"I run the country and the world."
Spoken like a true mob boss, happily skimming from the galactic casino he fronts.
From The Atlantic via Axios:
Asked how his second term so far differed from his first, Trump said: "The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys."
"And the second time, I run the country and the world," he added.
"I'm having a lot of fun, considering what I do ... You know, what I do is such serious stuff."
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/28/trump-interview-atlantic-first-100-days
= new reply since forum marked as read
There’s gotta be a microphone crammed somewhere in that gelatinous mass. Nothing else explains the vocalizations. Did you notice the subtle deprecation of the billionaires for not “getting” him? One nation under lard, Baby!
ETA. B.Kliban
Vietnam era.
Great music.
Lucian Truscott IV pegs the MAGA GOP types…
The American Pantagruel has declared himself the enemy of the United States.
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
FEB 19, 2025
It took us just thirty days into the second administration of Donald J. Trump to reach a signature moment in American history. In calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and accusing him of starting the war that his country has suffered through from Russian aggression for nearly three years, Trump has loudly and clearly taken the side of a real dictator against our ally, Ukraine. It's no longer as if Trump is acting like a Russian asset. He has raised the white, blue, and red flag of Russia over the White House. In military terms, Trump has switched sides and begun firing from Russian lines at American troops.
The United States began preparing for a land war in Europe with Russia's progenitor, the Soviet Union, 80 years ago at the end of the Second World War, when the Soviets militarily occupied the Eastern European nations which had been taken by the Nazis. The Soviets didn’t bother declaring them within their sphere of influence and immediately began treating them as client states. You need look no further than at photographs of Russian tanks on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie or rolling into Budapest in 1956 to put down the Hungarian Revolution for evidence of Russia's crimes against Eastern Europe.
In 1955, when my family debarked at Bremerhaven from a converted military troop ship called the General Patch, there were more than 300,000 American troops stationed in Germany, with about 70,000 more in France, and tens of thousands scattered around Italy, Great Britain, and other countries. We didn't arrive in Germany on a family vacation. My father commanded an infantry company in Stuttgart and was almost immediately put on alert and sent to the field for maneuvers and training that lasted for months at a time. My uncle James was an F-100 pilot assigned to fly missions along the border with Czechoslovakia to guard against encroachments by Soviet MiGs.
It was serious business to be assigned to combat units in Germany in the 1950s. The word that was used to describe the American military in Europe in those days was “tripwire.” The US Army and Air Force were stationed on European soil to deter the Soviet Union from turning the countries of Western Europe into more of its client states. The Soviet Union and its Communist leadership, headquartered in the Russian capital of Moscow, was the enemy of the United States.
Today, our enemy is the nation of Russia, led by its dictator, Vladimir Putin. If you have any question as to whether Russia has transformed itself into the enemy of Western Europe and the United States, all you have to do is look at the destruction Putin's military has wreaked on its much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, over the last three years, causing once again American military units assigned to Germany, Poland, and the Baltic states to be referred to as a tripwire.
The threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia to Western Europe is so great and taken so seriously that Germany every year hosts the Munich Security Conference, attended by the secretaries of defense and military commanders of every country in NATO and the European Union. Those images you see in the papers or on television of European leaders around conference tables in Munich every year are not posed for show. Despite the juvenile presence of the American Vice President in Munich giving a speech that could have been written in Moscow, the security conference this year was especially serious for one reason: according to JD Vance and the drunken frat boy we have for a Secretary of Defense, Donald Trump decided to back Vladimir Putin and Russia against our allies in Ukraine. Listening to the words of Vance and Hegseth, no other conclusion can be drawn than that the United States is no longer acting as a member in good standing of NATO.
There is only one good thing about what Trump has done over the last two days. One of the readers of this column, Reed Bonadonna, put it better than I could in his comment today, which I will quote in full:
“As a military type, I feel a sense of excitement that the enemy has declared itself, looming like a hideous, toupéed Pantagruel. This, I begin to wondering see, is the battle for which we have always been preparing ourselves.”
Continues…
https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/the-american-pantagruel-has-declared
Trump, the billion-dollar loser — I was his ghostwriter and saw it happen
Charles Leerhson
Yahoo.com, May 9, 2019
EXCERPT...
I tend to see my time with him — the first part of it, anyway, before things started going bad in a hurry — as his “King Midas” period. I never said this to him; if I had, he probably would have thought I was suggesting he enter the muffler business. But there was a stretch of months when everything he touched turned into a deal. The banks seemed to accept the version of him depicted in his first book, “The Art of the Deal,” which we now know from his previous ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, was entirely invented. They believed it over what they saw on his balance sheets or heard coming out of his mouth, and they never said no to his requests for more money. Often they came up with things he could say yes to before he could think of them himself. As a result, a failing real estate developer who had little idea of what he was doing and less interest in doing it once he’d held the all-important press conference wound up owning three New Jersey hotel-casinos, the Plaza Hotel, the Eastern Airlines Shuttle and a 281-foot yacht.
