Consider what it actually means when the Republican Attorneys General–the chief law enforcement officers–of 17 Republican-controlled states join a lawsuit initiated by the criminally indicted Attorney General of Texas to disqualify the duly certified election results of four other states that voted narrowly for Joe Biden. The lawsuit seeks nothing less than to overturn the election of Biden as president by eliminating those four states’ electors from the official electoral college vote on December 14, thereby assuring the re-election of Donald Trump, who lost nationally by more than 7 million votes.
Unless the Supreme Court has become utterly debased, this frivolous lawsuit will be summarily dismissed and never heard in court. But that’s not the point. What it means is that the entire Republican party–specifically including those Republican officials charged with upholding the Constitution and enforcing the rule of law–are willing to enlist in an attempted legal putsch that they certainly know will fail. Why are they doing this? It has to be that they are terrified of the belligerent anarchic forces that Trump has mobilized throughout this country.
With “Stop the Steal” rallies being organized to trumpet ever more fantastic lies about the November vote, citizen election officials receiving death threats from Trump supporters and armed demonstrators showing up at their homes, the tinder is being laid in place to ignite violence when Biden officially becomes president-elect. And the Republican Party remains silent and complicit.
The Texas lawsuit might have been disregarded as a transparent attempt by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton–currently under indictment for felony security fraud charges and reportedly under investigation for other crimes–to secure a Trump pardon. The lead attorney for the lawsuit, John Eastman, is a fixture of the radical right and in August published an op-ed piece in Newsweek arguing that Kamala Harris, who was inarguably born in Oakland, California, is ineligible to be vice-president because her immigrant parents were not yet US citizens at the time. [Newsweek later added a kind of faux-apology for the piece, saying that it had failed “to anticipate the ways in which the essay would be interpreted, distorted and weaponized” and was “horrified that this op-ed gave rise to a wave of vile Birtherism directed at Senator Harris.”] And yet 17 Republican state attorneys general joined in the lawsuit.
This case, like most of the other failed cases mounted by the Trumpistas, rests on an inherently racist premise because it focuses its challenges not on vaguely alleged voting irregularities in the entire states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but specifically on the cities of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee, where a large proportion of the population is non-white. The unstated, but clearly implicit, assumption is that those votes are therefore suspect and probably illegitimate. Even when the lawsuits all lose in court, they stoke the belief among the white faithful that they are the aggrieved in a corrupt system.
The damage that this is doing is both incalculable and long-lasting, because it seeks to destroy the belief of ordinary Americans in the integrity of the country’s elections. It is now essentially out of control, with Trumpista attorneys like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell telling people at a Georgia “Stop the Steal” rally that they shouldn’t vote in the Georgia senate runoff elections until the “fraud” has been fixed. If American can’t trust in their elections, then what is left but insurrection?
That’s where we are now, and that’s why this ridiculous case matters.
And the impossibly dark punchline offered by the Broadway-caudillo drag of Trump’s latest phase is that the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, did not even get a real Perón. The authoritarian style arrives in America not in the form of a general or an intelligence-agency thug, but in the form of a guy who was sweating along to the disco cover of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” at Studio 54. — Charles Homans, in the New York Times
As Americans wait incredulously to find out whether Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and remain president are an attempted coup or just another con, either way the damage will be deep and lasting. Once elections become viewed by a large segment of the population as rigged and illegitimate, then democracy really is on the ropes.
In the US, we don’t know how to deal with this because we’ve never had to before, and the clueless public doesn’t even recognize the milestones of impending authoritarianism as we keep passing them. But Latin Americans, including the millions who have immigrated to this country, certainly do or should, because they’ve been through this many times before.
Political instability has been the enduring curse of Latin America, preventing democracy from ever taking firm root. Virtually every country in Latin America–not just the much-mocked “banana republics”, but big advanced complex societies like Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, and Cuba–have seen their constitutions discarded, elections manipulated or overturned, and watched as their freedoms disappeared in a descent into capricious thuggery or outright authoritarianism. Very often the US–both government and private corporations–has played a major role in abetting or instigating such changes and supporting anti-democratic caudillos once they achieved power.
