2016 Timeline
- Russia Computer Spies on U.S. Election throughout 2016
- 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies Conclude Actions Deliberate and State Sponsored
- Trump Blames Fat Guy in Jersey
- Even Trump-Sympathetic FBI Declares Soviet Actions Intentional
- Trump Says : I Don’t Believe it”
Thursday, December 29, 2016
- U.S. President Imposes Sanctions, Kicks out 35 Russian Spies, Names GRU & FSB
- House & Senate Republican Leaders Agree With Sanctions, Saying Overdue
- Trump is Silent on Sanctions
- Trump Wants to Move On
Friday, December 30, 2016
- Trump Praises Russia
This is not about Trump’s election vote count.* There was more than enough hard, confirmed information for U.S. authorities to impose sanctions over the summer. The President waited so as not to unduly influence our own elections in a partisan way, something a real President of either party would always strive to honor.
Trump continues to bloviate on the subject of Russian spying, without any actual knowledge or information, as he has repeatedly declined intelligence briefings that would rapidly set his goofier ideas straight. Trump’s obdurate and willful ignorance is now affecting U.S. national security.
Smiling Trump & Putin: Nose to Nose (photshopped)
Sad to say, Trump has a documented history of unwarranted good feelings and respect for Russian dictator Putin dating back to 2007, more than 10 years ago, first as a private citizen and now as President-elect for the last month. Trump’s ill-considered judgments on Russia are not In America’s best national interest, and are clouded by private profit considerations and conflicts.
Here are 24 examples just through October 4, 2016 from an interesting compilation story by Mother Jones:
October 2007: Five months after Russia is accused of unleashing a cyberwar on the small Baltic country of Estonia, Trump tells Larry King that Putin is doing a great job: “Look at Putin—what he’s doing with Russia—I mean, you know, what’s going on over there. I mean this guy has done—whether you like him or don’t like him—he’s doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period.”
“I have no relationship with [Putin] other than he called me a genius.”
2008: Donald Trump Jr. tells a real estate conference, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.…We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
December 2011: In his book Time to Get Tough, Trump praises Putin while deriding Obama’s inability to contain him: “Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe. Putin has also announced his grand vision: the creation of a ‘Eurasian Union’ made up of former Soviet nations that can dominate the region. I respect Putin and the Russians but cannot believe our leader allows them to get away with so much…Hats off to the Russians…Obama’s plan to have Russia stand up to Iran was a horrible failure that turned America into a laughingstock.”
June 2012: As President Obama meets with Putin, Trump tweets, “Putin has no respect for our President — really bad body language.”
June 2013: Shortly after Russia passes anti-gay laws banning gay “propaganda,” Trump tweets: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?”
March 2014: At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump boasts, “I was in Moscow a couple of months ago, I own the Miss Universe Pageant and they treated me so great. Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present.” Just after Russia annexes Crimea from Ukraine, Trump tweets, “I believe Putin will continue to re-build the Russian Empire. He has zero respect for Obama or the U.S.!” Also: “Putin has become a big hero in Russia with an all time high popularity. Obama, on the other hand, has fallen to his lowest ever numbers. SAD”
April 2014: Doubling down on his earlier tweet, Trump casts Obama as a weakling compared to Putin: “America is at a great disadvantage. Putin is ex-KGB, Obama is a community organizer. Unfair.” NATO had just condemned Russia’s “illegal intervention” in Ukraine.
May 2014: Speaking at the National Press Club, Trump says he’s kinda sorta spoken with Putin: “I was in Russia, I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.”
July 2015: Now the Republican presidential front-runner, Trump says he’d “get along very well” with the Russian president during an interview with reporters in Scotland. “I just think so. People say, ‘What do you mean?’ I think I would get along well with him.” He adds: “He hates Obama, Obama hates him. We have unbelievably bad relationships. Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. She was the worst secretary of state in the history of our country. The world blew apart during her reign. Now she wants to be president.”
