Back in 2016, when it became obvious that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican Nominee for President, I started reading everything that I could find online about Donald Trump. I did this for a couple of reasons: 1) in case I wrote a diary about Trump, I wanted it to be accurate and 2) if I got into a conversation with a Trump fan, I wanted to be able to use the facts that I had learned about Donald Trump to point out whatever issues that I had with him.
So, when A&E started showing commercials about how they had put together a three-part six-hour documentary on the family of Donald Trump called "The Trump Dynasty” about a week ago, I cared little. Not only had I researched him thoroughly in 2016, but between reading tons of diaries about him here on DailyKos and watching way too much MSNBC since 2016, I figured that I knew way too much about him already. Nevertheless, last night, there did not seem to be that much to watch on television, and A&E was running all three “Trump Dynasty” episodes in a row. So, I figured that I might just take a peek.
It turns out that the three episodes of “The Trump Dynasty” are a solid look at the life of Donald Trump, and the only inaccurate parts seemed to be the statements made by Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s fans, such as when they gush about what a "genius” Donald Trump is. I found that softly muttering "bulls**t” whenever that happened made it easy to put up with the garbage hero worship from people such as Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg.
One of my favorite parts of the series was when it described how Donald Trump became so desperate for money after his businesses went bankrupt that he allowed Russians to buy condominiums from him by setting up anonymous dummy corporations and paying in cash, and how he sent out feelers to the Russian oligarchs to let them know that he was open to the idea of the oligarchs taking the money that they wanted to get out of Russia and parking it in his condominiums. That is usually called “money laundering”.
Another good part of the series was how it described that when no one else would lend Donald Trump money, Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank and the same bank that has had to pay the equivalent of $600 million in fines for money laundering, was the one bank willing to deal with him. Well, of course, they were open to lending to him, since Trump was open to condominium Russian money laundering.
This also ties into both how Steve Bannon apparently said that he thought that Donald Trump might be investigated for money laundering, and how Rachel Maddow has said repeatedly on her show that Trump and his administration freaked out when they thought that Robert Mueller was going to subpoena bank records from Deutsche Bank.
The A&E docuseries also pointed out how Donald Trump and his partners were setting up the Trump Moscow Tower deal years before the 2016 election, and how Obama's sanctions on Russia put a nix on the whole deal. The documentary makes clear the following: 1) the numerous contacts that Trump had with Russian citizens prior to the 2016 election 2) Trump’s large desire to please Vladimir Putin and to do business with Putin 3) Trump's big desire to do business with the Russians in general, especially regarding the proposed Trump Moscow Tower and 4) Trump’s vested interest in getting the sanctions America had against Russia lifted. Does anyone think that this may be one of the reasons why the emoluments clause exists in the Constitution so that the President does not sell out his country for money?
From these facts, it becomes clear that from the time that Trump first started his Presidential Campaign, the Russians would have always thought that Trump could have been easily talked into lifting the sanctions against Russia if he became President because of both his vested interest in having the sanctions lifted in order to get his Trump Moscow Tower and his lack of business ethics. This is apparently why the Russians seemed to mention the American sanctions against Russia every time that they met with someone from Trump’s Campaign for President. In addition, since Trump was clearly open to the idea of money laundering, which seems to be what the Russians were doing when they bought condominiums from Trump anonymously using cash only and shell corporations, he would seem to be the ideal President of America to the Russians because 1) he has demonstrated that he could easily be corrupted and 2) he could be manipulated by the Russians by threatening to blackmail him about his corruption.
For someone who has been studying up on Trump for years, I found the A&E docuseries "The Trump Dynasty” to be both well produced and satisfyingly accurate. For the person who knows little about Trump before his 2016 Presidential Election win, he or she will learn a lot. For the person who already knows a lot about Trump, the A&E docuseries will tie things up in a nice little package. Apparently, all that we may need now are the results of a full Deutsche Bank investigation and then--the handcuffs.