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What we might want to consider
Here are facts that have been collected and researched by a man
called Seth Abramson. He's an attorney, a professor, a former
criminal investigator and a writer who has a twitter feed. He also
writes for Newsweek Magazine. He refers to himself as "a curatorial
journalist", and he defines this as someone who compiles and curates
"reliable investigative reporting from around the world [emphasis
mine] and going back decades." He doesn't report the news, he says,
but what he writes often feels like news to the people who read it
because he connects stories together that have been in the news. In
plain sight, so to speak.
It's his twitter feed from today that I'd like to share with you. I
encourage you to think about it--as I will do--and to pass this
information along if you find it worthy. I'd like to add that I'm
writing this not in an attempt to woo Donald Trump's "base" away
from him. I believe those people are lost to all of us, much to my
sorrow and undoubtedly to yours. Just like you, I know some of them.
Just like you, I keep asking why and how with regard to their 2016
votes for Trump. But this message I'm sending you isn't and cannot
be an answer to that. This message is just to give you some
information. Everything I'm going to write here has been vetted more
than once.
A question many people have asked in the last few years is "What
does Putin have on Donald Trump?" The answer has always been in
plain sight, in the oft-quoted words of Hal Holbrook playing Deep
Throat in the film All the President's Men. "Follow the money."
In 2008, a Russian oligarch (for that read billionaire) named Dmitry
Rybolovlev paid Donald Trump $54 million dollars for a Palm Beach
property that Trump had been unable to sell. The $54 million was net
profit. Trump, who does not have the amount of money he claims he
has (which is more than likely one of the reasons he won't release
his tax returns), believes that this $54 million actually came to
him from Vladimir Putin and that it was a bribe to encourage him to
run for President. At the time, Trump was considering a 2012
Presidential run and although he didn't make that run, the $54
million rescued him financially. Within 60 months Trump had made a
decision to run for President and he informed his good friend Roger
Stone that he was throwing his hat in the ring. Within 150 days of
confiding this to Stone, another oligarch--this one named Agalarov--
emerged and offered a deal that would be the biggest of Trump's
life: future nine- or ten-figure "payments" to him. The requirements
were, first of all, to win the election and, afterwards, to develop
a pro-Kremlin policy that would include his support of Putin as well
as his slowing down or, preferably, his blocking of Russian
sanctions. Thus, Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator in the
summer of 2015 and made his announcement (with references to Mexican
drug dealers and rapists invading our country as I recall). The
rest, we can say, is history:
"Russia, if you're listening..." was the message to the Kremlin to
dump their hacked DNC emails onto Wikileaks, secure in the knowledge
that Wikileaks would know exactly what to do with them.
Essentially, then, Donald Trump sold out the United States for $54
million dollars (Rybololev) and the promise of more to come (Agalarov).
Personally, I never believed that Putin had "something" on Trump in
the way we tend to think of such things, such as the rumored tapes
of a prostitute relieving her bladder onto his naked chest or
elsewhere upon his person. I never believed that Trump "had to do"
what Putin ordered him to do in fear that Putin would release those
tapes. It's my belief that even if one such tape exists, Trump is as
concerned about it as he was concerned about the country hearing him
talk about grabbing women's genitals, or the country learning he was
putting children in cages on the border, or the country discovering
he was separating those children from their parents without keeping
any records as to where those children were being sent, or the
country learning that Mexico was never going to pay for his "big
beautiful wall", or the country learning that he'd attempted to
extort from the newly elected President of Ukraine a guarantee that
he would announce an investigation into Hunter Biden and Joe Biden,
or--even now--the country learning that he knew COVID19 was deadly
and did nothing to prepare the country to deal with. Indeed, he
could get away with calling John McCain a loser for being a prisoner
of war for five years and he could call the young men who died on
Omaha Beach fools and, really, nothing would ever drive his
supporters away. And all of us know that this is true. Those people
are the lost souls of this time we've been living through. Those
people are among Trump's victims.
For three bottom lines exist for Trump and he lives in service of
them. They are money, the power to get more money, and celebrity in
the form of adulation from a fawning public. He doesn't care about
anything else and the real tragedy for America is that there are
millions of people who do not care that he does not care.
If the stock market is being artificially boosted by the US
government's pouring money into it, this does not matter to Trump's
base.
If the police kill men and women of color while actually being
filmed doing it, this does not matter to Trump's base.
If nearly 200,000 people die because Trump doesn't want to upset the
stock market by acknowledging a deadly threat to their lives, this
does not matter to Trump's base.
If he puts the US Postal Service into the hands of a donor to his
campaign who broke the law, this does not matter to Trump's base.
If he fires people who blow the whistle on him or on his cronies,
this does not matter to Trump's base.
What you and I will have to decide is what matters to us. What you
and I will have to decide is what we're going to do about what
matters to us.
Elizabeth George
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