Literary Corner: NATO as Protection Racket

 

NATO map by CBS News.

Until I Came Along

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

NATO was busted until I came along.

You don't pay your bills, you get no protection.
It's very simple. I said,
‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well,
if we don’t pay, are you still
going to protect us?’
I said, ‘Absolutely not.’

They couldn’t believe the answer.
One of the presidents of a big country
stood up and said, 'Well, sir,
if we don't pay and we're attacked
by Russia, will you protect us?'
'No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them
to do whatever the hell they want.
You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.'

NATO actually does have bills, for its political headquarters and command structure in Brussels, which belong not to any specific country but to the organization as a whole, and various programs it runs, for a some €3.3 billion in 2023, or 0.3% of the members' total defense spending, and these are paid for with member contributions, on a sliding scale according to the wealth of the particular country: the two biggest being the US and Germany, at just over 16% each, with Britain and France coming next at 11% and 10% respectively, and so on, down to Montenegro, paying a bit under 0.03% of the budget.

It's not a whole lot of money, in reality, and NATO has never been busted, as Trump puts it. It's also not what Trump is talking about. But Trump does not know that. 

More Perverts

 

People, I've been reading the Complaint in the $10-million suit filed in Manhattan court yesterday against Rudolph Giuliani by Noelle Dunphy, who worked as his Director of Business Development from January 2019 to January 2021, at a salary of $1 million a year plus expenses, which he never paid her, because this was during the protracted process of his third divorce, and

he told Ms. Dunphy that her pay would have to be deferred and her employment kept “secret” until the divorce proceedings finished. He claimed that his “crazy” exwife and her lawyers were watching his cashflow, and that his ex-wife would “attack” and “retaliate” against any female employee that Giuliani hired. Giuliani promised Ms. Dunphy that his divorce would be resolved “any day now,” and therefore the deferral of her pay and the need to keep her employment secret would soon end.

And that's not all, as you've probably heard by now; he started sexually harassing her from the first day—

As he was preparing to leave, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that since they would be working from different locations that week, he would like it if Ms. Dunphy sent him some flirtatious photos.

and in the first week, in New York on a business trip, insisted that she stay at his apartment (he has a guest suite), got her drunk, and forced her to give him oral sex, before taking her out to dinner with Lev Parnas (remember him? this is all happening as we're building up to the Ukraine scandal and the first Trump impeachment, and Lev is around a lot). Before you knew it, this had become a major part of her job:

"Just How People Get Into Politics"

 

Marcel Proust's fictional character Palamède de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, in a drawing by Jean Cocteau, ca. 1921-23, via. 

Warning, this is incredibly distasteful, so much so that I think a lot of journalists are telling themselves it's not newsworthy so they can stop themselves from thinking about it, but if you do think about it, it starts to seem important, as a sign of what the Republican Party is now and where it's going, hopefully toward total collapse.

The story goes back to last January, when the House Republicans were struggling to elect a speaker over the hostage-taking tactics of their most radical faction, not including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had made some kind of private deal, presumably over committee seats, with Leader Kevin McCarthy, and was supporting him.

Upon which a voice arose from outside of Congress, that of Ali Alexander, organizer of the Stop the Steal movement following the 2020 election and January 6 defendant, in a remarkably vituperative attack on Greene,

You are a harlot and a liar. You supported Q. You talked about Jewish people and now you denounce people who talk about Jewish power? Now you want to act like you're not into conspiracies? Girl, go get your teeth fixed. Mine are crooked cause I'm not a multimillionaire. Why are yours crooked?

culminating in a fairly specific threat:

Disorganized Crime

Disorganized Crime, 1989

Frank Wilhoit in comments:

"...don't think he's got the stuff or the staff [to do a full-scale Netanyahu and get elected]..." How are you using the word "got" here? He has been kiting off free media the whole time. Negative partisanship is the wind beneath his stubby little wings, and it is now self-perpetuating. Trump has no friends, no admirers, no sympathizers, never has had; he is purely an avatar for the rural mindset. Any avatar would do: undeniably he has been, down to now, a very good one, but there is a structural imperative to keep escalating, and I do not take for granted that Trump will be able to win that race to the bottom. Someone will arise who will outflank him on the right. The Republican nomination will go to someone who says -- explicitly, no more codetalk, no more allegories, no more private-versus-public: "You, the People, will save America, and you will do it by killing all the liberals, and I will bless you and hold you harmless."

