#trump tower russia

[mylionheart2]

ACTIVE MEASURES

UM HELLO.... The Russians interfering in the 2024 Presidential election to once again help Trump win should be a bigger story... don't you think?

**Tap, Tap, Tap... is this thing on?** 🎙️

How Russia Openly Escalated Its Election Interference Efforts

The Kremlin did not bother to hide its efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election, as it did in the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/07/technology/russia-us-election-interference.html

FBI Calls Russia ‘Most Active’ Foreign Threat on Election Day

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-05/fbi-russia-poses-most-active-threat-on-election-day

[odinsblog]

Uh oh 👀

A squad of FBI special agents, assisted by local police, descended on Trump Tower III at 15811 Collins Ave. to carry out a search of unit 4102. It’s owned by a shell company, MIC-USA LLC, that is controlled by two Russian businessmen, Oleg Sergeyevich Patsulya and Agunda Konstantinovna Makeeva, according to state corporation records.

Sunny Isles Beach has been dubbed “Little Moscow” by locals because it’s home to many Russian expatriates. Some expressed concerns about a backlash against their affluent beachfront community after the Russian military invaded Ukraine last year and the U.S. government started pursuing sanctions against oligarchs who hide their wealth in real estate in South Florida and other parts of the country.

Before becoming president in 2016, Trump signed a deal with the developers of the 45-story condo buildings to name the property after him to help promote sales. Foreign buyers, especially from Latin America and Russia, flocked to Trump Towers, as they did with other Trump-branded properties in Sunny Isles Beach.

(continue reading)

[trump666traitor]

[ivovynckier]

The Germans: We did not start it.

Basil Fawlty: Yes, you did. You invaded Poland.

[reality-detective]

Obama’s Global Spy Network Targeted Trump: Explosive New Evidence Revealed!

Barack Obama’s shadowy betrayal has surfaced, shaking the very core of America. He orchestrated a treasonous conspiracy, weaponizing global intelligence networks to attack Donald Trump—a man who dared to challenge the globalist cabal.

Project Fulsome: A Web of Treason

Obama, in collaboration with Britain’s GCHQ, bypassed U.S. laws to spy on Trump, his family, and his campaign. Trump Tower wasn’t just wiretapped—it was a surveillance fortress. Tools designed for counter-terrorism were turned against an American citizen. Financial records, emails, and private conversations were infiltrated, with the Deep State feeding this intel to fabricate scandals.

This was no ordinary operation; it was a globalist vendetta to preserve their crumbling grip on power. Secret satellites even tracked Trump’s movements during the 2016 campaign. Every action, every word—monitored.

The Russia Hoax: Manufactured Lies

The infamous Russia hoax wasn’t an accident. Phony dossiers, funded by Clinton’s allies and legitimized by Obama’s corrupted agencies, were part of this operation. The Steele dossier? Pure disinformation. Whistleblowers reveal it was a long-planned strategy to discredit any outsider who challenged their rule. Trump just happened to win, making him target #1.

Black Sites and Secret Courts: Deep State Tools

Beyond spying, Obama’s network used secret courts and black sites to crush Trump’s allies. FISA warrants based on lies enabled illegal surveillance. Black sites deployed rogue operatives to infiltrate Trump’s inner circle, feeding intel back to the cabal.

Why They Had to Stop Trump

Trump’s presidency represented a direct threat to their empire. He promised to end endless wars, dismantle corrupt trade deals, and expose their hidden agendas. The globalist pipeline funding their machine was at risk. Trump wasn’t a puppet—he was their worst nightmare.

The Awakening: Deep State on the Brink

The Deep State is collapsing. Whistleblowers are stepping forward. Leaks are surfacing. Patriots within the intelligence community are exposing the truth. Platforms like X and Telegram bypass Big Tech’s censorship, spreading revelations far and wide.

The Fight Isn’t Over

Obama’s betrayal exposed the elites’ desperation. Now is the time to act. Share the truth. Demand accountability. Stand with Trump. The Deep State is crumbling, but the battle for freedom continues.

You would think ALL that 👆 would be something you'd see in a spy/espionage movie like "Enemy of the State" with Gene Hackman and Will Smith.