No two cases are alike, but the patterns are basically the same whether it’s authoritarianism of the Left or the Right. This is how it goes:
- A large segment of the population festers with inchoate economic and/or social grievances against the existing regime.
- A charismatic leader comes along who is able to exploit those grievances and present himself as the savior who will solve everyone’s problems.
- The charismatic leader is swept into power, often by (sometimes disputed) election or possibly with the support of the military or security forces.
- Once in office, the caudillo makes radical changes in the country’s institutions to make sure he stays in power.
- He gains control over the country’s law enforcement and judicial systems.
- He secures authority over the economic engines of the country either by nationalizing them (usually, though not always, if coming from the left) or co-opting the economic elite who then give him financial and political support and kickbacks in exchange for tailored favors from the government–always with the threat of retribution if their support should waver.
- Corruption inevitably increases, as it becomes evident that the only way to get approval and funding for projects is to secure the favor of the caudillo and his supporters.
- As opposition and criticism grow, the caudillo attacks the media and uses the levers of government to stifle dissent coming from the press, academia, and the political opposition. He mobilizes paramilitary groups and militias and popular mobs of supporters to intimidate opponents.
- The caudillo panders to the military for their support and encourages the police to target and harass groups that oppose him.
- Subsequent elections are manipulated and tightly controlled to insure the caudillo is kept in power.
What is important to keep in mind is that caudillos usually retain strong bases of popular support. Even in cases where they are somehow removed from office, they remain major political power centers because of their hold over their true believers. Juan Perón was ousted by the Argentine military in 1955, but then regained power (initially through a surrogate) in 1973. In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista served as elected president from 1940 to1944 and then left for Florida when his handpicked successor lost the election. But he continued to conspire from exile, got elected to the Cuban senate in absentia, and ran for president in 1952. Then three months before the election, he staged a coup with military backing and reinstalled himself in the presidency which he held until ousted by Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959. Peru’s strongman Alberto Fujimori, even after fleeing the country following the disputed 2000 election, being extradited and sentenced to prison for corruption, still retained strong support among the Peruvian electorate.
It’s easy put Trump somewhere in the authoritarian paradigm outlined above. There is no exact analog for him among the rogues gallery of Latin caudillos, but rather elements of several different ones. He clearly has channeled Perón’s use of public pageantry with his White House balcony appearances. He even managed to create his own Evita, using Ivanka as an eager substitute when Melania proved unsuitable for the role. (Evita is reportedly Trump’s favorite Broadway show ever, and he claims to have seen it at least 6 times.)
But even caudillos from the right, like Perón and Batista, actually initially promoted labor reforms that strengthened unions and boosted wages for his political base. Trump has done nothing of the sort. The economic benefits of his policies have gone overwhelmingly to the very rich and big corporations–the very forces that created the conditions that his base claims to be upset about. His primary appeal was and remains rhetorical validation of the prejudices and perceived grievances of “forgotten” white Americans, who have stayed passionately loyal despite getting nothing tangible from his administration beyond stoking their resentments. So far, that seems to be enough.
Ironically, given the support Trump received from Cuban-Americans in South Florida, the caudillo who most closely represents a more extreme version of Trump’s own style and inclinations is indeed the Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista. Cubans who fled the island after Castro took over often look back with gauzy nostalgia on pre-Castro days as a time of Edenic prosperity and freedom. For a small minority, perhaps it was. But by the mid-1950s, the Batista regime was a thuggish and repressive criminal enterprise that had sold off most of the national patrimony to US and other foreign owners and was thoroughly in bed with the Mafia, which controlled the gambling, drugs, and prostitution that attracted Americans for hedonistic holidays in Havana.
As John F. Kennedy stated in an October 1960 speech, the US supported the Batista regime with weapons, which reinforced the repressive apparatus, and gave “stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years…, and he turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state – destroying every individual liberty….We used the influence of our Government to advance the interests of and increase the profits of the private American companies, which dominated the island’s economy. At the beginning of 1959 U.S. companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands – almost all the cattle ranches – 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions – 80 percent of the utilities – and practically all the oil industry – and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports.”