October 2015: On CBS’ Face the Nation, Trump talks about sharing air time with Putin on a 60 Minutes episode: “I think the biggest thing we have is that we were on 60 Minutes together and we had fantastic ratings. One of your best-rated shows in a long time. So that was good, right? So we were stable mates.” (Trump and Putin were on different continents, were interviewed separately, and according Time, the ratings weren’t all that great.) Less than two weeks earlier, Russia had launched its first airstrikes in Syria in support of the Assad regime.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Trump insists that there isn’t enough proof to point to pro-Russian separatists for shooting down a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. “They say it wasn’t them,” he says. “It may have been their weapon, but they didn’t use it, they didn’t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you’ll probably never know for sure.”
November 2015: During a Republican debate, Trump gets back in the barn with Putin: “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stable mates, and we did very well that night.”
December 17, 2015: In a rare moment of recognition, Putin praises Trump, saying that he is “a very lively man, talented without doubt,” adding that Trump is the “absolute leader in the presidential race.” Before the day ends, Trump returns the favor. “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” he says of Putin.
“I got to know [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes…and we did very well that night.”
December 18, 2015: On Morning Joe, Trump defends Putin from allegations that he’s murdered journalists and political opponents. “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader. Unlike what we have in this country.” He adds, “I think our country does plenty of killing, also, Joe.”
February 17, 2016: At a rally in South Carolina, Trump inserts a little distance between himself and Putin. “I have no relationship with him other than he called me a genius. He said Donald Trump is a genius and he is going to be the leader of the party and he’s going to be the leader of the world or something.” (The word “genius” was Trump’s, not Putin’s.)
April 28, 2016: After Bill O’Reilly asks whether he and Putin would get along well, Trump responds, “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. If we can make a great deal for our country and get along with Russia, that would be a tremendous thing. I would love to try it.”
June 17, 2016: Once again, Putin compliments Trump, calling him a “bright” person. On the same day, Russia bombs American-backed rebels in Syria.
July 25, 2016: After Democratic National Committee emails are leaked by WikiLeaks, Trump takes to Twitter to suggest the Russians were behind the hack because Putin “likes” him.
July 27, 2016: Still gleeful over the DNC hack, Trump calls on Moscow to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he says during a news conference. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” He then declares, “I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius. I said, ‘Thank you very much’ to the newspaper, and that was the end of it. I never met Putin.” Trump says he’d be firm with Putin, but also refuses to tell him to stay out of the presidential election: “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?”
“I was in Moscow a couple of months ago…Putin even sent me a present, a beautiful present.”
August 1, 2016: In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump claims that Russia isn’t going to take military action in Ukraine—despite having already done so. “He’s not going into Ukraine, okay, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”
September 8, 2016: At a national security forum hosted by Matt Lauer, Trump says the Russian president “has been a leader far more than our president has been.”
September 14, 2016: Perhaps forgetting his August statement that Russia wouldn’t go into Ukraine, Trump tweets about Russia’s annexation of Crimea: “Russia took Crimea during the so-called Obama years. Who wouldn’t know this and why does Obama get a free pass?”
September 19, 2016: Russia allegedly bombs a United Nations aid convoy outside besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, dashing hopes of reestablishing a US-Russia brokered ceasefire.
October 4, 2016: During the vice presidential debate, Trump tweets a link to a campaign press release titled, “Clinton’s Close Ties To Putin Deserve Scrutiny.”
Trump Playing the Don King Patriotism Card on Russia (Flag and all)
Wariness and suspicion of Russian motives are and have been reliable hallmarks of Republican party dogma for more than 75 years, since before Trump was born. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, even a hint comparable to Trump’s recent repeated excuses and fulsome praise for the Russian autocrat would have provoked angry outbursts and cries of “ComSymp” across the entire spectrum of Republican political opinion.
The weirdly muted responses to Trump so far from elected Republicans in 2016 is magnificently hypocritical.