Stay vigilant. History will remember those who fought for truth. 🤔

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

On 7/31/2019 Trump has a private meeting with Putin. On 8/3/2019, just 3 days after his private meeting with Putin, Trump issues a request for a list of top US spies. By 2021 the CIA reports an unusually high number of their agents are being captured and/or being murdered. During the search executed at Mar A Lago the FBI find more documents with lists of U.S. informants on them.

A Timeline

• FBI wiretapped Russian gambling ring headquartered at Trump Tower for two years - March 21, 2017

• Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador - May 15, 2017

• Trump, Putin Meet For 2 Hours In Helsinki - July 16, 2018

• Rand Paul Goes To Russia And Delivers Letter For Trump, Marking Our Era Of Irony - August 9, 2018

• Following the Money: Trump and Russia-Linked Transactions From the Campaign to the Presidential Inauguration - December 17, 2018

• The US extracted a top spy from Russia after Trump revealed classified information to the Russians in an Oval Office meeting - September 10, 2019

• Trump’s Loose Lips Force US to Extract Spy From Kremlin - September 10, 2019

• Was Mar-a-Lago Trespasser a Tourist or a Spy? A Judge Said Her Story Didn’t Hold Up. - November 25, 2019

• Trump downplays massive cyber hack on government after Pompeo links attack to Russia - December 19, 2020

• Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years, former KGB spy says - January 29, 2021

• There was Trump-Russia collusion — and Trump pardoned the colluder - April 17, 2021

• Longtime GOP operatives charged with funneling Russian national’s money to Trump, RNC - September 20, 2021

• Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants - October 5, 2021

• Files Seized From Trump Are Part of Espionage Act Inquiry - August 12, 2022

• Ex-Clinton aide implies 'President of France' file found at Trump's home during Mar-a-Lago raid could be valuable to Putin as 'kompromat' - August 13, 2022

• Inventing Anna: The tale of a fake heiress, Mar-a-Lago, and an FBI investigation - August 22, 2022

• Russians used a US firm to funnel funds to GOP in 2018. Dems say the FEC let them get away with it - October 30, 2022

• Trump makes shocking comments about trusting Putin over US 'intelligence lowlifes' - January 31, 2023

• Russia's Prigozhin admits links to what US says was election meddling troll farm - February 14, 2023

• GOP operative sentenced to 18 months for funneling Russian money to Trump- February 17, 2023

• Trump allegedly discussed US nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving White House: Sources - October 5, 2023

• 'So appalled': What witnesses told special counsel about Trump's handling of classified info while still president - April 24, 2024

🤔🤔🤔

[yamimichi]

Once again... Russia.

Scores of FBI agents and Florida police ambushed Trump Tower III on “Little Moscow” Sunny Isles Beach Thursday to search a condo unit owned by a shell corporation two Russian businessmen oversee. An FBI Miami field office spokesman told the Miami Herald that it “was conducting court-ordered law enforcement activity in the vicinity of that location,” but did not elaborate on the details. The men, Oleg Sergeyevich Patsulya and Agunda Konstantinovna Makeeva, did not respond for comment. “I can’t talk about it,” Patsulya’s wife, Roza Pereira, told the Miami Herald. “The lawyer [for my husband] said not to talk to anyone. ... I have no idea what it’s about.” Pereira is also listed under the company MIC-USA LLC, according to state records of the corporate documents. MIC-USA purchased the three-bedroom, three-bathroom residence a decade ago for $1.65 million.

[klbmsw]

July 1987, Moscow, USSR.

41-year-old Donald Trump arrives in Moscow with his wife, Czech model Ivana Zelnichkova, at the invitation of the Soviet Ambassador to the

United States (!!! ) Yuri Dubinina. The invitation was approved by the politburo of the ck kprs.

Trump, who is in a financial crisis - his assets are plummeting rapidly and the debt is rising - reflects on his condition in a famous joke:

-- "See that beggar in the hat on 5th Avenue?" "- he tells his companion, who just gave a diamond necklace.