The first wave of emigrés that fled the new Castro regime to the US in the early ’60s included wealthy property owners who were targeted by the revolutionaries precisely because they had collaborated with or directly participated in the Batista government. Some had seen the writing on the wall, and left Cuba before the fall along with a substantial portion of their wealth. They didn’t leave because they were opposed to dictatorship in principle; after all, they had been quite comfortable with the one under which they had prospered.
One example of those who did was Rafael Diaz-Balart (the brother of Fidel’s first wife, Mirta Diaz-Balart), who had been a deputy in Batista’s Ministry of the Interior which controlled Cuba’s internal security forces. Two of Rafael’s sons (Lincoln and Mario) would later be elected US congressmen from South Florida; a third (Jose) is now a successful anchorman on NBC and Telemundo.
That first wave had both money and influence with the US government, and they set the tone of implacable hostility to the Castro regime which has dominated both US policy and Cuban-American politics to this day. Only a few months after taking office, the same President Kennedy who had lamented US support to Batista approved the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion which was intended to topple Castro and restore the old regime. Sixty years later, almost nothing has changed, and Cuban-Americans who support Trump don’t want it to, because reactions in the community have become so Pavlovian that all they have to do is press the button to get the desired response. They don’t really want to change Cuba; they just want that rush they get from imposing punishment and extracting revenge.
Trump doesn’t yet have a political police force that kills and jails his opponents, but he has turned the US Department of Justice into his personal law firm and has fostered heavily armed white supremist vigilante militias who turn out to intimidate and occasionally kill peaceful demonstrators. He used the US military against protests on the streets of Washington, DC, and he claims that he has the loyalty of police departments across the country. In the midst of a pandemic that has so far killed 250,000 Americans, his inaction and disinformation campaign have been responsible for tens of thousands of needless fatalities and economic devastation.
Trump has turned the presidency into a personal cash machine, while delivering lucrative political favors to his supporters who eagerly pay to try to keep him in the White House. He has turned the Republican Party into a cowering cult of personality that openly or silently endorses his every whim, fearful of his wrath if they don’t. He has normalized blatant nepotism, putting unqualified family members–the only people he can really trust–in positions of critical importance, thereby expanding the opportunities for graft, corruption, and incompetence.
And now, having clearly lost an election by any measure, he persists in his preposterous claim that he actually won, while his minions pursue increasing ludicrous, but conceivably successful, stratagems to overturn the vote. Importantly, these efforts are blatantly racist, focusing on urban counties with large black populations, which are being smeared as being inherently suspect. According to polls, around 70 percent of Republicans believe that the election was not free and fair–a finding that will inevitably feed further attempts to manipulate the election system and disenfranchise selected segments of the population.
Americans used to look with condescending contempt on Latin America with its instability, violence, corruption, and the preening dictators that would come and go, fleecing their countries while in power and then fleeing into exile with their loot when the public (or the military) finally turned on them. Now this is us. We have our own caudillo.
In May 2016, Adam Gopnik wrote a prescient essay in The New Yorker about what electing Trump would mean:
If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak. If he can rout the Republican Party in a week by having effectively secured the nomination, ask yourself what Trump could do with the American government if he had a mandate.
Maybe we managed to escape the worst this time, but I think he’s right: The damage will never fully heal. After a century and a half, America has never really recovered from its Civil War, and Trumpism is just another outbreak in a somewhat different form of the same national disease. More than 70 million people voted for Trump, which means that almost half the electorate–and a majority of white people, both male and female–were just fine with keeping him in power.
Trump may be evicted from the White House, but he will remain a hugely disruptive force in American politics. Like Perón or Batista, he will be plotting a comeback, and it’s entirely possible that he might succeed.
Welcome to the Third World, America!
If you’re looking for a diversion from the non-stop horror show that is our daily newsfeed, may I enthusiastically recommend Lovecraft Country, the television series now streaming on HBO.
I have never been a big fan of the horror genre. Or, for that matter, of fantasy fiction and films. But there are exceptions, and this is decidedly one of the best. I had to reconsider my prejudices after seeing Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, in which he reimagined the horror genre as a pretty realistic way of viewing the black experience in America. Peele’s brilliant insight was to use the conventions of horror films to illuminate the real life dangers of just being black in this country, where there are few places of real safety and a simple ordinary encounter with a white person or, worse, law enforcement can in an instant turn dangerous or even deadly. Where even seemingly friendly white folks can’t be trusted not to conceal some variety of monster with malign intent.
