Does Donald Trump Need a Bailout?
Maybe
that’s why he sucks up to Putin.
Opinion Columnist
In his new book “Rage,” Bob Woodward
reports that Dan Coats, Donald Trump’s first director of national intelligence,
was never able to shake his suspicions that Trump is in the pocket of President
Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Coats is obviously not alone — Trump’s
obsequiousness toward the Russian strongman has been one of the enduring
enigmas of his presidency. Even Trump’s natural affinity for autocrats doesn’t
explain why Putin is one of the few men on earth whom the president of the
United States treats as his better.
The New York Times’s
blockbuster exposé of Trump’s taxes does not directly solve this mystery. The
journalists Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire make clear that
Trump’s taxes reveal no previously unreported financial link to Russia; the
documents mostly “lack the specificity” required to do so. But the revelation
of the gargantuan debt closing in on Trump offers one plausible motive for why
the president constantly sucks up to Putin, even when doing so seems
politically self-defeating.
Michael Cohen,
Trump’s former fixer, has said that Trump thinks Putin is the richest man
in the world. And the American president, The Times’s reporting
suggests, may need a bailout.
Trump, reported The Times, “is
personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with
most of it coming due within four years.” He is also fighting the I.R.S. over a
tax audit that has the potential to cost him more than $100 million. Since
2014, Trump has unloaded almost all his stocks. As of June, he had “as little
as $873,000 in securities left to sell.” He’s a man, said The Times, “in a
tightening financial vise.”
That’s the context in which Trump spent
the 2016 presidential campaign trying to make a deal to build a Trump Tower in
Moscow. According to a Forbes investigation,
he stood to earn about $35 million up front. The Times article reveals how
badly Trump needed the money, and likely needs it still.
Well before 2016, Trump had experienced
the beneficence of Russian oligarchs. In 2004, he paid $41.35 million for a
home in Florida, then tried to flip it. It sat on the market for years, but in
2008, a Russian potash magnate named Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the house for
around $100 million. (As Politico reported,
it was later appraised for much less.) Rybolovlev reportedly never lived in the
mansion and visited only once. He eventually tore it down and sold the property
in parcels. According to Cohen’s book “Disloyal,” Trump was convinced that the
real buyer was Putin.
The Times article on
Trump’s taxes reveals another instance where Trump found doing business with
Russian oligarchs uncommonly profitable. In both 2012 and 2014, The Times
reported, Trump lost money on the Miss Universe pageant, which he co-owned. But
the 2013 pageant, held in Russia, was Trump’s most profitable Miss Universe
event. He earned $2.3 million, even as Trump’s Russian partner, Aras Agalarov,
lost money. (Agalarov’s son, of course, later brokered the meeting between
Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer peddling dirt on Hillary
Clinton.)
Coats, wrote Woodward, thought Putin
“had something” on Trump. Despite efforts by Trump’s allies to write off
Russiagate, Coats was clearly correct about that. If nothing else, Putin would
have known about Trump’s Moscow real estate maneuvering years before the
American people did.
But you don’t need blackmail to explain
Trump’s fealty to the Russian president. Avarice will suffice.
Trump’s financial condition, wrote The
Times, “lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at
least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.” Throughout
the campaign, he tried to ingratiate himself with Putin. But then, catching the
tiger by the tail, he won.
He’s used his office to extract all
that he can. “His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly
from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or
favor,” wrote The Times. As president, he’s garnered millions from licensing
deals in foreign countries, including some with authoritarian leaders: “$3
million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from
Turkey.”
But he appears to need more. Trump’s
brand, perhaps his most lucrative asset, is worthless in much of the country.
His family’s plans for two new hotel chains, Scion and American Idea,
were scrapped last year. Despite hosting festivals of graft,
his Washington hotel lost $55.5 million through 2018. The Times reports that
the coronavirus pandemic is hitting Trump’s businesses hard. (That may be one
reason he’s extra desperate to lift public health restrictions.)
Among those best positioned to rescue
him are international oligarchs. That includes Putin, but others as well.
Trump, for example, helped the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, evade
consequences for the killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi,
boasting to Woodward, “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”
Perhaps the president
simply feels a kinship with rich villains. But if he’s truly facing ruin, Trump
needs them at least as much as they need him.