A real go-getter, right? But Trump’s portfolio did not jibe with what I saw each day — which to a surprisingly large extent was him looking at fabric swatches. Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation. Some days he would do it for hours, then take me in what he always called his “French military helicopter” to Atlantic City — where he looked at more fabric swatches or sometimes small samples of wood paneling. It was true that the carpets and drapes at his properties needed to be refreshed frequently, and the seats on the renamed Trump Shuttle required occasional reupholstering. But the main thing about fabric swatches was that they were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn’t. One of his aides once told me that every room at the Plaza could be filled at the “rack rate” (list price) every night, and the revenue still wouldn’t cover the monthly payment of the loan he’d taken out to buy the place. In other words, he’d made a ridiculous deal. Neither he nor the banks had done the math beforehand. Or perhaps Trump knew it because someone had told him, but didn’t want to think about it. The one thing he is above-average at is compartmentalization.
Source:
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-the-billiondollar-loser-his-ghostwriter-recalls-the-king-midas-years-090000640.html
‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy
The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian
by David Smith
The Guardian, January 29, 2021
Excerpt…
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Continues…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
Craig Unger courageously lifted up the lid...
Trump’s Russian Laundromat
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By CRAIG UNGER
The New Republic, July , 2017
Excerpt...
Trump made his first trip to Russia in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Invited by Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin, Trump was flown to Moscow and Leningrad—all expenses paid—to talk business with high-ups in the Soviet command. In The Art of the Deal, Trump recounted the lunch meeting with Dubinin that led to the trip. “One thing led to another,” he wrote, “and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Over the years, Trump and his sons would try and fail five times to build a new Trump Tower in Moscow. But for Trump, what mattered most were the lucrative connections he had begun to make with the Kremlin—and with the wealthy Russians who would buy so many of his properties in the years to come. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. boasted at a real estate conference in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
The money, illicit and otherwise, began to rain in earnest after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. President Boris Yeltsin’s shift to a market economy was so abrupt that cash-rich gangsters and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, coal, minerals, and banking. Yeltsin himself, in fact, would later describe Russia as “the biggest mafia state in the world.” After Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin as president, Russian intelligence effectively joined forces with the country’s mobsters and oligarchs, allowing them to operate freely as long as they strengthen Putin’s power and serve his personal financial interests. According to James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey & Company who consulted on the Panama Papers, some $1.3 trillion in illicit capital has poured out of Russia since the 1990s.
At the top of the sprawling criminal enterprise was Semion Mogilevich. Beginning in the early 1980s, according to the FBI, the short, squat Ukrainian was the key money-laundering contact for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, or Brotherhood, one of the richest criminal syndicates in the world. Before long, he was running a multibillion-dollar worldwide racket of his own. Mogilevich wasn’t feared because he was the most violent gangster, but because he was reputedly the smartest. The FBI has credited the “brainy don,” who holds a degree in economics from Lviv University, with a staggering range of crimes. He ran drug trafficking and prostitution rings on an international scale; in one characteristic deal, he bought a bankrupt airline to ship heroin from Southeast Asia into Europe. He used a jewelry business in Moscow and Budapest as a front for art that Russian gangsters stole from museums, churches, and synagogues all over Europe. He has also been accused of selling some $20 million in stolen weapons, including ground-to-air missiles and armored troop carriers, to Iran. “He uses this wealth and power to not only further his criminal enterprises,” the FBI says, “but to influence governments and their economies.”
In Russia, Mogilevich’s influence reportedly reaches all the way to the top. In 2005, Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence agent who defected to London, recorded an interview with investigators detailing his inside knowledge of the Kremlin’s ties to organized crime. “Mogilevich,” he said in broken English, “have good relationship with Putin since 1994 or 1993.” A year later Litvinenko was dead, apparently poisoned by agents of the Kremlin.
Continues...
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
The stuff the deleted story needed to withstand the lawyers of MAGA…
The Hidden History of Trump's First Trip to Moscow
In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen.
By LUKE HARDING
Politico, November 19, 2017
It was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for gathering foreign intelligence.
Kryuchkov had begun his career with five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest under Ambassador Yuri Andropov. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer. By 1984, Kryuchkov’s directorate in Moscow was bigger than ever before—12,000 officers, up from about 3,000 in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern outskirts of the city, was expanding: Workmen were busy constructing a 22-story annex and a new 11-story building.
In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing contrast to the global confrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.
Snipski...
The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.
Continues...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842/
No wonder Putin, the Kremlin and the GRU and whatever the KGB is called these days call him "America's Gorbachev." Gorby sped up the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Now Putin returns the favor.
So, Donald J Trump represents the most successful spy operation of all time. And thanks to Just-us John Roberts redefining the meaning of "Insurrection" and the very words of the Constitution of the United States of America, an active Russian agent has been allowed to return to the Oval Office to again "serve" as the pee-resident.
Normally, I'd say: "Think about that!" But, destroying truth is what tyrants do. It's why they hate a free press. It's why trumpf is doing all he can to sue anyone who ever wrote anything bad about him. Now he has the DoJ doing his dirty work and handing the legal bill to the U.S. taxpayer.
The photo of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and dip above was taken by TASS, the official Russian news agency. The US media were not informed about the 2017 visit. We learned about it because the Unstable Moron himself spread the pic proudly on social media. How many people do you know who’ve seen that picture or the one below, taken on an earlier date in the Oval Office? Again, very few.
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
And this is the man leading the "restructuring of American government" today winking at Putin at a diplomatic affair during his first madministration.
It ticks me off to think we now have a pee-resident beholden to our nation's chief adversary. Only thing worse than MAGA and the GOP not minding the treason is that the US news media have been cowed into silence by fear of offending a tyrant or coopted into silence as co-conspirators in treason. Thank you for grokking, CountMyVote4Reality.
There, fixed it for ya, #DementiaDonnie. 
