Trump Knew It All, From
the Beginning
President Trump meets with
Danny Burch in the Oval Office on March 6, 2019, in Washington, D.C.TOM BRENNER
/ GETTY IMAGES
March
8, 2019
Every week seems to bring another
Trump scandal. There are so many now we’re going to have to start numbering
them. Up until now the sheer volume of alleged misdeeds and malfeasance has
actually worked in the president’s favor. There is so much out there that it’s
hard to keep the whole picture straight in your mind and that has the weird
effect of making things seem less serious than they actually are.
We know that the Trump base and
the vast majority of Republican voters still support the president and think
it’s all nothing but a witch hunt. They are mesmerized by the president and
propagandized by Fox News and other right-wing media. But I would
imagine that even people who don’t like Trump but don’t follow all this closely
or in much detail wonder whether maybe the whole thing is just a collection of
complaints that don’t really add up to anything.
That’s why it’s meaningful when
the likes of Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios, journalists whom the political
establishment sees as avatars of acceptable mainstream thinking, decide that
it’s time to take stock of how many scandals are now being investigated and how
wide the scope of the alleged criminality and corruption has become. It’s
rather sobering. On Thursday they wrote out a partial list, entitling
it, “The biggest political scandal in American history.”
VandeHei and Allen report that
historians tell them there are only two previous scandals that even come close
to what we are dealing with now: One is Watergate, and even Americans who
weren’t alive at the time have heard plenty about that one. The other would
be Teapot Dome, a bribery scandal under the
manifestly corrupt Warren G. Harding administration in the 1920s.
Trump’s scandals include the
Russia investigation, of course, which the Axios authors call
one of the greatest counter-espionage cases of all time; the Stormy Daniels
campaign finance scandal; the lies about the Trump Tower Moscow project (which
is likely also part of the Russia counterintelligence investigation); the more
than 100 contacts between Russian agents or emissaries and members of the Trump
campaign; Michael Flynn’s inexplicable lies to the FBI about his conversations
with the Russian ambassador; the firing of James Comey and other acts of
obstruction of justice; and the granting of security clearances to Trump’s
daughter and son-in-law over the objections of the intelligence agencies.
Their list does not include
all the administration officials under suspicion of corruption while
in office or the scandals swirling around the president’s family
business, which he refused to give up upon taking office and is still closely
involved with, even promoting his resort properties and private clubs with
personal appearances nearly every weekend. Top executives and foreign
representatives seeking favor from the administration ostentatiously spend
money at Trump hotels to gain the attention of the president and his family. In
the wake of a recent unfavorable court ruling over his golf course in Scotland,
Trump even posted a promotional tweet openly promising foreign policy considerations:
Very
proud of perhaps the greatest golf course anywhere in the world. Also, furthers
U.K. relationship!
The U.S. attorney for the
Southern District of New York is investigating Trump’s inaugural committee and
various financial issues regarding the Trump Organization. New York’s attorney
general and insurance regulators are looking into various charges of fraud. And
the House of Representatives has launched at least half a dozen different
probes into various of the matters mentioned above.
Even the purveyors of
Beltway conventional wisdom are starting to see that regardless of what
Robert Mueller’s eventual report may conclude, what we already know makes this
the most scandal-plagued presidency in history. And the big question that hangs
over all of it is the proverbial one uttered years ago by Sen. Howard Baker,
who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the
president know and when did he know it?”
It’s tempting to believe that
Donald Trump is just too dim to have known what he was doing. That theory goes
like this: He had no experience in government and just didn’t realize that his
ruthless tactics, which were customary in the business world, would be seen as
corrupt and possibly criminal. He was busy running for president and then being
president.
That is almost certainly wrong.
First of all, Trump’s business history is full of examples of corrupt
practices, from his days as a casino magnate to redlining of rental housing, fraudulent development projects and partnering with the mob. Not long ago, we saw
a massive exposé of the fraudulent scheme
Trump’s father set up, from which his family massively profited for decades.
It’s not as if he’s ever operated with integrity.
Let’s take one example from the
recent revelations by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. Cohen produced
checks signed by Trump, after he became president, that Cohen says
were to pay him back for the hush money Cohen had paid to Stormy Daniels. It has
been suggested that perhaps Trump didn’t know what those checks
were for. After all, he’s a wealthy man who signs $35,000 checks all the time
and he might have assumed they were for general legal work. But Donald Trump
doesn’t operate that way. He told The New York Times during
the transition:
[I]n theory, I can be
president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on
my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks,
I’m the old-fashioned type. I like to sign checks so I know what is going on as
opposed to pressing a computer button, boom, and thousands of checks are
automatically sent. It keeps, it tells me what’s going on a little bit and it
tells contractors that I’m watching.
Is it reasonable to believe
that he signed those checks in the Oval Office without knowing what they were
for?
Bloomberg recently reported that Trump was
heavily involved in the inauguration festivities. His inaugural committee
chair, Tom Barrack, said Trump wanted to know everything about the finances.
There remain big questions about what happened to the massive sums of money
collected for that lame inaugural celebration. We know that in at least one
case foreign donors to the inaugural committee were told to send their money
directly to other people donors in order to hide the origins of the money. Is
it remotely conceivable that Trump wouldn’t have known about such arrangements,
or that he had no idea where any of that money was going?
Big questions remain about
whether the then-candidate knew in advance about the June 2016 Trump Tower
meeting with Russian emissaries who had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
After all, he had a big deal brewing in Moscow at the time. Are we
really expected to believe that Donald Trump Jr., who was heavily involved with
that deal, didn’t mention the meeting to dear old Dad? Not bloody likely.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.
Donald Trump is a narcissistic
control freak, particularly when it comes to his cash flow. When it comes
down to it, most of these scandals are about money — including his Russia
entanglements, now that we know about the Moscow project. So to answer Howard
Baker’s question: It’s pretty clear that the president knew everything, and
knew it all from the very beginning.
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has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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