he really is being financially propped up by interests answerable to Putin (again, whether he knows it or not).
Either way, Trump hasn't said anything that had to have been planted in his mind by Putin (or Manafort). As ajay says, Trump's commentary re: NATO is consistent over decades. His comment re: Russia finding the missing emails also has a precursor: a few years ago he tweeted that Snowden is a vile traitor who should be executed but Trump would love him if he exposed Obama's real birth certificate. This is a thought pattern in Trump's brain, a willingness to say "bad things aren't bad if they benefit me." (He may, per Drum, tend to exclude Russia from criticism, but in the NYTimes interview he did name Russia along with China as a country that might be subjecting us to cyberattack.)
Trump's repeated affinity for authoritarian strongmen is not subservience, it's identification; he thinks that's the kind of guy he is. (And if I were Putin, the idea that Trump thinks he's a "guy like me" would have me licking my chops.) He's also incessant on the idea that, with no specifics, he's going to go out in the world and make "great deals" for America. Putin and his people (possibly including Manafort) probably see Trump as a man they can work with to their benefit; Trump, foolishly, probably thinks the same; nobody has to have said anything out loud for everybody to think they know where their interests lie.
at one end, Trump is motivated solely by his ego and a sincere thirst for power and adulation; at the other, Trump is a failing con man who's decided the White House is the only con big enough to save his image.
A line with the endpoints identified to form a circle.
24.last is probably referring to this. He got £3 million over the asking price. The buyer was the billionaire son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan. He let the house become dilapidated and it was soon bulldozed.
11.1 doesn't preclude hiding Russian money as well.
Well, sure, technically, but nothing precludes anything because almost everything we have is speculative - we're limited to balance of probabilities.
Anyway, my main take started here. He's probably not explicitly or implicitly in the tank for Russia, but it's about as bad that he has so many advisors who are, and has various friendly business relationships with them, because he's so reactive and incurious. Putin favors him on RT etc. partly just because he's so clearly disruptive and incompetent, and maybe also that he shares a fatalist vision of the world that legitimizes Russia's aspirations.
A line with the endpoints identified to form a circle.
Yes, but what does he think about it is the question. Which brings us back to the tax returns: nobody but Trump and his fanboys thinks he has as much money as he says (many of his fanboys probably don't realize that he's not even saying he actually has $10B at hand), but is he merely very rich or is he, by the standards of a millionaire with a millionaire's lifestyle, trending very close to broke?
The useful idiots: now more useful and more idiot.
31. Fortune estimates $3.9B. Hidden revenues or debts obviously possible, but they do a straightforward analysis of property he is known to own. There are error bars, since rents are estimated rather than reported, some other guessing.
He could shut up and eat caviar off of odalisques' midriffs in a tropical paradise until he dies with the ongoing revenues.
Fortune also says Standpipe is worth $3 million because he could monetize this blog.
So there are a bunch of business entities that are hard to evaluate and can lead to delusional estimates, but I didn't think commercial buildings in a competitive market with planty of turnover were controversial to analyze. Possibly I am wrong because there's something I don't know, but I'd be interested to read why they could be wrong.
The possibility of hidden debt I understand-- there are devious ways he could have tunneled out the equity, but I thought that was usually done in order to stiff a lender who views the tunneled entity as collateral.
Isn't that something Trump has done before?
35 - the Fortune estimate is based on revenue and extraordinarily generous asssumptions about operating margins. Basically it treats Trump as a near debt-free real estate investor who manages his assets like the world's most successful REIT (they did thos because they were trying to figure out the maximum range of his net worth, which is still about 1/3 of what he claims, but whatever). In fact Trump is a guy who can't get financing from any American bank, is largely (appparently) a branding phenomenon, and certainly has large debts at bad rates to people (almost certainly including Russians) that reduce his net worth enormously and quite possibly under $1b.
He hasn't borrowed heavily against most of his lucrative properties, at least not in a way that's discoverable.
So he'd be tunneling just for the hell of it, and then somehow hiding the money he secreted out.
33, 35: How much of the revenue from those properties is his after all his bankruptcies, especially the first?
His corporations filed for bankruptcy, not him personally-- the Taj Mahal going bankrupt doesn't affect the company wrapped around a Manhattan building.
I can't for the life of me find the article about this (and someone here might know first-hand) but I remember reading that as NYC real estate people go he's considered to be kind of a lightweight. Having owned any substantial amount of property since the 1970s in New York City is going to make someone very wealthy, but having inherited so much he's been playing the real estate investor game on easy mode and hasn't had to really suffer for a lot of his mistakes like someone starting from less might have to.
