Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin
A rancid foretaste of imperial President Trump came Wednesday, when he advised congressional leaders, “Don’t talk. Please, be quiet. . . . We have to have our Republicans either stick together or let me just do it by myself.”
.. He received a portion of the $14 million paid by Agalarov and other investors to bring the pageant to Moscow. Agalarov said he and Trump signed an agreement to build a Trump Tower in the heart of Moscow — at least Trump’s fifth attempt at such a venture. And Trump seemed energized by his interactions with Russia’s financial elite, at the pageant and a glitzy after-party in a Moscow nightclub.
“Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room,” Trump bragged to Real Estate Weekly upon returning home.
.. Trump’s relationship with Putin and his warm views toward Russia, which began in the 1980s when the country was still part of the Soviet Union
.. The overwhelming consensus among American political and national security leaders has held that Putin is a pariah who disregards human rights and has violated international norms in seeking to regain influence and territory in the former Soviet bloc.
.. In 2012, one year before Trump brought his beauty pageant to Moscow, then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ top geopolitical threat — an assessment that has only gained currency since then.
.. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
.. In a Republican Party in which an ability to stand up to Putin has been seen as a test of toughness, Trump’s relationship with the Russian leader is instead one of mutual flattery.
.. He has called for overhauling NATO, the allied military force seen as the chief protector of pro-Western nations near Russia. And Trump has surrounded himself with a team of advisers who have had financial ties to Russia.
.. Russia has signaled a deep interest in the U.S. election, and in Trump in particular.
.. And this week, The Washington Post reported that hackers tied to the Russian government had gained access to the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research file on Trump.
.. Part of the allure was what Trump and his associates saw as a huge opportunity — the chance to market American-style luxury apartments to the wealthy elite in a place that still mostly offered utilitarian Soviet-style construction.
.. Trump claimed in a later court proceeding that Russian investors were spooked when a 2005 book questioned his net worth.
.. “I convinced my father it would be cool to have next to each other the Trump Tower and Agalarov Tower, and he was kind of into it at some point,” Emin Agalarov said.
.. At a debate in March, Trump said Putin “has been a very strong leader for Russia,” even contrasting him with President Obama. “I think he has been a lot stronger than our leader, that I can tell you,
.. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort has done multimillion-dollar business deals with pro-Russian oligarchs and was a longtime adviser to the Russia-aligned Ukrainian president
.. An adviser who helped run Trump’s efforts in the New York primary, Michael Caputo, lived in Russia for seven years in the 1990s, working with groups that supported then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Caputo also had a contract for several months in 2000 with the Russian conglomerate Gazprom Media to improve Putin’s image in the United States, damaged after he had taken over a private television station.