Peele followed that up in 2019 with Us, a more complex narrative that uses the horror genre to look at race, inequality, insecurity, and fear of the “other”–all issues that actually what our politics are all about. As he put it in an interview, “On the broader stroke of things, this movie is about this country. And when I decided to write this movie, I was stricken by the fact we are in a time where we fear the other. Whether it is the mysterious invader that we think is going to come and kill us, take our jobs, or the faction that we don’t live near that voted a different way than us.” It is a highly ambitious film and full of ideas, and I loved it even though it did not quite receive the critical acclaim of Get Out.
Now Jordan Peele is executive producer of Lovecraft Country, an even more ambitious undertaking that so far, in my opinion, is nothing short of amazing. A new episode is released on HBO every Sunday at 9 Eastern.
The series is based on a novel by Matt Ruff, who took the title from H. P. Lovecraft, an early 20th century writer whose “cosmic horror” style is reflected in the series, where danger lurks at every turn both in the normal realm as well as in the supernatural. But Lovecraft was a blatant racist and Nazi admirer. As the NY Times observed, Ruff (who, incidently, is white) “upended this legacy by centering Black characters and making the story a parable about throwing off the constrictions of white supremacy.”
The showrunner, Misha Green (“Underground”), has taken the book and run with it. The series is unapologetically written from a black point of view and isn’t at all concerned about sparing white sensibilities. And why should it be? The story takes place in the early 1950s just before Jim Crow began to crack, and its flawed protagonist Atticus Turner (played by Jonathan Majors, of The Last Black Man in San Francisco–count me as a total fanboy!) is a Korean War vet returning to a very racist and hostile country. Interestingly, the action mostly takes place in the supposedly more enlightened North, not the segregated South, and it also has a pronounced feminist theme throughout and complex female characters, led by Jurnee Smollett and Wunmi Mosaku as half-sisters Leti and Ruby.
I won’t be a spoiler and attempt to summarize the plot, but I will say that each episode has layers and layers of references to literature, pop culture, music, and black history. Sometimes they zing by so fast that you can easily miss some of them on a single viewing. If you followed all of them up, they would amount to a very interesting course in American history. I would also recommend listening to the illuminating commentary on the podcast Lovecraft Country Radio after each episode is released. It is available on HBO on demand, as well as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Prime, and other podcast sources.
It’s nerdy, pulpy, sexy, horrifying, serious, and funny. Just simply great television. And most definitely NOT for the kiddies. Most of all, it tackles themes that we are very much still dealing with in our own real life daily horror show. Just go with it.
When the president is deliberately spreading a deadly disease which he insists is no big deal, when QAnon believers can be elected to Congress, when cops can burst into your home and kill you while you’re sleeping or kill you on the street in front of witnesses, when backwoods “militia” can plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Trump country doesn’t seem all that different from Lovecraft Country.

Last night my partner and I were among thousands of people who lined up to pay respects to Ruth Bader Ginsburg as her body rested on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. That immense outpouring of respect, grief, and love by ordinary people was happening because of what she represented: The expansion of justice and equality against the entrenched forces of privilege, money, and caste. Fundamentally, that’s what the 2020 election is about.
This morning, I watched the ceremony where her body was placed in state in the rotunda of the Capitol. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate were absent. Had they been there, the hypocrisy would have been unbearable, because as the ceremony was going on they were preparing to ram through a yet-unnamed replacement for Ginsburg before the presidential election less than 6 weeks away. Trump, of course, was absent as well. The day before he had made a perfunctory appearance at the Supreme Court, where he was greeted by the crowd with a chorus of boos and chants of “Vote Him Out”.
The network then cut away to an anguished protest in Louisville, Kentucky over the failure of law enforcement there to bring any charges against police who killed an innocent black woman, Brionna Taylor, in her own apartment. The message was clear. There will be no accountability. Some people can be killed with impunity. This came after a summer of nationwide protests prompted by the police killing of George Floyd against racially-motivated police violence to which Trump’s response was to dismiss the validity of the grievance and double down on police repression.