Trump’s evidently soft-on-communism take on Russian interference in domestic affairs of sovereign countries like Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Syria, and above all, the United States, are barely creditable. His patriotic generals in waiting must be stewing in disbelief at Trump’s denial of the obvious, and his lack of military force projection spine in defending America’s security.
Trump seems far more concerned with a few thousand semi-organized stateless terrorists across the Middle East, while he is cozying up to the leader of an anti-democratic nuclear state with millions of men under arms, billions of dollars in annual defense expenditures, and world wide reach and access as an established country.
Who’s the bigger problem here?
To put it like it is, if somewhat crudely, Trump seems most anxious to exchange sloppy political bodily fluids with the leader of America’s most formidable world opponent, which is now and has always been Russia, for more than seven decades.
What is Trump thinking?
Few Americans know that Russia has existed as a continuous established empire for more than 1,100 years (since 882 A.D.). The Russian people have had rulers, Princes, Tsars, Chairman of Peoples’ Commissars, General Secretaries of the Central Committee, autocrats, and strong men as their sometimes absolute, and nearly always dictatorial, political leaders. Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has been in rigid charge, whatever his particular title, whether listed as Prime Minister or “President”, a 16 year uninterrupted run, with no democratic end in sight.
Ordinary Russians have a centuries long (longer than White men have inhabited America) experience with political intrigue, manipulation of foreigners, including Heads of State, and unexcelled world-wide propaganda knowledge and resources. Russia’s official state sponsored accumulated expertise makes Trump’s supposed media mastery look laughably amateurish and third-rate in comparison.
Putin, by himself, has more political and propaganda wiles in his left big toenail than the whole of Trump’s body could ever acquire, if he were to live for 100 years. Plain truth. folks.
I don’t say this out of joy or celebration. My own father was a White Russian national, born in Manchuria as his mother and father fled political and economic persecution to the east in 1920, during the Bolshevik Revolution and the aftermath fighting. My father’s birth certificate declares, in black and white, his father’s origin as a peasant. My own blood is American and Russian, a 50/50 combination. I am a native born American citizen, proud of it and my second generation ethnic heritage from Russia.
The Russian people are solid, patient, good hearted folks, who have survived under centuries of manipulation, deprivation, and political intrigue fostered by autocrats and dictators, and yet persevered individually nonetheless.
But the Russian soul knows how to recognize a massive political scam when it faces one in the flesh up close. It’s probably a gene thing, as Trump likes to point out.
Russians have a word description for unknowing foreign dupes: the term is useful idiots. A massive Russian disinformation program, spreading confusion and mischief here, is being broadcast in high-definition, wide-screen display all over the U.S. right now. Trump has the starring role, despite his own self-assessed deal making brilliance.
Worse, Trump doesn’t even know he is the fat pigeon. It does, however, make for good TV, and better ratings.
Trump is being rolled, skinned, and set-up for political robbery, as we speak. Meanwhile, he is obsessing about his popular vote loss in the election, as if that simple fact were of any fundamental importance to America’s national security interests.
Excessive naval gazing will get you in the neck every time.
Putin is smiling inside. While Russia’s leader is a virulent homophobe in person, he must get a princely rise out of the inadvertent savvy, political mural celebrating his oral seduction of Trump, painted on the wall of a small BBQ joint in Vilnius, Lithuania by a political satirical artist in May 2016.
Putin-Trump Kiss, Painted Street Mural Vilnius, Lithuania (May 2106)
How richly, ironically true.
In the end, will America’s elected Republicans stand up or roll over on her dignity and sovereignty against foreign meddling in our internal affairs, while our potent political, diplomatic, and cyber weapons lie idle and rusting?
In the charge of an absolute political neophyte, who doesn’t know what to do with them, nor how to use them for effect without starting a shooting war.
America’s proud Veterans are watching for real strength, not platitudes and empty bluffs. So are the rest of us.
