Why Is Donald Trump Afraid of Putin

After the Helsinki spectacle where Donald Trump almost gave Vladimir Putin a public foot massage, the usual suspects rose again with their "this is it, the straw that will break the Orange Camel" cries.

They hollered Trump's subdued performance was treasonous and it was proof that Putin had some compromising tape on him and he was Putin's poodle.

There were also, to my eye, homophobic depictions of their relationship.

What I don't understand is how long will this "I can't believe his base is not deserting him" discourse go on. After ever scandalous tweet they rush to quiz the Trumpkins and they all gleefully say that they love the Man.

Neither do I understand the liberal conviction that Putin has something on Trump, which is why the Orange Man is behaving in a strangely decile manner.

This time, I didn't bother with another "nothing will derail Donald Trump" post.

There is no point in repeating the axiomatic truth that there is virtually nothing Trump can do that will turn his evangelical, white privileged, racist and affluent base off.

You can show that he colluded with Russia to win the elections and his folks will say, good for him.

However, there is one thing Trump is afraid of and it is why he is extremely cautious in dealing with Putin. It has to do with my prediction about how his presidency will likely to end. And as one of my most popular posts, it is still on the right hand margin.

My view is that, nothing other than financial fraud, money laundering and associated crimes can bring Trump down. But those crimes, when revealed, will almost certainly force him to resign.

As I explained in that post in some detail, in mid-2000s, after six bankruptcies, Trump was toxic and no financial institution would lend him money. So, to develop residences, hotels and golf courses, he began working with Russian, Kazakh, Georgian and Azeri businessmen, like Felix Sater, Tevfik Arif, Alexander Shnaider, Tamir Sapir and the Mammadov family.

There is a long list of dubious development projects here and you can click on them to see the problem in each instance.

The people whose name I mentioned are all shady characters with extensive links to criminal groups and in my opinion it is very likely that they used the Trump Organization to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. They financed properties, Trump slapped his name on them, the units got sold, hotels and golf courses managed and fresh smelling money came out from the other end.

Financial fraud would be problematic for Trump for two reasons: One, unlike sex allegations, which are of "he-said-she-said" narratives, money laundering is easily proven and him helping some foreign criminals clean up their ill-gotten gains would give pause even the staunchest Trumpkin.

There are some hard-to-believe projects.

As the New Yorker's Adam Davidson put it:

Although we cannot say that Trump himself knowingly engaged in money laundering, we do know with certainty that much of his business in the past decade was in the industries most known for money laundering, in the locations most conducive to money laundering, and with people who bear the key hallmarks of money launderers.

Moreover, associated crimes like tax evasion could become a serious headache for him. And it would be difficult for Fox News to claim bothsideism as there is nothing like this on the Democratic side.

But perhaps more importantly, such a scandal would destroy the Trump brand and make it impossible for him to profit from the presidency and his business model (putting his name on other people's properties and getting a license fee) would vanish overnight.

Faced with such a situation, Trump would make a deal and simply resign.

As you might remember, I maintained throughout that this outcome was more or less inevitable because of Trump's stupid feud with intelligence agencies. They know where the bodies are buried and they will unearth them when it is appropriate.

It turns out your humble soapbox operator was on to something.

Credit

Recently, an editor at the New Yorker concurred with the general outline of this analysis.

According to several Russia experts "kompromat" does not necessarily refer to a compromising video clip that can be used for blackmailing.

You know the apocryphal pee-tape.

Instead, it should be thought of pieces of information being held by different players within the "sistema" or system, which is an informal structure of hierarchy where the players constantly shift position relative to others.

In this case "kompromat" is about Trump's past business dealings with these guys.

If there truly is damaging kompromat on Trump, it could well be in the hands of Trump’s business partners, or even in those of their rivals. Trump’s Georgian partners, for example, have been in direct conflict with other local business networks over a host of crucial deals involving major telecommunications projects in the country. His Azerbaijani partners were tightly linked to Iranians who were also senior officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

And the reason why Trump is being nice to Putin is this:

The scenario that, to my mind, makes the most sense of the given facts and requires the fewest fantastical leaps is that, a decade or so ago, Trump, naïve, covetous, and struggling for cash, may have laundered money for a business partner from the former Soviet Union or engaged in some other financial crime. This placed him, unawares, squarely within sistema, where he remained, conducting business with other members of a handful of overlapping Central Asian networks. Had he never sought the Presidency, he may never have had to come to terms with these decisions. But now he is much like everyone else in sistema. He fears there is kompromat out there—maybe a lot of it—but he doesn’t know precisely what it is, who has it, or what might set them off.