That’s this election in a nutshell. Trump and the Republicans are doing everything possible to suppress voter turnout from targeted purging of state voter rolls to destroying the Post Office which will have to deliver an unprecedented numbers of mail-in votes. Trump, of course, continues his campaign to impugn the credibility of the election itself, setting up a pretext for refusing to accept the results if he loses. This, too, is a question of justice and may well wind up in the Supreme Court.
The basic theme of American history is ferocious resistance by reactionary forces to any expansion of rights and justice to those who had been denied them. After eight years in which a black man had violated American caste restrictions by winning the White House and expanding access to health care, the Republican Party declared its policy of implacable resistance and obstruction, and Trump rode that into the presidency. The result has been the most massive epidemic of official lawlessness, corruption, and malicious destruction since the Civil War.
It all comes down to questions of justice. Do we want to live in a country where cops can bust into your home and kill you without accountability, or arrest and shoot you without provocation? Where the president and his officials can ignore legal subpoenas and exploit their offices for personal gain? Where the tax laws are skewed to protect the fortunes of the wealthy while programs that protect low income Americans are starved of funds? Where adherents of certain religions can impose their doctrines on everyone? Should good health care depend on your income? The list could go on and on. Virtually every major issue shaping this election hinges on a vision of justice.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg represented a expansive vision of justice, using the force of government and the courts to help people who had been oppressed and relegated to the margins of society, often by the force of law: black folks, gays, women, immigrants, asylum seekers, etc. If Trump succeeds in imposing his choice to replace her, the result will move the country in the opposite direction.
Netflix has just released the new documentary The Social Dilemma by Jeff Orlowski in which a series of Silicon Valley apostates argue that social media like Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, etc. have effectively changed human behavior. The result, they argue, is increased anxiety, anomie, distrust, fear, social isolation, and political polarization which threaten democracy and exacerbate economic inequality throughout the world. These are the unintended consequences of social media platforms designed to be incredibly efficient money-making machines that manipulate users by predicting our responses with uncanny precision. We are the product they are selling.
It’s a compelling argument because we all see the evidence everywhere we look. Who hasn’t had the experience of doing a Google search and seeing a related ad pop up on our Facebook feed within seconds? Why do we see posts from the same limited number of people and little else? Because the algorithms used by social media know what we want to see and serve it up specifically tailored to us relentlessly. When we do a Google search, the results it delivers depend on the data Google has on us, and Google knows pretty much everything about us. If social media is where we go for our information, then all we get is we want to hear. The system is both much more subtle and more complex, but this gets to the general idea.
Facebook and the others sell us to political manipulators who bombard us with material exquisitely crafted to push our buttons. That’s what happened in 2016 (see another excellent documentary The Great Hack), and they have only gotten better at it since then. The Social Dilemma focuses mostly on Facebook, perhaps because it’s the biggest and Mark Zuckerberg is so easy to despise, but all of the platforms are doing essentially the same thing. For my money, Twitter is the most pernicious of all, and I avoid it like the plague.
I was among the last people on the planet to open a Facebook account. My concern then (and still now) was with the risk it posed for identity theft. I had long conversations with a dear friend years ago who argued that Facebook was a way to have a real dialogue with people all over the country on critical issues. I was skeptical about that then. Then Trump got elected, and I wanted to do what I could to raise the alarm about what I was seeing. So I succumbed in hopes that Facebook would be a medium for amplifying that message. Looking back, I think both my friend and I were naive. We didn’t persuade anyone who wasn’t already persuaded. We just got locked into a feedback loop of people with similar opinions. I now understand at a personal level just how addictive it is. We are the ones being manipulated.
Recently, Facebook has the rep of being a platform for old folks, though the available demographic statistics don’t bear that out. (The biggest age cohort for FB users remains 25-34 year-olds. Some 88% of online users age 18-29 are on FB, versus 62% of online seniors 65+ and 72% age 50-64.) The company has lately taken a few token steps to limit its complicity in spreading disinformation, but continues to resist any systemic changes that might make a real difference. Like other social media platforms, their business model requires that.