I read a few good books about investing and finance from the 90s and 2000s and Trump came up multiple times from these businesses professors as a blowhard and a laughing-stock of actual rich people.
What do you mean by "discoverable debt"? Publicly-recorded mortgages? Things publically released? Of course that doesn't reflect his actual debt, let alone explain what is actual net take-home profits from any of his enterprises are. The truth is that we just don't know how wealthy he is, but the Fortune estimate is (deliberately) a near-maximum amount.
42 to 38. 41 has long been my impression/understanding as well.
someone should revisit how exactly he intends to balance his private business with his public service
Hahaha. This is so cute.
Bloomberg did what looks at first blush to be a pretty rigorous (given what data's available) analysis of his properties' net financial positionhere. A lot of the operating income data is available in CMBS investor reports. To the extent he's funded by bilateral bank loans, it will be much less public.
"One hand washes the other" is balance, right?
37. Thanks, interesting. I would like to believe this, but have questions.
can't get financing from any American bank,
I am ready to believe this, but would be interested in pointers to evidence. Redoing the post office in DC was US financed.
I was surprised to learn that he had such a reputation for being an insufferable blowhard even before all the reality TV stuff.
There's a good anecdote in an Asher Edelman interview on YouTube about Trump showing up at a business meeting and really weirding out everyone by being too terrified of germs to shake anyone's hand in the room. Edelman asks his friend after being warned about not to try to shake Trump's hand, "did he adopt his children?" and his friend, horrified, says "do not even think about bringing that up; Donald is extremely sensitive about that topic".
47 - Isn't that just the same methodology they use to assess other billionaire's wealth? It might be as good as what you can do publically but it's important to know how much of a guesstimate those things are, like they can easily be off by 50-80%, usually down not up. I had to get experts to look at a non-Trump near-billionaire's actual net worth for a case once and in addition to be stunningly difficult to do it was crazy how unreliable the public estimates were.
The ditch he's really dug himself into is that while he wants to be as publicly boastful about his wealth as possible, he has every reason to make his wealth look as small as possible on his tax forms which would make him look like even more of a cheater. Romney wasn't really in this boat because he only cared about being seen as a rich private equity guy, so the specific number wasn't important. Trump, otoh, has committed to a specific number that is a deliberate highball of his real worth, so there's no way the taxes come out looking good. Still, I don't think the IRS forms are likely to convince anyone to change their mind in any way.
When I was in NYC a few weeks ago I made a conscious effort to know where his properties were and boy did they stick out like sore thumbs because of how tacky they were. Having his name on them didn't help. Serious real estate magnates care more about building viable shopping centers and tend to keep a low profile, which means keeping their names off of things. A commercial center isn't really improved by people knowing who owns it. The things they put their names on are museums, opera houses, etc, which do have real cultural cachet.
I thought this is a good article:
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/07/26/trump-putin-fallacy-failure-of-imagination/
I did not know this:
In The Washington Post, first Josh Rogin and then Anne Applebaum wrote about the Manafort and Page connections and noted that Trump's people have apparently been indifferent to the party platform but focused on exactly one point: blocking an amendment that would pledge weapons to Ukraine. Arguing that the issue was of supreme importance to the Kremlin, Applebaum called Trump a "Manchurian candidate." But this theory ignores the fact that the same passage in the platform contains the following sentence: "We support maintaining and, if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored." That just happens to be the plank that Russians had hoped to see gone. In fact, earlier this month Page was in Moscow giving a lecture that was publicized by Putin's press secretary and attended by journalists who asked Page to promise to advise Trump to lift sanctions; in what was clearly a rehearsed performance, Page in response pulled out a Putin quote and read it in broken Russian: it said that countries should not interfere in one another's affairs. With this in mind, the incident with the blocked amendment begins to look like Page's attempt to curry favor with his business partners in Moscow by giving them what he can, which isn't what they asked for.
I'm not vouching for its overall validity. I'm just saying that for the properties specifically, a lot of the financial information is actually publicly available, both for value/debt and operating income, because it's in CMBS investor reports.
I am ready to believe this, but would be interested in pointers to evidence. Redoing the post office in DC was US financed.
Yeah, it's a pretty misleading line. The construction loan for that was Deutsche Bank, though it could well have been syndicated to US banks (or non-banks). He certainly has had US lenders in recent times. Wells Fargo financed (and then securitised) 40 Wall Street.
48: It looks like it was originally U.S. financed, but not by a bank. And then the not-bank pulled out.
Sources say.
54 Obviously, Trump can give them recognition of Crimea and lifting of sanctions once elected, and has implied that he will. I don't think he's an agent -- more likely, he sees that Putin is willing to intervene to help him, and sees no reason, the fundamental of the race being what they are, to turn that help away.
I think the campaign was originally a sequel to The Producers, a common view, and now he's got no choice but to play it all the way through. The best possible result for him is a loss so narrow he can claim it was stolen. And then keep cashing in on the brand.
52: 40 Wall Street details here.
54: My understanding is that Colony would have been an equity partner or possibly mezzanine finance, rather than funding the whole thing. The bulk of the financing was always going to come from a lending bank (indeed the Deutsche Bank loan was granted in 2014).
I read the nybooks article and I thought it made some good points, but I am not convinced that Trump doesn't have an explicit deal with Putin. I don't see why he wouldn't. I also don't think it is especially important whether or not he does.
The Clinton global initiative raises money from leaders all over the world. Trump as a newcomer to the world of influence peddling probably has to be cruder and more direct than the Clintons, while also being able to cut fewer deals. I would find the prospect of more friendly relations with Russia somewhat reassuring except for the fact that I know Trump is completely untrustworthy.
Always thought this was Hillary being Rovian. BI don't know about Trump but her and her interests really do take a lot of money from foreign governments.
This is flawless and brilliant. I agree with all of it and find myself horrified to be agreeing. I pride myself on cynicism, but this seems a step too far.
https://medium.com/@pennyred/ab4a4b389949#.877aibd3h
These days, British people are not really in a strong position to be all snarky and superior about the madness of American politics.
59: Needs a Samoan attorney, a briefcase of drugs, several high-powered pistols and Ralph Steadman.
Nowhere near cynical enough, pampered kids today don't understand that you don't just tell the horror, or even show the horror, you have to embrace the horror and leave the lovechild on the page.
Weird story here on the time Trump purportedly flipped a megamansion to a Russian (real) billionaire for $100 million. Could be the buyer simply made a bad decision, could be something more shady.
What my mind concocted is, they lied about the sale price for the dual purpose of bolstering Trump's ego and hiding the Russian's money.
The weird thing about the link at 59 is that you have an underlying sentiment involving British eye-rolling at the dearth of a sense of proportion and reserve in the glitzy American style of political myth-making, but then it's couched in a counter-rhetoric that (as in the Beats and Hunter S. Thompson) is just as grandiloquently American as its object.
I dunno, Russian billionaires paying ridiculous money for gaudy baubles is pretty much dog-bites-man in London, so I'm not sure I'd read much into that one either.
Dubious financial happenings are also dog-bites-man in London, no?
67. Yes. And the ones in London tend to be much better concealed than the ones in NY, which is why they seem less frequent.
Also, I think the Russian nouveaux-riche aren't like stereotypical bourgeois nouveaux-riche. The Russians got rich by being canny power brokers, not by being good at commerce. Like the vieux-riche (sp?), in other words.
Maybe, but they seem to have the same taste as the stereotypical nouveaux riches.
Maybe they're smarter than they look, is what I'm thinking.
I thought the miniature pet giraffes were rather tasteful.
Well, yes, there is the whole infomercial aspect of it. But just because there's sizzle, doesn't mean there isn't steak.
I'm left wondering what Ms. Penny thinks ought to be happening instead: bigger myth-making?
I started following her twitter yesterday and she seems pretty pissed off that Democrats are corrupt. I'm guessing she feels like that undermines the possibility of the good they could do.
She laughs at us for being puritans?
74: I may be projecting, but I think that was a long way of saying "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, and if we can't have virtuous Democrats, at least let's hope they stay hypocritical." Sort of. That the Democratic party self-image, and what they try to project to voters, is about competent governance in the service of loving care for the people of the US generally. And wow, do they not live up to that image in so many ways, but if they stopped trying to fake it things would get much worse.
70: Some of the nouveau-riche did it that way too. Trump's father abused federal programs to subsidize veteran's housing; Trump himself broke into Manhattan real estate by getting a massive tax break through the accidental good fortune of his connections briefly holding both mayor's and governor's office, and also gained from greater willingness to deal with organized crime - they gave him advance notice of strikes and made it safe for him to use pre-mixed concrete and immigrants at illegal wages.