[RD] Surrender Summit

[Berzerker]

I doubt Trump would like Hitler, his daughter married into the (orthodox?) Jewish faith

 

[Cutlass]

This can be said about any other country leader. If foreign intelligence has leverage on him, then the country may be in trouble. But the accusation is specifically that Russia hacked elections and brought Trump to power.


Putin's mother survived Leningrad blockade where about million of Soviet civilians perished. Father was a decorated WW2 veteran who was wounded on Neva bridgehead.
Don't know about Trump, but only ignorant idiot can seriously consider Putin to be a Hitler's fan.

Oh, he's definitely a Hitler fanboi. He is the type of person a loyal Russian would kill, if they were willing to see him for what he really is.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I'm seriously beginning to think that Trump is being bribed by the Russian government, has been bribed in the past, or that they have some kind of serious dirt on his financial dealings and not just a pee tape. Accepting bribes despite being super-wealthy would fit his personality perfectly. Alternately, it could be that the Trump organization is in financial trouble again and is accepting bribes for that reason. Once the bribery is accepted, the threat of this being revealed is a further incentive to keep going with it. Of course, he also appreciates the help they provided in hacking the DNC and airing their dirty laundry.

There is not a single other human, except perhaps Ivanka, that Trump lavishes nothing but praise on in this manner. He also behaves as though he looks up to Putin in ways that he just doesn't with any other person, and his actions lately have involved openly damaging US alliances rather than just being indifferent to them. Perhaps he just admires the autocratic personality and is looking forward to more election help. But something deeper could be afloat.



It doesn't really involve any kind of elaborate conspiracy. All that has to happen is that Trump accepted bribes - a thing he would absolutely do - or that there is severely compromising information regarding his financial dealings. It's not even totally out of the realm of possibility that he'd respond to blackmail involving unusual sexual acts, given that he is known to obsess over the "pee tape" to aides. But I suspect financial blackmail is more threatening to him.

The article posted a while ago plays it out more like a spy movie, hinting that this might go all the way back to 1987. That is extremely unlikely. But there could easily be something banal and corruption-related behind his vocal support for Putin.

Trump has been in Putin's pocket for a long time. The Russian financing has kept him out of bankruptcy. Putin's Poodle is the meme of the day and should be used at every opportunity. #putinspoodle.

 

[Ajidica]

Lawfare had a good article on the implications of Mueller's strategy of indicting foreign intelligence officers for hacking and mucking around in foreign elections.

An excerpt:

Intelligence history expert Loch Johnson told Scott Shane that the 2016 Russia electoral interference is “the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades, whenever American officials were worried about a foreign vote.” The CIA’s former chief of Russia operations, Steven L. Hall, told Shane: “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all.” Hall added that “the United States ‘absolutely’ has carried out such election influence operations historically, and I hope we keep doing it.”

https://www.lawfareblog.com/uncomfo...dictment-20-and-trumps-press-conference-putin

 

[red_elk]

Oh, he's definitely a Hitler fanboi.

No problem, if your statement wasn't trolling than conclusion is obvious.

 

[Bootstoots]

No. You're wrong. It's Hitler. The Crimea thing was straight out of Hitler's playbook. Crimea and Sudetenland are about as close as historical parallels ever get. Putin is fascist, not communist. It's all about robbing the country for the benefit of the country's masters, and it's all about the masters rule, and the workers work.

Neither of course can admit it. But neither deviates from it in any meaningful way.

Eh, Putin's no Hitler. He doesn't take over other countries, he just lops off little pro-Russian pieces of the ones that annoy him and has them declare independence as otherwise unrecognized puppet statelets. Then he uses the resulting low-grade conflicts to put pressure on the target country and keep them off-balance, without ever launching a full-scale invasion of the whole country. The only outright annexation was Crimea, and that was because of its overwhelming strategic importance. Otherwise it would be the Crimean People's Republic.

This is certainly not acceptable behavior, but its differences from the Nazi attempt to overrun the whole continent are pretty obvious. I don't know of another historical example of this sort of thing offhand, though.

Putin's an authoritarian right-wing populist. This has some stuff in common with fascism, but there doesn't seem to be a coherent overarching ideology besides Russian nationalism, social conservatism, and something of a cult of personality. He seems pretty content to allow some modest amount of individualism and limited personal freedom provided it doesn't threaten him, as well. So I don't think "fascist" really fits either. Maybe kind of a fascist-lite or something.

 

[Ajidica]

Maybe kind of a fascist-lite or something.

"right-wing authoritarian" seems to fit without having to bring the Fascists into this.

 

[Bootstoots]

Yeah, that's what I prefer too. Calling someone a fascist should be restricted to ideologies/regimes that seriously resemble the actual fascists. Otherwise it's just a snarl word without much meaning besides "authoritarian I dislike".

Then again, of course, that is how it's most frequently used nowadays...