"That man is 1.5 billion dollars richer than me! "

"But he's got nothing!" "

"He has nothing, but I have 1.5 billion in debt!" "

Returning from Moscow, bankrupt Trump unexpectedly receives a loan from a consortium of 16 banks and buys a Plaza Hotel in New York. Soon, it will get another loan from a consortium of 22 banks to buy Eastern Air Lines Shuttle (renamed Trump Shuttle).

What happened in Moscow in 1987? Who has been funding Trump?

Financing came from Soviet sources of KGB in the United States - through guarantees of loans, not direct monetary payments. In Moscow-1987, Trump's first political contract took place - he was offered support for a future US presidential campaign, and he agreed.

Volodymyr Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, in a report from the Politburo presented Trump as a suitable American candidate who could become a controlled president of the United States.

Before the trip to Moscow, Trump said he would never run for president, because he prefers the free life of a businessman. But after 1987, he changed his position.

---

1996-1997, Moscow, Russia.

Trump visits Moscow three times, meets with Russian businessmen, trying to build ** Trump Tower Moscow without his own investment, only at the expense of Moscow criminal structures funds.

The agency (FSB) watches over him without putting pressure. It's a relief for Trump, but he also doesn't get money, which leaves him frustrated in Yeltsin's Russia.

---

July 1998, Moscow.

Vladimir Putin becomes the director of the FSB. General Philip Bobkov, a former deputy chairman of the KGB, who oversees foreign intelligence and handled Trump's case, is his adviser.

Bobkov passes Putin a compromise on Trump. Trump gets a "message": the FSB returned control and remembers about it.

---

November 2013, Moscow.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Trump returns to Moscow as a bankruptcy, holding the Miss Universe contest in Crocus City.

Event organizer Araz Agalarov pays Trump $14 million and gives unlimited access to young contestants. The FSB films all the events in high resolution, including moments with underage girls posing as contestants.

Putin's agents remind Trump of his 1987 "obligation" promising funding and intelligence support for his presidential campaign.

---

2016 is trump's victory

Putin's propagandists are celebrating:

“America is ours!” "

---

July 16, 2018, Helsinki, Finland.

Trump's closed-door meeting with Putin. Only their translator is an FSB agent.

Putin shows Trump records of his meetings in Crocus City. Trump comes off as a loser and tells reporters:

"... I don't trust my intelligence agencies... i trust Vladimir Putin... "

---

January 6, 2020, Washington DC.

Trump is losing the election. Putin's agents are sending him a "message" - not to concede defeat, to lift up his supporters and attack the US Congress.

Trump urges supporters to storm Capitol.

---

March 22, 2024 Moscow.

Putin burns Crocus City - a kind of Trump signal.

---

Bottom line:

Trump is all in:

1. Many-year cooperation with Soviet and Russian intelligence services.

2. Funding from an enemy state.

3. Compromise in the form of video recordings.

4. Direct communication with terrorist attacks organized by Putin.

Putin has made Trump his "pocket president".

[tomorrowusa]

« [T]wo facts tower over the rest. First, Zelenskiy is a democratically elected president. He defeated the incumbent in 2019 by a thumping 73–24 percent margin. Second, Russia invaded Ukraine. Period and end of story.

Putin’s apologists can make all the excuses for him they want. NATO expansion eastward was always, to me, a debatable proposition. But Russia didn’t want a debate. And nothing excuses an all-out invasion aimed directly at a country’s capital city (remember those endless lines of tanks at the beginning of the war, sights set on Kyiv?). »

— Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.

That is essentially all anybody needs to know about Ukraine these days. Anything else is either irrelevant or MAGA-Kremlin film-flam.

Donald Trump is taking the side of enemies of America who are war criminals. Most likely it's because former KGB Lt. Col. Putin has some great dirt on him.

[mylionheart2]

[agentfascinateur]

Dear NATO,

After Trump sidles up to Putin and loses you Greenland if not Europe itself, you'll rue abandoning Ukraine. You'll be encircled. Trump would sell you out as fast as Russia or China approve a Trump tower there.

The only enemy within is the Trump administration.

Get behind Zelensky.

[mugiwara-lucy]

FUCKING DISGRACEFUL.