Hence the reluctance to release tax returns and insistence that his business dealings are off-limits to Mueller.

And of course his super nice guy routine with Putin.

Because he doesn't know how much Putin knows and he is worried.

And he will do anything to make sure that it is not a problem.

Turkish Elections: How Did Erdogan Win?

Turkey's pugnacious president Recep Tayyip Erdogan won the most important election of his political career.

Erdogan Campaigning

And he did so decisively.

He became president in the first round and he preserved his majority in Parliament, albeit through an electoral alliance.

He achieved all that at a time when the Turkish economy was looking into an abyss with foreign currency and corporate debt and inflation are all at an all-time high.

Anyone else in anywhere else would have seen his wings clipped. Not him.

Erdogan's GOP Strategy

He was facing an elactoral alliance composed of:

a) Republican People's Party (CHP) a secular social democratic party,
b) The Good Party (IP), an ultra-nationalist party led by a charismatic and pious conservative woman,
c) Felicity Party (SP) an Islamist party led by a life-long political Islamist and an early collaborator of Erdogan.

What is important to note is the fact that the alliance removed the need for each party to clear the 10 percent threshold to get their votes turned into seats. This was done in order to encourage hard core Islamists to vote for SP without worrying that they might be wasting their ballot.

The idea behind bringing together a staunchly secular party, a conservative, ultra-nationalistic party and an Islamist party was to convince disgruntled AKP voters to consider voting for this new formation.

And it resonated with many of them. Poll after poll showed that Erdogan would be forced to go to the second round and he would very likely lose his legislative majority.

Herein lies a twist.

As I posted a couple of week before the elections, one opinion poll found that both Turks and Kurds were more inclined to support IP and its leader Meral Aksener than CHP and its presidential candidate Muharrem Ince.

In fact, that poll indicated that Aksener would force Erdogan to a second round and could then win the presidency.

While an outlier, the poll made sense because a very large portion of the Turkish electorate has always had an intense dislike for the CHP.

Some associate it with a zealous prosecution of Islamist population (it was illegal to wear a hijab or niqab until AKP came to power and women could not wear a headscarf of any kind in schools and universities or government buildings).

Others hate the party for its long association with the army (the only two times it formed a government were after military coups). And its tacit role in the country's four coups.

Others see it as a rigid and shallow agents of Western influence with no specific outlook or platform.

I can go on.

The fact remains that a significant majority of the Turkish electorate would vote for anyone before they considered CHP.

Hence the Erdogan strategy.

Muharrem Ince

He methodically ignored the nationalist conservative Aksener and IP and the Islamist Felicity Party. He solely focused on CHP and its candidate. Since he controls almost all the media outlets they followed suit.

You could see Ince on many talk shows on in the news bulletins, Aksener, not so much. Mind you, even then the balance between Erdogan - Ince media exposure was very much in favor of the former but Aksener was nowhere to be found.

In the May 1-25 period, the country’s two main news channels, NTV and CNN Turk, dedicated a combined 70 hours of coverage to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its election ally, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), according to a report by the two opposition-nominated members of Turkey’s media watchdog RTUK. The report was made available to Al-Monitor. The CHP and Ince got 22 hours, while the Good Party and its presidential candidate, Meral Aksener, got 17 minutes and the HDP received no coverage at all.

In other words, he transformed the elections from being between a coalition of conservative, nationalist, Islamist and secularist parties and Erdogan's AKP into a bipolar Us and Them race.

Us being the Sunni conservatives, Them being the Western-minded secularists.

Essentially, Erdogan was saying if it is between me and CHP, who you're gonna call?

And the electorate chanted "Ghostbusters" as they were expected to.

Erdogan's message contained the threat that if CHP came to power, despite Ince's reassurances, they would bring back all those anti-Islamist laws. They could force the removal of headscarves, reduce the number of religious schools and go back to Kemalist days of early republic.

And his base ate it up. After all, candidate Ince might be relatable with his mother and sister both wearing a headscarf, but he is not the leader of CHP.