Selected Additional Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/29/politics/russia-sanctions-announced-by-white-house/
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/donald-trump-russia-sanctions-response-233065
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2016/05/15/mural-trump-putin-kissing/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20160518-what-does-the-trumpputin-kiss-really-mean
*Two of the better summaries of the latest about the Russian Election Spy Story:
From the Huffington Post:
Obama announced this week that he would sanction Russian intelligence agencies and expel 35 suspected spies that the U.S. thinks were involved in the hacking effort. Both the FBI and CIA agree that Russia used cyber attacks to try to tip the election toward its preferred winner: Trump.
“All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions,” the president said in a statement on Thursday. The 35 operatives who will be expelled are currently posted at Russian diplomatic facilities in Washington and San Francisco. The sanctions also bar two Russian intelligence agencies, three companies and four intelligence officers from traveling into or doing business with the U.S.
Russians are also being barred from entering two compounds in Maryland and New York that the administration said were used for information-gathering.
Trump repeatedly praised Putin and Russia during and after the 2016 campaign, and declined opportunities to criticize the Russian leader and his government for human rights abuses and military actions in Syria and the Ukranian territory of Crimea.
Trump praised Putin’s leadership, telling MSNBC last December that “When people call you ‘brilliant’ it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia. He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader. You know, unlike we have in this country.”
Trump told NBC’s Matt Lauer in September of this year that Putin was a better leader than Obama, and declined to say that Russia should not interfere in U.S. elections. “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?” he said.
From the Los Angeles Times:
After President Obama on Thursday announced retaliatory measures against the Russian government for what the U.S. has concluded were efforts to interfere in the election, President-elect Donald Trump’s response was terse and dismissive, saying it was time to “move on to bigger and better things.”
But after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he would not respond in kind to the U.S. actions — preferring to wait until the new administration takes office — Trump weighed in with high praise.
Trump’s effusive words were particularly striking given the bipartisan view of Putin as more adversary than ally.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said they supported the Obama administration’s move to expel Russian diplomats and block access to two properties owned by its government.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) is expected to call a hearing on Russia’s cyber activities when the new Congress convenes next week.
A Trump transition spokesman was asked earlier Friday whether Trump had spoken or planned to speak with Putin before his inauguration.
“The priority right now is for the president[-elect] to get an update next week from the intelligence community,” Sean Spicer said.
Trump’s praise did get tacit approval from some quarters. The Russian embassy in Washington retweeted it.
**Two perspectives on the Trump-Putin Kiss Mural in Lithuania (May 2016). The intellectual deconstruction of the possible deeper artistic aesthetic meaning of the street mural is interesting from an academic perspective, and provokes reflection and analysis in proper circumstances.
On the other hand, it is undeniably true that public art also has a plain and straightforward meaning as well. The message here is shatteringly obvious. Trump and Putin are close and dig each other in an intimate embrace. They are too cozy for antagonistic world leaders with naturally divergent agendas, whose primary job it is to protect their own people. America first.
Putin is putting the political seduction moves on Trump. Advantage Russia. Trump is so lost in his own inflated opinion of his intrinsic beauty and desirability that he doesn’t recognize a numbingly blatant master spy’s propaganda honey-trap when it is sprung on him.
Heavy bill to follow for your brief interlude of pleasure
NSFW Christine Keeler (1963) at time of Profumo Affair British Political Honey Pot Scandal
Here is a primary example of a real life political honey pot. In 1963 British government Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Christine Keeler had an affair in 1963. She was linked to a Soviet diplomat in London, Yevgeny Ivanov, at the same time. Real sex was involved in this one. All parties involved suffered great personal damage and disgrace.
You will no doubt not be surprised to learn that Profumo resigned, Keeler was sent to jail..
Christine Keeler After release from Jail: Safe for All Ages (1964)
From the BBC:
The mural is reminiscent of a famous 1979 photo of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker embracing with a kiss, an image that was later painted on part of the Berlin Wall.