And my response:

I meant "in his body" and "on the payroll". He's a racket boss. That doesn't mean he's a mastermind who works his will through his employees. Rather he's the flag under which they—from Stone and Bannon and Graham down through low-rent crooks like Boris Epshteyn and Jason Miller—have sought to work theirs. "Our boy can become president!" said Felix Sater to Michael Cohen. He was right on that, on two things: he did become president, and he was their boy—he doesn't own them, they own him. They're not the reason he became president, but they sustained him while it was happening, and I personally don't think they can do it again, I think the legal actions especially in Washington are giving them a very hard time (one of the reasons the New York demonstration was so pathetic yesterday was that so many guys who knew how to organize such things in 2021 are in jail or under indictment themselves), and many of the conditions that favored Trump in 2016 have changed.

I agree with you, of course, on the nature of his relationship to the Republican Party (except to note a good number of professional politicians have been willing to serve the mob as his employees, courtiers, couriers, court jesters, enforcers, "friend" simulacra, to be his made men as it were, while others are just using that flag to make their own political connections with the rustics).

Narratology: The Former President is Rubber and the Rest of Us Are Glue

 

Jordan writes in comments, in response to some material I won't repost here that I was saving for a sequel to the "Minions" post:

Apologies for being thick-headed but I just want to make sure I get this. You're saying

1) Trump has his narcissistic injury of believing that the "deep state" (or whatever Nixonian fantasy he has of the forces aligned against him) wanted to prevent his election by inventing "Russia, Russia, Russia";

2) The main goal of his first term therefore was to vanquish and punish his enemies; to "win" (beyond merely getting elected anyway; to really show everyone);

3) To this end he directed investigations into the FBI and Congress;

4) Upon leaving office he took the documents — the evidence of his investigation into his enemies' investigation — because (and here's where I get confused):

4a) Trump believed the documents did exonerate him (they proved that "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a hoax and a vendetta);

4b) Trump believed the documents did not exonerate him;

4c) Trump started with #4a and switched to #4b (or the other way around) so that, like Lindell, the material that he first believed he was empowered by — that would let him "win" — was revealed as material that would sink him;

4d) Some alternative combination of elements that is less rational;

5) So now, he has no choice but to keep stonewalling while helplessly watching the walls close in, retreating into the feral stance he gets into when he's really cornered (the stance from which he orders his followers to get violent).

Is this basically it? If so, there's still the deeper mystery of why Trump believes that "Russia, Russia, Russia" is a hoax — if he does in fact "believe" this — or if it's more that he knows he did it all, committed all the crimes, but so does everyone on the international stage, so his being singled out (merely because he was running for President) was nevertheless a vendetta...meaning, like a mafioso, he knows he's guilty but still believes that those investigating him are being unfair. Right?

Close. I think you're making it a lot more complicated than necessary. Let me take it starting from where you finish:

Timeline

Sorry to keep harping on this, but I can't seem to focus on anything else, and there are some dumb stories circulating because people aren't paying attention to the timeline (my favorite version of which is the one posted by CNN). And some interesting new stuff is just coming out.

First, the original issue was internal to the National Archives and Records Administration, starting not long after Biden's inauguration, and what tipped them off is kind of endearing: as they were sorting through the Trump administration presidential records doing librarian things, cataloguing and indexing, they were eagerly awaiting just what you or I would: the famous stuff, like the love letters from Kim Jong Un or the weather map Trump had tried to doctor with his Sharpie in the hope of convincing people that he had been right to warn Alabamans to prepare for a storm that was not coming to Alabama.

Only none of it showed up. It was missing. 

One Cheer for Liz Cheney

 

Via NBC News.

In less than two years, Liz Cheney went from winning a state wide congressional seat to now, being unable to win her party’s nomination for the same seat, without changing a single political view.

— The Gardener (@hmcadena) August 17, 2022

Not quite, though. Before the 2020 election she voted against impeaching a criminal president, and afterwards she voted for it.

It occurred to me to wonder if that could be the characteristic Republican switch where they come to understand a more or less "liberal" concept when they become personally involved—"I'm against abortion" until somebody you're close to needs one. Like Mrs. Reagan turning in favor of stem cell research when her husband was dying of Alzheimer's disease.

The 2020 impeachment of Trump put the mobster president on trial for a crime against Ukrainians, shaking down President Zelenskyy in an offer-he-can't-refuse scheme in which he wouldn't deliver the congressionally-mandated Javelin missiles until Zelenskyy helped him make an anti-Biden ad. The 2021 impeachment was over a crime against congressmembers, when he unleashed his thug militia on the Capitol building in an effort to stop the joint session from taking a vote.

Did the penny suddenly drop for Cheney when the Trump mob started trashing her own personal workplace? That Trumpism is organized crime?