So not just Ableism but Anti-Semitism as well?? The fact that he's saying all this hatred against Jewish people and Immigrants gives me STRAIGHT ADOLF HITLER 2.0 Vibes.

This guy is a legit DANGER to America and anyone worth a damn and we can NOT let him or his pet dog Vance into the White House! If so the America we've all known and loved will be DONE and replaced with Nazi Germany from the 1930s along with Norea Korea/Russia and China with Christianity bullshit plastered everywhere.

To prevent that bullshit from happening to our democracy, here is the link below to register to vote along with the deadlines varying by state! Also, your own vote isn’t enough! Get as many people as you can to vote for Kamala be it your friends, cousins, parents, grandparents, old friends from high school and college, coworkers, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, stepchildren (if they’re 18 and over) and the list goes on and on but every vote counts! ALSO PLEASE check your registration DAILY because MAGA WILL purge your voter registration!!!

And early voting has started! And if you don’t wanna vote on November 5th, Early Voting is another option! Like I said get as many people as you know and try early voting that way you can avoid MAGA fuckery on November 5th! Down below is a list of dates by state:

And Mail in Ballots are ANOTHER option I highly recommend!! And like I said get as many people as you can to take advantage of this option! BUT if you decide to go with Mail In/Absentee Ballots; PLEASE mail your ballots at the ACTUAL USPS office!! That way MAGAts won't fuck with it.

And if you’re an American who lives overseas; PLEASE use the option of voting overseas since I know every country other than North Korea, Russia and China do NOT want to see Trump’s stinky ass back in the Oval Office! Here’s a link below:

I don't understand how people find this guy funny. It's the SAME FUCKING INSULTS he's used since 2016 against Hilary and 2020 against Biden BUT he just changes the name.

This is a 78 year old man with GRANDCHILDREN acting like a FUCKING TODDLER.

I can't even laugh at him. (I never laughed at him by the way or found him funny, he was just a bad headache you can never get rid of). I'm just SICK of him.

NEARLY TEN YEARS we've been dealing him. FUCKING HELL.

[geezerwench]

Oliver Kornetzke

I’m not a historian. I’m not a Kremlinologist or a credentialed scholar on authoritarian regimes. I’m not a behavioral psychologist, and I don’t hold a PhD in fascism or kleptocracy—though frankly, given the state of the world, I’m starting to wonder if we all should. But I’ve lived in Russia for some time. I’ve spent time in Eastern Europe. I’ve read obsessively, listened carefully, and paid attention like my life depended on it—because, in a very real sense, it does. And while I’ll leave academic dissection to the ivory tower, what I can tell you from the ground is this:

What’s happening in this country isn’t just cruel—it’s methodical, strategic, and deeply familiar to anyone who’s studied or survived under regimes built on repression and rot.

We’re watching a script play out—one that was written in the blood and bureaucracy of Putin’s Russia, refined in the dungeons of Chechnya, perfected through decades of oligarchic decay, secret police intimidation, and mafia-state theatrics. And now it’s being re-staged here in America, rebranded with flags and lapel pins and the tired language of “law and order.”

The Trump regime—this carnival of third-rate strongmen, grifters, sycophants, and sadists—isn’t innovating anything. It’s copying. It’s importing the authoritarian model wholesale. They’ve read the Putin playbook, dog-eared the best parts, and now they’re running it in real time. And the cruelty? That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

Because cruelty serves a dual purpose: it distracts and it paralyzes. It shocks the conscience just long enough to make you forget about the theft happening in broad daylight. It freezes resistance by making you wonder who’s next. It’s not just about dehumanizing the target—it’s about disarming the observer. You see a 52-year-old seamstress abducted by masked agents in broad daylight, and your mind stops. That’s the point. While you’re frozen, they’re looting the vault.

Putin’s critics—brave dissidents like Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Alexei Navalny—laid it out plainly: behind the thuggish repression, there’s no grand ideology. There’s only theft. Power is just a means to steal more, protect the stolen, and destroy anyone who threatens the racket. Navalny made that crystal clear. Putin’s state isn’t built on belief—it’s built on plunder. And everything else—beatings, censorship, propaganda, disappearances—is just set dressing for the heist.