Charismnatically challenged Kilicdaroglu

Since Ince committed himself to going back to the previous system of a ceremonial president with an executive prime minister, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of CHP could soon become prime minister in a new government.

He is an Alevi, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam and most Sunnis consider them heretic infidels.

That was Erdogan's message. I know Ince seems nice but you elect him, you will be governed by a secular Alevi. Me or them?

It is like the GOP telling their base if it is not them, then it is Nancy Pelosi, abortion at every clinic, socialist health care and probably another black president.

Who cares if Trump is a twice divorced, pussy-grabbing idiot. He is what stands between, conservative, evangelical and racist GOP voters and Pelosi at Co.

Erdogan has also used GOP's voter suppression techniques.

Many voting districts were redefined. They changed voting stations in the Kurdish region removing them from pro-Kurdish villages. This made voting for many rural Kurds very difficult.

There was also some evidence of ballot stuffing.

Officers resorted to firing their guns into the air to stop the threesome in the country’s southeastern province of Urfa from delivering four sacks stuffed with fake voting cards to the Bilge Primary School, which was being used as a polling station.

Ballot stuffing is not widespread in Turkey but this incident was not a one-off situation either. I assume ballot stuffing was part of Erdogan's Plan B or C or D, something that can be used, on a limited basis, to alter an undesirable outcome.

For instance, in the 2017 referendum, the Organisation  for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) alleged that up to 2.5 million votes might have been manipulated. Out of 55 million voters 2.5 million vote is not a big deal perhaps but if you won the referendum with 1.5 percent, it is a huge deal.

Which brings me to the other parties and especially the surprising MHP win.

Other Parties and the Mystery of MHP?

Kilicdaroglu, the beleaguered leader of CHP lost nine consecutive elections but has no intention to resign. In fact, he criticized Ince's performance and said that he did not get as many vote as he should have.

He is counting on the fact that, despite reducing the party's electoral support from 25.32 percent to 22.64 percent he was rewarded with more seats (146) than the previous election (131). Most of that was due to the fact that the number of MPs went up from 550 to 600.

In any event, Turkey's electoral laws and CHP's bylaws are such that it is almost impossible to remove a party leader through regular democratic means. To give you an idea, since 1923 the CHP has had only five leaders. Can you find another such example in the world?

Meral Aksener, the leader of the nationalistic and conservative Good Party (IP) passed the 10 percent threshold and will have 43 seats in the new assembly.

The case of her former party the proto-fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) is very interesting. Devlet Bahceli, the leader of MHP fought off Aksener's leadership bid tooth and nail and expelled her from the party. She went on to form IP and Bahceli entered into an electoral alliance with Erdogan and AKP.

Interestingly, between 1 May and 25 June only a single polling company placed MHP above the 10 percent threshold. Fourteen others predicted that it would never go over.

There is a good reason for that. The ceiling of MHP's support is around 5.5 to 6 million votes.  It once hit 7.5 million (for the June 2015 hung parliament) but contemporaneous opinion polls clearly showed that the additional votes came from disgruntled AKP supporters. And the next time around, in November 2015, the party's vote went back to 5.7 million.

But let's stipulate, for the sake of the argument that 7.5 million votes is the true potential support level for ultra-nationalistic parties in Turkey.

In 24 June 2018 elections MHP and IP, which share the same identical electoral base received 10,555,227 votes. That's almost double the regular MHP vote.

How could MHP get to preserve its share of the vote when half of its base went to support an offshoot party? Even the one opinion poll that gave MHP 10.5 percent found that IP was going to be stuck at 7.4 percent. Yet they received collectively 21 percent of the vote.

You could argue that since AKP's vote went from 49.5 to 42.5 percent, a significant percentage of AKP voters went to ultra-nationalistic parties.

The problem with that argument is that no opinion poll showed such a drastic move away from AKP to ultra-nationalist parties. And why should they?

With his Afrin excursion, his Syrian adventures in Al-Bab and Manbij and his genocidal tactics in Southeast Turkey Erdogan showed his bone fide as the most nationalistic leader in Turkey. Why would such voters desert him at this juncture?

In other words, there is no explanation for this 21 percent ultra-nationalistic vote either arithmetically or politically.

And curiously no one tried to explain this odd result.

Unless of course, these three guys caught with fake ballot bags were part of a larger effort to get MHP over the 10 percent threshold.

Where is OSCE when you need them.