It did for a lot of them, of course, not least minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who was talking tough on January 7, not only in public but also among his colleagues, bragging to them about how he was going to get the president to resign, but quickly folded like the proverbial cheap suit he fundamentally is.

But Cheney couldn't get it out of her mind. So respect to her for having more balls than Kevin, as it were, but as ever when you're comparing anybody to the vast majority of Republicans, you're setting a pretty low bar.

I should add one other thing, because practically everybody is in love with this narrative of Cheney as being perfectly in lockstep with the ideological side of Trumpism, tax cuts and deregulation, votes with his wishes 93% of the time, etc., that it's not entirely true. She is not merely her father's daughter, she's his disciple, and even his co-author, in the 2016 Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America—an advocate, like so many NeverTrumpers from Kristol to Goldberg, of hard American power who still doesn't think the Iraq War was a mistake and who was enraged both with Trump and with Biden over the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago this week. Like a lot of journalists, too, as I have sometimes noticed. I wonder if that's connected in any way to the current journalistic crushing on Liz Cheney, reminiscent of that on Captain John McCain back in the day.  

Family Matters: Try 2

I have this feeling yesterday's post was too hypertextual to read comfortably and that nobody in fact really read it in the way I meant them to do, so I'm trying again in more conventional prose.

Bassin's Café, Pennsylvania Ave., before and after torching,1978. Via WETA's Washington history website. Boundary Stones.

Eric Says – “we’re the first honest family who’s actually ever gone into Washington, DC.” https://t.co/CLDNzJ117b

— #TuckFrump (@realTuckFrumper) August 14, 2022

Or, more accurately, the only family that's gone into Washington, DC since Salvatore Cottone finally got sent to prison in 1990. Because, really, what kind of family "goes into" a city and there are so few of them that you might be tempted to say yours is the only honest one? That's what you'd say about a Mafia family, of which most cities most of the time have just one, like Chicago or New Orleans (you'd be lying about the honesty, I guess, or maybe meaning that yours are buona gente, unlike those filthy pervert Russians), or fewer, like Washington up until the mid-1970s, when Salvatore Cottone opened a couple of pizzerias there and put his brother Giuseppe in charge of the cocaine and heroin dealership.

Narratology: Family Matters

Bassin's Café, Pennsylvania Ave., before and after torching,1978. Via WETA's Washington history website.  Boundary Stones.

More accurately the first family that's tried to take over Washington since Salvatore Cottone went to prison in 1990https://t.co/WCpZxNJDW1

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 14, 2022

Cottone's downfall came when his desire for revenge against the informant who got his brother's cocaine ring busted led him into an FBI trap. Will Trump finally succumb because his desire for revenge against Comey, McCabe, and Strzok started him on his career of document theft?

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 14, 2022

For the Record: We Had All the Information We Needed

 

So Maggie Haberman's aptly titled biography of The Former Guy is about to drop, and they're teasing it, as is the custom, with a sample scabrous anecdote—how Trump clogged White House toilets with the bits of torn-up official documents, as if the cops were knocking and he was getting rid of his stash of coke. So what's got everybody riled up? This new evidence of Trump's knowing, continuous violation of the Presidential Records Act? Hell no, everybody's mad at Maggie for presumably waiting till now to publish the story so she could cash in on it.

Everybody, that is, except some old bloggers:

Maybe there would have been hearings - maybe even an impeachment. But he would have skated, with unanimous or near-unanimous Republican support. So withholding the story had no effective impact.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 10, 2022

Now we know why he was so obsessed with water-saving toilets. It wasn't about flushing shit, it was about flushing criminal evidence pic.twitter.com/dt33u7kroU

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 10, 2022

Narratology: If You Have a Hungarian For a Friend...

Tucker and Viktor on Monday, photo by the Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister, via The New York Times.

Not how the old saying goes, but if you have a Hungarian for a friend, you might want to know who his other friends are.

I don't know to what extent readers are following the adventures of the wingnut brethren in Hungary, where Rod Dreher of The American Conservative has been serving as a visiting fellow of the Danube Institute since spring (his substack says he went 17 April, and was about to return to the US when he last posted on 4 August, but he's also traveled around a bit in France, Spain, Romania, and Poland, I think), exuding enthusiasm for the illiberalism of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, one of the politicians who emerged from the velvet revolutions of 1989, a more or less conventional, pro-Western though very conservative, leader in his first premiership from 1998 to 2002 and an increasingly authoritarian one in his second, beginning 2010, during which he has battled immigrants (especially Muslim ones), LBGTQ+ Hungarians (that's important to Rod, of course), press freedom, and George Soros and his Open Society Institute (the Soros Foundation gave him a scholarship to Oxford in 1989, but he returned to Hungary to run for Parliament less than a year after starting).