Trump, a failed businessman and serial conman, didn’t stumble into power because he had a vision. He stumbled into it like a raccoon into a jewelry store: overwhelmed, opportunistic, and desperate to grab everything shiny before the lights come on. He brought with him a gang of similarly hollow, self-serving goons—parasites in flag pins—who recognized that brute force and spectacle could serve as a perfect cover for mass-scale corruption. All they needed was enough boots, enough masks, and enough Americans too scared or too exhausted to resist.

That’s what ICE is now—a terror squad designed not just to punish the “other,” but to frighten the rest into submission. They don’t need to knock on your door. They just need you to see what happens when they knock on hers. They want you disoriented, enraged, heartbroken, and above all—silent.

It’s not about immigration. It’s about domination.

But here’s the part they never count on: you can only keep people paralyzed for so long. Fear calcifies. Shock fades. And eventually, rage focuses.

So let’s speak plainly: this is not normal, it’s not American, and it’s not sustainable. It’s a kleptocratic death cult wearing the face of democracy. It’s an authoritarian racket hiding behind courtrooms and uniforms. And it will fall—just like every regime before it that mistook violence for invincibility and corruption for competence.

What can we do? First, resist the paralysis. Rage, yes—but don’t retreat. Pay attention. Speak out. If something feels wrong, say it’s wrong. Refuse to play along with their language, their framing, their euphemisms. They are not “removing undocumented immigrants.” They are disappearing people. They are not “restoring law and order.” They are weaponizing the state.

And just as importantly: take care of yourself. Joy, community, love, rest—these are not luxuries in a time of repression. They are acts of defiance. They are the fuel for the long fight ahead. Because this will be a long fight. There will be distractions, casualties, betrayals. But there will also be courage. And solidarity. And moments that remind us exactly why we fight.

Because we don’t do it for the flag. We don’t do it for politicians. We do it for every seamstress dragged from her car. Every family torn apart. Every dissident silenced. Every protestor jailed. We do it to honor the civil rights marchers, the freedom riders, the Stonewall rebels, the water protectors, the labor organizers—the defiant, the bold, the brave.

And we do it for the Americans who laid down their lives to crush fascism in Europe. For the soldiers who stormed beaches to fight against tyranny, not wave it in through the front door. For those who fought in the jungles and the deserts and the streets—not for conquest, but for freedom. For those who knew that authoritarianism doesn’t need to speak a foreign language to be a threat.

And we do it because we must. Because history is watching. And this time, it’s our names on the line.

Let’s make sure they’re remembered for the right reasons.

Pic related—personal hero of mine, Russian patriot and dissident Alexei Navalny.

[velcropygmy]

I can't express my disappointment in the American people. The best analogy I've heard for this election was from a teacher. She said, "Imagine teaching a class of honor students for a whole semester. At the final you give them an open book test and over half the class fails. Now imagine that disappointment. All that hard work for naught. Multiply that times a thousand.

It was all in front of everyone's eyes. I'll start with the orange man. He was never really a successful business man. People bought the image given them by a reality show. The people involved with that very show have all come out and said that no really serious billionaire they approached would touch the show. They built him up for the show and tried to tell you it was all a facade during the campaign. But no, you want to claim fake news because Trump said so. That's like releasing all those guys on death row, after all they all say they were framed and innocent. The guy has always been nothing more than a carnival barker with some inherited coin. 6 bankruptcies including casinos should have been a clue to someone. Not to mention the adultery, not paying his contractors.

The free press is one of this nations most important guardrails against corruption and the GOP and it's supporters followed the path of dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. You see it in Russia, Turkey, China, any other authoritarian regime. The press has to toe the party line. Trump wants that. He said so.

Vladimir Putin blames the US for the fall of the USSR. He has stated that was the greatest socio/political tragedy in history. He has vowed to fight democracy. And yet I hear cheers at a Trump rally when his name is brought up. In the USA! And how is Putin fighting democracy? Disinformation and misinformation. And they are the experts. Find a vulnerable spot and create a divide. Race, Gay rights, anything. Social media is the greatest gift to Putin he could have ever gotten on Xmas. And Americans eat it like candy. An example was Matt Gaetz using information about the US arming the Azrov Battalion in Ukraine. His source, a Communist Chinese propaganda website. If you need proof I'll get the video. It's easy to find. Let's go on to the congressional investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. Who were their witnesses? A Russian oligarch close to Putin and an FSB agents. Not to mention the fact that once Eric Trump told the press they get their money from Russia when asked because banks quit lending them money. Or that most Trump Towers in foreign countries are fully sold out but unoccupied. Trump has been laundering Russian mob money through his real estate for years.

His affection for dictators and saying they rule with an iron fist like that's a good thing. Has he ever said anything positive about a foreign leader that wasn't a dictator? I'll wait but I'm not holding my breath. His desire for Putin's approval is disgusting. Given that, to me the two greatest geopolitical tragedies would be Trump giving Ukraine to Putin and the fall of American Democracy.

The book was open, it's was all out there in front of everyone's eyes and they ignored it. America failed that open book test and it will cost everyone the world over for this fuck up.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 4, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 5, 2024

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee today released a 156-page report showing that when he was in the presidency, Trump received at least $7.8 million from 20 different governments, including those of China, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia, through businesses he owned. 

The Democrats brought receipts. 

According to the report—and the documents from Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars that are attached to it—the People’s Republic of China and companies substantially controlled by the PRC government paid at least $5,572,548 to Trump-owned properties while Trump was in office; Saudi Arabia paid at least $615,422; Qatar paid at least $465,744; Kuwait paid at least $300,000; India paid at least $282,764; Malaysia paid at least $248,962; Afghanistan paid at least $154,750; the Philippines paid at least $74,810; the United Arab Emirates paid at least $65,225. The list went on and on. 

The committee Democrats explained that these payments were likely only a fraction of the actual money exchanged, since they cover only four of more than 500 entities Trump owned at the time. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) stopped the investigation before Mazars had produced the documents the committee had asked for when Democrats were in charge of it. Those records included documents relating to Russia, South Korea, South Africa, and Brazil. 

Trump fought hard against the production of these documents, dragging out the court fight until September 2022. The committee worked on them for just four months before voters put Republicans in charge of the House and the investigation stopped. 

These are the first hard numbers that show how foreign governments funneled money to the president while policies involving their countries were in front of him. The report notes, for example, that Trump refused to impose sanctions on Chinese banks that were helping the North Korean government; one of those banks was paying him close to $2 million in rent annually for commercial office space in Trump Tower. 

The first article of the U.S. Constitution reads: “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument [that is, salary, fee, or profit], Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” 

The report also contrasted powerfully with the attempt of Republicans on the Oversight Committee, led by Comer, to argue that Democratic Joe Biden has corruptly profited from the presidency. 

In the Washington Post on December 26, 2023, Philip Bump noted that just after voters elected a Republican majority, Comer told the Washington Post that as soon as he was in charge of the Oversight Committee, he would use his power to “determine if this president and this White House are compromised because of the millions of dollars that his family has received from our adversaries in China, Russia and Ukraine.”

For the past year, while he and the committee have made a number of highly misleading statements to make it sound as if there are Biden family businesses involving the president (there are not) and the president was involved in them (he was not), their claims were never backed by any evidence. Bump noted in a piece on December 14, 2023, for example, that Comer told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that “the Bidens” have “taken in” more than $24 million. In fact, Bump explained, Biden’s son Hunter and his business partners did receive such payments, but most of the money went to the business partners. About $7.5 million of it went to Hunter Biden. There is no evidence that any of it went to Joe Biden. 

All of the committee’s claims have similar reality checks. Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian wrote that after nearly 40,000 pages of bank records and dozens of hours of testimony, “no evidence has emerged that Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes in his current or previous role.”

Still, the constant hyping of their claims on right-wing media led then–House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to authorize an impeachment inquiry in mid-September, and in mid-December, Republicans in the House formalized the inquiry. 

There is more behind the attack on Biden than simply trying to even the score between him and Trump—who remains angry at his impeachments and has demanded Republicans retaliate—or to smear Biden through an “investigation,” which has been a standard technique of the Republicans since the mid-1990s.

