The Red Scare 2016

I was gonna write another How did we get here today, Trump has been Trumping, but nothing really unusual was happening so I figured why not talk about Mike Huckabee? He's pretty shitty and you can change his last name to Fuckabee for laughs, well I laugh anyway.

But that isn't going to happen because the Trump campaign seems to be insisting on proving the theories that he is in Vladimir Putin's pocket.

For those who don't want to read a New York Times article for some reason, the short version is the Ukrainian anti-corruption task force, which is apparently a thing, found in a room with safes full of hundred dollar bills, a secret ledger listing payments from a network of pro Russian oligarchs, including former President Yanokuvych. This ledger contained the name Paul Manafort, listing payments totaling about 12.7 million dollars.

Paul Manafort still keeps an office in Ukraine, and never reported income like that from his work for the president, which he actually did, so if true, this income was kept off book for reasons that can't possibly be above board.

Manafort has a history of working for dictators, including allies of Vladimir Putin, and in March he showed up at Trumps place, had dinner with him, and offered to take over running his campaign, for free, from Corey Lewandowski, the fairly unstable previous manager, who rapidly secured a job at CNN and became one of Trump's supporters there while making half a million bucks a year. It seems Lewandowski is still kinda mad though, as he retweeted the above article himself today.

Meanwhile since March Donald Trump has consistently been critical of NATO, particularly of the member nations on the Russian border, his daughter Ivanka is currently on vacation in Croatia with Wendy Deng Murdock, ex wife of Rupert Murdoch, and thought to be the current girlfriend of... Vladimir Putin.

Any other campaign, at any other time, would immediately be sunk by any of the things I just mentioned, with congressional hearings and FBI investigations to boot, it remains to be seen if anything will actually come of this, though Times writers have stated that there are more stories coming and the week has just begun for Manafort, who for his part hasn't commented yet and his lawyers have simply denied everything, which is the correct response. Donald Trump however has a speech tomorrow, it is supposed to be about foreign policy and Trump has never shown any signs of being on the same page as his advisors.

Let's recap, in the year 2016 we are concerned about Russian influence on the American elections, and it is not the Democrats we are worried about.

There are three months to go, and a very real chance that a major component in the Republican presidential campaign ends up facing treason charges. And even if not, the GOP campaign has ties to unfriendly foreign interests that would not be tolerated on the other side of the aisle, at all. They keep finding ways to make it worse, I thought that Trump's base would never be scared off from him, but his base is xenophobic in the extreme, and for the older crowd, Russia is still the enemy, I don't know if his support has a bottom at this point, and that is awesome.