On the press freedom, Rod rodsplains, in a post datelined Ljubljana (note how, for evidence, he cites himself, talking to an anonymous Slovene, reporting the authority of some anonymous Magyars without explaining what makes them authorities):

I mentioned to a conservative writer here that a couple of Hungarians told me that if Orban had not engineered the takeover of a number of Hungarian press titles by his friends and allies, there would be no conservative media presence at all in Hungary — this, even though conservative voters are a majority. Whenever you hear people on the Left demanding government intervention to guarantee “equity” — meaning equal outcomes [if I ever hear it, but I haven't so far, though I've heard talk about reviving the FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949-87 requiring individual broadcasters to represent a range of views] — remind them that that is pretty much what Viktor Orban did with the Hungarian media landscape. I should say that I have serious misgivings [sure, Rod, that's why you're defending it] about the media operation Orban pulled off, but the de facto monopoly the Left has on the media, especially in a small country like Hungary, tempers my criticism. Orban is far more realistic about the world people on the Right actually live in, I think.

For the Record: I was into impeachment before it went mainstream

Photo via Pasta Factory, Cape Town.

A constant theme on the Republican side of the impeachment debate was the idea that "Democrats have been wanting to impeach this president since the day he took office," as if to say the particular matter of the Ukraine case was just an excuse—the spaghetti strand that clung to the wall.

Of course it's projection, as my old friend Mikey says, because it's exactly what they'd been planning themselves  (see Steve M for lots of detail):

What I know is, weeks BEFORE the election, when it seemed a lock for HRC, I’d heard of R’s saying they’d be drafting Articles on her literally before she was even sworn in.

For what??
Doesn’t matter. Because HER.

So, any Rs b¡tching now, can Shut right TFU & sit TF down. 😡

— Not My Secret Twîtter Account (@mikeybee33) December 19, 2019

Nevertheless there's some truth to the suggestion that we'd have taken anything that worked, some of us: the Zelenskyy bribery case being the one that somehow grabbed the attention of those 30 "moderate" congressional Democrats and the big newspapers—though not to the corollary implication that Trump's not guilty in the others, from the corrupt use of the inauguration fund and the campaign finance violations for which Michael Cohen is in jail through all the bank fraud and tax fraud that may apply and the many sexual assault charges and the foreign and domestic emoluments to the big cases of the president bending foreign and national security policy for the personal benefits he may have received or be receiving from the leaderships of countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and above all Russia.

I was worried about this problem in the "marketing" of the narrow impeachment case from the start, that it would give Republicans a chance to insinuate that the Ukraine shakedown must be the only bad thing Trump had ever done as president, since it was the only bad thing Democrats had been able to find, and cast doubt on whether it was really so bad, because they'd be portraying it in isolation, rather than the context of Trump's all-round thug style of foreign policy. Indeed that's how the Republicans have been arguing, and yesterday they did it all day long, until I was moved to emit the following thread:

The gun is smokin, it's really smokin

...come in spies and blink your eyes I say this gun is smokin

Quickly, some key excerpts from the "transcript" (not a diplomatic-phonetic transcription but clearly pretty well done) of the Trump-Zelensky phone conversation of 25 July, with comments from me:

Zelenskyy (apparently that's how his name is spelled on his passport) has clearly been briefed on how Trump likes to be talked to.

Nice little country you got here...

Intolerable

Everybody's talking about this Stephanopoulos interview:

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP: By the way, not only wasn’t he [Donald Junior] charged, if you read it, with all of the horrible fake news- I mean, I was reading that my son was going to go to jail — this is a good young man — that he was going to go to jail. And then the report comes out, and they didn’t even say, they hardly even talked about him.

OK, so I read it. He's cited on 44 pages of the Report (the same, as it happens, as "Russian sanctions"). Mueller doesn't call him a good young man. Mueller explains that he committed a crime in accepting the offer of help in the form of "dirt" on Clinton from a foreign government, but he felt it would be too hard to convince a jury that he knew what he was doing, or that the thing on offer was a "thing of value", given that as far as anybody knows it turned out to be not valuable (as you know, I think there's more to be said on that and new evidence in the Mueller Report bearing me out), so he decided not to prosecute:

taking into account the high burden to establish a culpable mental state in a campaign-finance prosecution and the difficulty in establishing the required valuation, the Office decided not to pursue criminal campaign-finance charges against Trump Jr.

Or as Marcy's explained, he'd have a hard time showing Junior was smart enough to understand that he was risking jail. It was nevertheless a crime, and it still is one. Hold that thought.