Claiming that Biden is as corrupt as Trump undermines faith in our democracy. After all, if everyone is a crook, why does it matter which one is in office? And what makes American democracy any different from the authoritarian systems of Russia or Hungary or Venezuela, where leaders grab what they can for themselves and their followers?

Democracies are different from authoritarian governments because they have laws to prevent the corruption in which it appears Trump engaged. The fact that Republicans refuse to hold their own party members accountable to those laws while smearing their opponents says far more about them than it does about the nature of democracy.

It does, though, highlight that our democracy is in danger.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[peakwealth]

You Run

Vladimir Putin, flanked by airline cabin crew (reportedly Aeroflot trainees), shortly before ordering the invasion of Ukraine.

Two recent quotes stick in my mind. The first one was by an American woman who escaped from a mass shooting incident after the US Super Bowl in Kansas City. (One dead, twenty-two injured.) Interviewed minutes later on TV, she said: In this day and age, you run.

I forget where I saw the second quote but I thought of it after Donald Trump threatened to pull the plug on NATO, should he be re-elected this year: It's as if the devil had changed sides.

Near panic broke out across Europe. Trump was willing to throw European countries, previously known as America's allies, to the wolves.

Vladimir Putin, do as you please. Ukraine, prepare to be sacrificed. And by extension, Taiwan, your time is up.

I keep coming back to this: the West isn't what it used to be. I think of myself as fortunate to have grown up in a 'eurocentric' world order, or the outcome of the second world war if you prefer. It may have been delusional but it was printed on perfume bottles: PARIS - LONDON - NEW YORK.

In reality, eurocentrism and the colonial empires that created it were already faltering by the time I came into this world. It took, however, a long time to see and accept it. As for the 'American century', it ended in 2001 with the apocalyptic scenes of 9/11 in New York City. As the towers collapsed, the world pivoted into a new era. To put it differently, the world was changing hands.

---------------

On February 24 2022 I woke up in a small hotel south of Granada and went downstairs to have coffee at the bar. I flipped open my tablet and there it was:

RUSSIA ATTACKS UKRAINE

Until then I - we - had assumed there existed a fundamental contract with European history, immovably rooted in postwar reality and shared by all: never again, no more major wars in Europe. No one in their right mind would want to mess with that contract.

Except that Vladimir Putin had just ordered his army across the border into Ukraine.

Now I wake up every day and want to hit my head against the wall as the Russian war of aggression grinds on. Grind, meat grinder, human waves, trench warfare. The words are all desperately wrong.

After two years of daily annihilation, hundreds of thousands of lives casually erased or ruined, it goes on and on. Both sides, it has been reported, are running short of young men to waste at the front.

We do not know exactly what goes on on those front lines. We hear about Russian soldiers dispatched to their deaths as a matter of course. But we do not get to see that, nor do we get any real casualty numbers. At the beginning of the war, things were more graphic, the bodies photographed where they had fallen. Two years on, we don't know. But the broken, blasted cities tell the story, as they do in Gaza: not many people walk away alive.

And now no one seems quite sure what to do about Ukraine. The war looks unwinnable because Putin does not care about the cost in human lives.

Why fight if you can't win? Is a negotiated settlement still possible? Land for peace would mean the partition of Ukraine accepted as a fait accompli. But can there be peace without justice for Ukraine, which would effectively be sacrificed in the hope of keeping Putin's Russia in check? Putin, however, cannot be trusted, nor can Trump for that matter.

Should Trump return to the White House, a new world order might emerge overwhelmingly inimical to the west or what would be left of it. It might not even be clear where the USA would position itself. As for the loss of Ukraine, in whole or in part, it would be like small change.

You can go on like this, endlessly turning over the options and arguments in your head, none of them acceptable: Ukraine's outright surrender? Or an indefinite ceasefire that would humiliate Kyiv but leave it attached to Europe?

Faced with a historic opportunity to rewrite everything, a moment of dizzying recalculation of how the planet works and who's boss, it is hard to imagine that China would hesitate to seize the moment. Others would follow, like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, eventually lining up with Russia in an historic act of opportunism and Schadenfreude.

In this day and age, you run. The devil has changed sides.

A lot is at stake in 2024.