 

[Berzerker]

what about Putin makes him right wing as opposed to left wing?

 

[Ajidica]

what about Putin makes him right wing as opposed to left wing?

I mean, is this serious?
Putin and United Russia are as far left as the Law and Justice party in Poland is.
Make of that what you will.

 

[Berzerker]

i dont know what to make of it, who is the law and justice party?

 

[Ajidica]

i dont know what to make of it, who is the law and justice party?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=law+and+justice+party

 

[Broken_Erika]

i dont know what to make of it, who is the law and justice party?

Standard right-wing pseudo-authoritarian trash.

 

[red_elk]

"United Russia" ideology is conservative and centrist in the same time. A "Just Russia" is a social-democratic version of a ruling party.
Putin's party ideology can be described as center-right.

 

[Ajidica]

PiS is currently getting into fights with the EU over their definitely-not-a-plan-to-stack-the-court court stacking plan. Their earlier had to back down in a fight with the EU over what basically amounted to turned the public broadcaster into a propaganda outlet and have been creating weird paramilitary forces with an internal security brief (which always goes well).

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Don't worry guys Trump said he just mispoke. Problem solved.

 

[red_elk]

Don't worry guys Trump said he just mispoke. Problem solved.

He wanted to poke somebody, but missed?

 

[Broken_Erika]

He wanted to poke somebody, but missed?

He wanted to poke Ivanka.

 

[Bootstoots]

Actually, we already know he has paid hush money to keep women quiet about his sexual activity.

Sure, especially if they could go public and derail his campaign. I'm not sure that sort of thing rises to the level of blackmail material, though. I'm thinking it has to be at least golden shower-level material for him to be blackmailed. If not considerably worse.

I have considered that long ago, when the Russia narrative first emerged, but it made as little sense then as it does now.

If Russia had any dirt on him, the US MIC would also have it. Trump lives and does most of his business in the US. The US controls and spies on the worldwide financial system very tightly. Trump's enemies would have had that information, and would have used it already.

While the US does have a tight level of control over the financial system, it also deliberately allows the rich to stash their earnings in overseas accounts owned by several layers of shell companies in various tax havens, to do business with other people's shell companies, and generally to structure their assets in such a way that it is very difficult to track everything. I believe it is genuinely very hard to trace Trump's money and that nobody would ever have bothered, at least not until people started taking him seriously as a presidential candidate in early 2016. Perhaps all of our three-letter agencies have subsequently started trying to figure it out and it will eventually come out in bits and pieces with Mueller. If he did get funding from Russian or other foreign sources, it would probably have gone unnoticed until serious investigative work began.

That leaves bribing. But the thing with Trump is that he never needed to take political bribes in his career. And he never feared losing money either. What kind of bribe could possibly be so appealing to him now, and why? Were we in the 2007-2012 period, he might have some business under water. But he weathered that period, before he got anywhere influential in politics. If he didn't need support then, he certainly would not need it afterward, when very easy credit became a thing and assets prices rose sharply again. The possible motives are just not there. No motive to attempt to bribe him before 2015, when he first became relevant politically. And no motive for him to be desperate about any money after 2012.

Not needing money, would he simply sell his political agenda for peanuts? Compromise what for him seems to have been an intense desire for decades, playing a major political roles, for just some more money? I' think he'd scoff at that. The whole narrative of Trump being manipulated or bought just made no sense. Which is why I started looking into conflicts within Washington as a possible explanation for the whole story. My guess is as good as others, I'm definitely an outsider to those politics. But it seems to me far more likely.

I don't know. If he were a normal political actor, I'd say you're right that this wouldn't make sense. But we're talking about a really impulsive character here, with highly unusual business dealings. Accepting large bribes ($1 billion plus) might be something he would do, even though it doesn't make sense strictly speaking. He may also think that he can behave with impunity as president - which he's been more or less right about so far.

I'd say more likely no than yes that his business is sound and doesn't need foreign bribes, but who knows. It could also be something like Ajidica's speculation that he happened to be propped up by Russian oligarchs for business reasons, and this morphed into political support - which would have a blackmail component, in that he knows Putin controls all the oligarchs and could easily release incriminating information at will.

I'm still not dismissing the idea that he might simply be enamored with Putin's authoritarian image and genuinely think that better relations with Russia would be in the best interests of the US. Trump doesn't believe much, but there are a few core beliefs he brings up over and over, and maybe that's one of them. Still, it all looks very suspicious.

It's hard to get a read on him and figure out how much of his behavior is simply impulsive and irrational, how much is impulsive but in line with his self-interest, and how much is fully rational. It will be very interesting to find out more about what exactly has been going on with him, as it's slowly untangled over the years to come.

 

[Hygro]

I doubt Trump would like Hitler, his daughter married into the (orthodox?) Jewish faith

Literal Hitler vs fungible/imagined/modeled/ideal-type Hitler.