Otherwise Blameless Life: Postscript

Andrew "Chef" Glick, ex-president of the Cape May branch of the Pagan Outlaws Motorcycle Club, knew enough about the 2012 hired killing of April Kauffman, a local radio host and doctor's wife who had threatened to expose the illegal opioid prescription racket her husband was running with the Pagan Outlaws, that he could have been arrested as an accessory. Cops instead charged him with crimes unrelated to the murder plot, illegal possession of methamphetamines, cocaine, and weapons, for which he could have gotten up to 40 years, according to the Philly Voice, and he testified against the murderers and did no time in his own case. That's what Manafort was supposed to do. It's not that complicated.

Also on the Manafort subject, I hope this isn't too obvious, but the fact that none of the crimes with which Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been charged with  feature direct collaboration in a Russian conspiracy doesn't mean they never committed any crimes on those lines.

Indeed, we know at least two cases in which Manafort and Flynn absolutely did collaborate in a Russian conspiracy: Manafort in that cigar bar meeting with Kilimnik of August 2016 when he passed him the 75 pages of polling data, Flynn in those phone calls with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 when they spoke about sanctions. That seems like a clear violation of the 1799 Logan Act

My Dad Went to Hanoi and All I Got Was This Lousy Evidence That I'm in a Smurfing Conspiracy

Image via Medium.

Smurfing, or structuring, being the crime of making a financial transaction in a one-bit-at-a-time way sequenced and parceled so as to evade reporting requirements, like the $35,000 checks cut by the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen all through 2017 paying him back for his payoff of one of Trump's one-night stands (illegal under campaign finance law whether Trump repays it or not), of which we saw two on TV yesterday, one with Junior's signature on it.

He wasn't lying when he showed us your signature on that Stormy Daniels check, Junior. And that's another one of your little crimes, too, structuring payments, isn't it? You might want to keep your head down for a while.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2019

Poor Junior!

Meanwhile, North Korea. Nicholas Kristof deals out some conventional wisdom ("After the Trump-Kim Failure"):

Leverage

Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via Daily Beast.

When the John Bolton interview on NPR started up yesterday morning, I was pretty taken aback:

Steve Inskeep: We'll just dive right in. But I want to start with the arrest that we learned about last night and that I presume you've known about for some time. What is the message that is sent by the arrest of Meng Wanzhou?

National security adviser John Bolton: Well, I'd rather not get into the specifics of law enforcement matters but, but we've had enormous concern for years about ... in this country about the practice of Chinese firms to use stolen American intellectual property to engage in forced technology transfers and to be used really as arms of the Chinese government's objectives in terms of information technology in particular. So not respecting this particular arrest, but Huawei is one company we've been concerned about, there are others as well. I think this is going be a major subject of the negotiations that President Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed on in Buenos Aires.

She's busted for intellectual property theft? Because the news coverage was pretty clear that the offense she was being held for was to do with her company violating Iran sanctions. Did Bolton not know that? Also, copyright violation isn't generally considered a criminal offense.

Riposte

Uncredited photo via BinsBox

Longtime commenter Procopius writes with reference to yesterday's post:

I'm hampered here, because my initial reaction to the initial accusations of Russian interference being so effective that it caused Hillary to lose the eledtion was, "Are you kidding me?" Since then I've felt gaslighted since, for example, the advertisements FaceBook identified as examples of "Russian Influence" were mostly purchased after the election and were mostly trivial click-bait. I've said so, so please don't think I'm trying to be disingenuous when I pull out your

Junior's cheerful acceptance of the Russian offer of stolen documents "as part of Russia and its government's support for the Trump campaign" (whoever drafted that expression for Goldstone might as well have been working to incriminate Junior, as if they were planning to use it as kompromat), is unquestionably a crime

OK, we're talking about many different possible crimes, and I applaud your even-handedness in this article. Since there are at least 5,000 felonies defined in the United States Code, many of which are only prosecuted when a prosecutor gets really obsessive about a particular defendant, and so most of us routinely commit a couple of felonies every day without realizing it, just what crime is this unquestionably? A violation of election finance laws?

This is an openly partisan blog, so you can spare me the sarcasm about "evenhandedness".

I'm not familiar with whatever you're citing on the FaceBook manipulation, so I can't really argue with it, but I was under the impression that the ads bought by Internet Research Agency trolls weren't meant to persuade anybody but to gather the volunteer army of reposters who shared the unpaid material posted from bot accounts, from anti-Semitic memes of Hillary and Soros to the "Pizzagate" scandal, that was actually effective: