Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.
.. Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington.
But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.
.. in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country.
.. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won.
.. The exploitation of ethnic tension; the dislike of NATO; the constant talk of opponents’ corruption, whether warranted or not; the shouting about falsified elections — these were Trump tactics, too
.. And he sought to undermine Ukraine’s constitution, first subtly and then openly.
.. For a long time now, a part of the U.S. political and business class has been merging, ideologically and aesthetically, with its post-Soviet counterparts. The use of shell companies and Cypriot bank accounts; the over-the-top spending on clothes and houses; the profoundly cynical manipulation of ethnic or racial divides to win elections — these behaviors are now common to a particular set of sleazy operators on two continents. If this indictment is correct, Manafort is the living embodiment of this Russian-American convergence.
Are Politicians Responsible for Their ‘Base,’ or Is It the Other Way Around?
Political caricatures don’t come much broader than these. Strange was the establishment incarnate; Moore was the Republican electorate’s id made ruddy flesh, an avatar of the latent nativism and conspiracism that Donald Trump’s detractors inside and outside the Republican Party blamed for his rise.
.. This was a “Jurassic Park” vision of the Republican base, in which party leaders, after fecklessly creating and nurturing a monster, find themselves powerless to stop it once the electric fences go out on the island.
.. Reagan’s 1980 campaign won seven percent more of the labor-union vote than Gerald Ford did in 1976, but he won just 10 percent of the nonwhite vote, significantly less than Ford.
.. Many of the major contenders for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination ran explicitly on the idea of bringing nonwhite constituencies into the party — none more enthusiastically than Representative Jack Kemp of New York.
.. Kemp believed that his vision of racial outreach could bring the party control of Washington.
.. Kemp lost to George Bush — himself a self-identified base-broadener, but one whose candidacy was marred by the race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad
.. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, vowed — and later apologized for vowing — that “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”
.. It was a testament to the party’s cynicism, naïveté or both that Atwater, in taking the helm of the Republican National Committee after Bush’s victory, was tasked with improving outreach to black and Hispanic voters.
.. The base had, in Gingrich’s formulation, become something new: not a coalition to be expanded but a force to be propitiated or crossed at Bush’s peril. It was not there to be molded by politicians like Jack Kemp. It was there to give orders to them, through mediums like Gingrich
.. When Bob Dole — who had campaigned for the 1988 nomination on, as his spokeswoman put it, the “need to broaden the base of the Republican Party” — said he had no “litmus test” for the abortion views of his running mate in 1996, he drew harsh words from James Dobson
.. It implies that the Republican Party is not a coalition of interests but the tribune of an essentially unified tribe.
.. Conservatives often point out, correctly, that today’s Democratic base is, if anything, more monolithic in its policy views than its Republican counterpart, with more uniform positions on issues like abortion, immigration and taxes.
.. Republican voters, meanwhile, passed over candidates with actual fiscal-conservative and evangelical bona fides, like Ted Cruz, in favor of one whose only sustained and consistent point of contact with past Republican practice was the winking subtext of the party’s white identity politics, delivered without the wink. One party’s base knew what it believed; the other’s knew who it was.
Liberals Shun Washington Attorney Representing Jared and Ivanka
she is a partner at WilmerHale, where lawyers charge up to $1,250 an hour and her corner office provides, according to the Washington Post, a “breathtaking” view of the capital. A graduate of Harvard (magna cum laude) and Harvard Law School (cum laude), the 67-year-old Gorelick is a credentialed member of the Washington establishment, of the cognitive elite, even, some might say, of the Deep State. Or at least she was until recently. Gorelick, the Post reports, has made a very bad boo-boo. Among the clients paying her exorbitant fees, you see, are Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. And for this crime, the Post continues, her liberal friends have cast Gorelick out and formed a “No Jamies Club.”
.. These are, after all, the same well schooled, affluent, smooth-talking men and women who erupt in outrage at the slightest suggestion that a lawyer might decline to represent an unsavory client. What does it say about them that Javanka’s attorney is held to a different standard than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s?
.. it difficult to know whom I am annoyed by more. There are the liberals attacking Gorelick for representing the Kushners even as they, the hypocrites, take money from liberal bogeymen on Wall Street and in the oil industry and in authoritarian foreign governments
.. Don’t go after me, Gorelick is saying, I’m just paying the bills. Maybe she can build a new guesthouse with Kushner’s money.
.. these craven and cynical “longtime friends of Gorelick” who say one thing on the record and another thing off the record.
.. The Trumps, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the press — they deserve each other. Mark Leibovich’s book about the swamp was called This Town. I have an idea for a sequel. Working title: These People.
No, Erdogan was not an authoritarian all along
The idea that Erdogan is nothing more than a power-seeking megalomaniac is hard to reconcile with his first term as prime minister. After he assumed that office in March 2003, he oversaw three rounds of political reforms, including diminishing the role of the military in politics, strengthening the freedom of the press, doing away with state security courts and changing the penal code.
.. Erdogan is an extraordinarily shrewd and paranoid politician, character traits that feed off of, and complement, each other. His fears are compounded by the fact that the military high command and the Constitutional Court shuttered four of the AKP’s predecessor parties between 1971 and 2001 for anti-secular activities.
.. And in 2007, the Turkish General Staff attempted to prevent Gul from becoming president because his wife wears a hijab, an indicator of reactionary values for Turkey’s ideologically committed secularists.
.. in 2008, prosecutors brought a case against the AKP in Turkey’s Constitutional Court, charging the party with being a “center for anti-secular activities” and seeking its closure. The party narrowly escaped that fate and was forced to pay a $20 million fine instead.
.. Taken together, these episodes amounted to victories for Erdogan, but they convinced him that Turkey’s elites would never rest until the AKP was brought low.
.. Europe’s ambivalence after negotiations began undermined them. This wavering was a result of collective disbelief that the Turks had undertaken enough reforms to start negotiations and, even more central, uncertainty among Europeans about the nature of their union. Was it a club of democracies that were coterminous with predominantly Christian countries, or was it based on shared values, ideals and norms?
.. French and Austrian governments declared that they would hold referenda on Turkey’s membership even after the successful completion of negotiations — a measure these governments never contemplated for other E.U. candidates.
.. With Europe making it clear that a large, overwhelmingly Muslim nation was not welcome, public support in Turkey for the E.U. project, which was as high as 73 percent in 2004, registered as low as 40 percent in 2007, leaving the country with no external anchor for reform.
.. Because Turkey is regarded as an ally in so many areas of importance to the United States — including the Middle East, Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, the Caucuses and Central Asia — successive U.S. administrations have been loath to publicly criticize Erdogan and the AKP for their domestic excesses. Regardless of what might have been said in private, Turkey’s ruling party used American reluctance to call it out, especially during the Obama years, as license to continue to repress and intimidate its opponents.
.. And yes, publicly chastising Erdogan may not have changed his behavior. But it would have signaled American support for principles the United States holds dear — and that at least some of the Turkish leader’s opponents share.
.. it is important to understand that the circumstances in which Turks now find themselves are a product of their country’s contested political environment, which is often defined in existential terms; European cynicism; and American indifference to anything other than security. The unfortunate result is a country that is both authoritarian and unstable.