What was going on here? I was genuinely puzzled. This was far outside the bounds of normal American politics, especially for a Republican. How was the Party of Reagan letting itself become the Party of Putin?
I thought there were three plausible explanations for the budding Trump-Putin “bromance.”
First, Trump has a bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen. He praised Kim Jong-un, the murderous young ruler of North Korea, for his skill at consolidating power and eliminating dissent—“You’ve gotta give him credit,” Trump said. He also talked admiringly about the 1989 Chinese massacre of unarmed student protesters at Tiananmen Square; he said it showed strength. Strength is what it’s all about. Trump doesn’t think in terms of morality or human rights, he thinks only in terms of power and dominance. Might makes right. Putin thinks the same way, albeit much more strategically. And Trump appears to have fallen hard for Putin’s macho “bare-chested autocrat” act. He doesn’t just like Putin—he seems to want to be like Putin, a white authoritarian leader who could put down dissenters, repress minorities, disenfranchise voters, weaken the press, and amass untold billions for himself. He dreams of Moscow on the Potomac.
Second, despite his utter lack of interest in or knowledge of most foreign policy issues, Trump has a long-standing worldview that aligns well with Putin’s agenda. He is suspicious of American allies, doesn’t think values should play a role in foreign policy, and doesn’t seem to believe the United States should continue carrying the mantle of global leadership. Way back in 1987, Trump spent nearly $100,000 on full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe criticizing Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy and urging America to stop defending allies who should be taking care of themselves. Trump said the world was taking advantage of the United States and laughing at us. Nearly thirty years later, he was saying the same things. He referred to America’s alliances as if they were protection rackets, where we could extort weaker countries to pay tribute in exchange for safety. He threatened to abandon NATO and bad-mouthed the European Union. He insulted the leaders of countries such as Britain and Germany. He even got into a Twitter fight with Pope Francis! Given all this, it’s no surprise that, once he became President, Trump bickered with our allies and refused to commit to the bedrock principle of mutual defense at a NATO summit. America’s lost prestige and newfound isolation were embodied in the sad image of the other leaders of Western democracies strolling together down a lovely Italian street while Trump followed in a golf cart, all by himself.
All this was music to Putin’s ears. The Kremlin’s top strategic goal is to weaken the Atlantic Alliance and reduce America’s influence in Europe, leaving the continent ripe for Russian domination. Putin couldn’t ask for a better friend than Donald Trump.
The third explanation was that Trump seems to have extensive financial ties to Russia. In 2008, Trump’s son Don Jr. told investors in Moscow, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant. In 2013, Trump himself said in an interview with David Letterman that he did “a lot of business with the Russians.” A respected golf journalist named James Dodson reported that Trump’s other son, Eric, told him, “We don’t rely on American banks” to fund Trump golf projects, “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Without seeing Trump’s tax returns, it’s impossible to determine the full extent of these financial ties. Based on what’s already known, there is good reason to believe that despite repeated bankruptcies and even though most American banks refused to lend to him, Trump, his companies, or partners, according to USA Today, “turned to wealthy Russians and oligarchs from former Soviet republics—several allegedly connected to organized crime.” This was based on a review of court cases and other legal documents. Additionally, in 2008, Trump raised eyebrows by selling a mansion in Palm Beach to a Russian oligarch at an inflated price—$54 million more than he paid for it just four years earlier. In 2013, his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow was partly financed by a billionaire ally of Putin. To build Trump SoHo New York hotel, he partnered with a company called the Bayrock Group and a Russian immigrant named Felix Sater, formerly linked to the mafia, who was previously convicted of money laundering. (USA Today has done great reporting on all of this, if you want to learn more.)
Trump’s advisors also had financial ties to Russia. Paul Manafort, whom Trump hired in March 2016 and promoted to campaign chairman two months later, was a Republican lobbyist who had spent years serving autocrats overseas, most recently making millions working for pro-Putin forces in Ukraine. Then there was Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who had been fired for good cause by President Obama in 2014. Then Flynn accepted money from Putin’s Western-facing propaganda network, Russia Today (RT), and in December 2015 attended RT’s tenth-anniversary gala in Moscow, where he sat at Putin’s table (along with Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein). There was also Carter Page, a former advisor to the Russian gas giant Gazprom, who traveled back and forth to Moscow frequently—including in July 2016, in the middle of the campaign. He seemed to be reading from the Kremlin’s anti-American talking points.
Learning all this over the course of 2015 and 2016 was surreal. It felt like we were peeling an onion, and there was always another layer.
If you add together all these factors—Trump’s affection for tyrants and hostility toward allies, sympathy for Russia’s strategic aims, and alleged financial ties to shady Russian actors—his pro-Putin rhetoric starts to make sense. And this was all out in the open and well known throughout the campaign. It came to a head in late April 2016, when Trump called for improved relations with Russia in a major foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, applauded from the front row. (He later attended the Republican National Convention, but avoided ours.)
Republican national security experts were appalled by Trump’s embrace of Putin. So was I. At every opportunity, I warned that allowing Trump to be Commander in Chief would be profoundly dangerous and play directly into Russia’s hands. “It’ll be like Christmas in the Kremlin,” I predicted.
Breach
Then things got stranger.
In late March 2016, FBI agents met with my campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, and other senior staffers at our Brooklyn headquarters to warn us that foreign hackers could be targeting our campaign with phishing emails that tried to trick people into clicking links or entering passwords that would open up access to our network. We were already aware of the threat, because scores if not hundreds of these phishing emails were pouring in. Most were easy to spot, and we had no reason at the time to believe any were successful.