But the BBC Correspondent thinks the better analogy is to a Brancusi culture here:
From an art critic’s perspective, the author may be entirely correct. As a public art mural political statement, I think this analytic notion is very deep in the weeds indeed. Using Occam’s Razor, I think a far more compelling explanation is a straight forward appeal to the Breznev-Honecker photo and its implications; a fit that offers more punch and oomph. But, to each his own.
From Macalester College:
Dig, if you will, the picture of Putin and Trump engaged in a kiss. The leader of an erstwhile superpower embraces the would-be leader of the Free World in a graphic riff on their mutual affection. Putin is on the left, his head masterfully cradled by Trump’s hand. Trump is on the right, his bright pink skin and yellow hair making Putin look washed-out and sepulchral by comparison (Putin’s smaller, paler hand clutches feebly at Trump’s shoulder). The expressions on the men’s faces are concentrated, even grave—and that makes sense, as their relationship is serious business, with the fate of the world at stake. They are dressed in matching black Adidas tracksuits, of the kind that “hard-boiled” gangster types began to sport in the post-Soviet 90s and that is still an essential article of macho clothing in post-Soviet Russia today. Their profiles are outlined with white paint that drips down from their chins, looking somewhat like saliva—whether by accident or by design.
This spicy mural appeared fittingly on the wall of a BBQ restaurant in Vilnius, Lithuania in May 2016. It was no daring act of unsanctioned graffiti, but rather a commissioned artwork. What sort of statement does it make?
First of all, some (1) geopolitical and (2) art-historical context. (1) Russia’s expansionist moves have left Lithuania and her fellow Baltic countries feeling vulnerable in recent years. In October 2013, Lithuanian authorities threatened to block Russia’s railway and automobile transport to the Kaliningrad region if Moscow did not “cease to put pressure in its neighbor,” according to the head of the Lithuanian Ministry of Internal Affairs. More recently, in May 2016 over a thousand soldiers from the US, Canada, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland held a military exercise in Pabrade, Lithuania. (If Russia were to invade Latvia, NATO would have to respond militarily. (2) When the mural first appeared, commentators were quick to draw a connection to the famous 1979 image of General Secretary Brezhnev kissing East German leader Erich Honecker:
In 1990, Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel transformed what was initially a press photo into a mural on the Berlin Wall, consisting of the image plus the bilingual (German and Russian) caption “My God, Help Me Survive This Deadly Love” (compare the caption for the Lithuania mural: “Make Everything Great Again.”) In the 2016 updating of that image, we see in place of the communist brethren who sought to export their ideology worldwide a new “reset” staged by two authoritarian one-percenters, each the mirror image of the other.
But there is another set of artworks of more recent vintage that provides an additional intertextual source and/or context (either the Lithuanian muralist was directly influenced by these works, or else he and the creators of those works responded to similar currents in the air at the time). I have in mind the 2005 photograph by Russia’s Blue Noses art collective, “Kissing Policemen (An Epoch of Clemency).”
Satirical Absurdist Photo of Two Male Russian Police Kissing in Birch Forest (2005)
The photograph depicts two Russian police officers locking lips against a lovely background of Siberian birch trees, which evoke associations of patriotism and the beauty of Russian nature, echoing emotional scenes in WWII films by Kalatozov (The Cranes are Flying) and then Tarkovsky (Ivan’s Childhood). The photograph was labeled a “political provocation” and banned by the Russian minister of culture from being exhibited in Paris, lest it “bring shame on Russia.” The creators of the image called it “an absurdist fantasy about what might happen if everyone showed mercy and tenderness to each other.” The Blue Noses’ photograph paid homage to Banksy’s stencil of kissing constables:
The scandalous reception of “Epoch of Clemency” should be seen in the context of the hyper-normative nature of traditional Russian views about sexuality. The kissing police officers, who represent the enforcement of social norms, are shown themselves transgressing the gender norms that are increasingly becoming emphasized under Putin’s regime as essential to Russia’s stability: these include a focus on women reverting to their traditional roles as submissive providers of children and domestic work; Putin’s pro-natalist policies, threats to reproductive rights, and the ban on “homosexual propaganda.”