To Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Russia is something of a mystery. It’s a country he knows nothing about. Sure, his ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort is being investigated by the FBI for taking $12.7 million in under-the-table payments from a pro-Russian party in the Ukraine. Yes, Trump’s stance on matters ranging from NATO to Brexit have provided both aid and comfort to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
But no, he doesn’t know the guy. They never met.
Or so he keeps telling us.
Trump Russia Ties
Wading through the lies and misdirection of the Trump campaign is no mean feat. It’s the kind of Sisyphean task that causes journalists to develop marriage-endangering nasal whistles that just won’t quit. There’s just so much that is contradictory, so much that is patent falsehood, that it often feels like wading through a sewer trying to find yesterday’s turd. Still, we have to try.
Speaking at a news conference on July 27, Trump said:
“I have nothing to with Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia — for anything.”
Trump Russia Lies
Suffice to say, that’s not strictly true. Trump’s dealings with Russia, one of the most corrupt regimes in the world, are both complex and deliberately opaque. As Liberal America reported in August, the word ‘nothing’ was Orwellian doublespeak for ‘quite a lot.’
In the exact same interview, he mentally rewrote the word’s dictionary definition saying:
“What do I have to do with Russia? You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida. Palm Beach is a very expensive place. There was a man who went bankrupt and I bought the house for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including brokerage commissions. So I sold it. So I bought it for 40, I sold it for 100 to a Russian. That was a number of years ago. I guess probably I sell condos to Russians, okay?”
Trump Russia Guys
Painful though repetition is, it has to be said again, that this is not true. Trump has been a lot closer to Russia than that.
Way back in 2007 Trump was extolling the virtues of the Russian market saying:
“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment … we will be in Moscow at some point.”
And for once, he was not simply boasting. His 2004 Atlantic city bankruptcy made it difficult for him to prop up his businesses with yet more toxic loans. Most of the major U.S. banks would not go anywhere near him. His favored back-up plan, Deutsche Bank, was already$2.5 billion in the hole thanks to having done business with the GOP’s great orange hope.
According to BuzzFeed he went cap in hand to the cash-rich Bayrock Group, the chairman of which was former Soviet official and real estate mogul Tevfik Arif. The two reportedly planned to build hotels in Moscow and Kiev, but the projects never got off the ground.
Trump projects often don’t.
Schrödinger’s Trump
Still, at least we can be confident that he doesn’t know Putin. Right?
Speaking to Jimmy Fallon last September, Trump was adamant that he did not know the man. He said:
“Look I don’t know him, I know nothing about him.”
Which would be fine, if it wasn’t for a recently resurfaced video that tells a different story. During an interview in 2013 Trump was asked a direct and unambiguous question:
“Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin?”
His answer seemed to contradict later statements:
“I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today. He’s probably very interested in what you and I are saying today and I’m sure he’s going to be seeing it in some form. But I do have a relationship with him.”
In these days of bitter partisan divide, people are far too quick to point fingers at one another’s preferred candidate. We are all guilty of an inability to empathize with the ‘other’ side. But one thing is clear and it cuts across party lines.
Because we are left with two options and two options only
Either Trump was lying in 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk8Odm3GkLU
Or Trump has been lying through the entire course of this campaign:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFS5CSP5fRM
There simply is not a third option, whichever way you look at it and that’s kind of depressing.
Still, we can make ourselves feel better about Russia’s influence over the man who would be President by watching him deny it in all over again in a sassy way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3XKF8pEfwY
Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video