So should we abandon Facebook now? Several of my friends have done that already and others have told me they’re considering it. How much is it worth to you? What do you really get out of it? Do you really need it to keep in touch with friends and family? Or is it something else? And how do you weigh that against the harm that it does to society? If you quit Facebook, are you also going to leave Instagram and WhatsApp, which Facebook owns? Are you going to quit Google? Is that even possible? Are we all too addicted to these private companies to stop supporting them? Honestly, I don’t know what I think at this point.
But by all means watch The Social Dilemma. And, of course, Netflix will then use that data to suggest other content that you might like…

What a black friend posted on Facebook today.
WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Having just watched the Trump Party’s four-day festival of mendacity and corruption (aka the Republican National Convention), I think it’s time to add a fourth oxymoron to Orwell’s famous trinity: EXPLOITATION IS BENEVOLENCE.
What most stood out during the event was the mind-bending juxtaposition of a parade of African-Americans there to praise the benevolence of Donald Trump while party leaders were simultaneously making the mostly outrageously racist appeal to White America’s primal fear of black people.
The latter loomed as the principal theme of the convention. One after another, Trump’s acolytes took the podium to scream alarm that if Joe Biden won the election those people from the crime-ridden war zones of Democrat-run cities [i.e., black people] would be coming to destroy America’s idyllic [white] suburbs. There would be uncontrolled rioting in the streets, “mob rule”, and “no one will be safe in Biden’s America”, as Trump himself proclaimed. Rudy Giuliani could barely contain himself, calling–literally–for locking more people up and portraying New York City as a cartoonish Gotham City where criminals rule the streets and chaos reigns. The solution, repeated endlessly by speaker after speaker, was total support for the police.
The intended message was crystal clear: Black people are dangerous. Black Lives Matter means riots, looting, and burning down private property. The Democrats are the party of black people. Therefore Democrats want looting and rioting and sending black welfare queens to live in your safe white suburban neighborhood, bringing crime and who knows what else. Good white people will not be safe in their homes.
And all of this was taking place immediately following another grotesque police shooting of an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Then a 17-year-old white vigilante named Kyle Rittenhouse had his mom drive him and his long gun up from Illinois so he could prance around with his rifle threatening protesters in the demonstrations that followed, where he promptly shot and killed two people and grievously wounded another, and then was ignored by police until video of him emerged on social media. Young Kyle was quickly adopted as a hero by such luminaries of right-wing America as Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, who gushed that she wanted him “as my president” on the same day that Trump went full-on “American carnage” in his acceptance speech. No one at the RNC condemned or even mildly admonished the Kenosha police; their denunciations were entirely directed at those protesting police violence.
Then there was the cognitive dissonance of a series of black Americans giving Trump glowing testimonials about how he had helped them. If you had just arrived from Mars and were watching the convention on TV, you could be forgiven for assuming that the Republican Party was mostly African-Americans or other people of color. I won’t speculate on the motives of the black folks praising the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson, but the general tone of their speeches (and indeed of the entire convention) was one of a grateful subject expressing gratitude for some favor gratuitously bestowed by a benevolent sovereign. It’s equivalent to fulsomely thanking the boss who has been paying his workers starvation wages all year for giving them a Christmas turkey.
The stress of the physical and emotional and political abuse of black Americans is clearly taking a toll. Black journalists and analysts commenting on the RNC were visibly struggling to contain their hurt and fury at what they were witnessing and to maintain their professional composure. As several people observed, the point of having black folks praise Trump wasn’t really to persuade black voters to vote Republican, but rather to give white voters who might have qualms about Trump an excuse to vote for him anyway.
The sports world reacted immediately. The players of the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play, and then the entire NBA suspended its playoff games. Several other sports leagues including the WNBA and MLB suspended play as well. A series of black sports stars spoke up, expressing their dismay and outrage at what is happening. Clippers coach Doc Rivers said, “How dare Republicans talk about fear. We’re the ones that need to be scared. We’re the ones having to talk to every Black child—what white father has to give his son a talk about being careful if you get pulled over? It’s just ridiculous…It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.” Charles Barkley said, “It’s exhausting being black in America.”
What I’m seeing from some black friends on social media is akin to despair.
I admit that I share that sense of despair. As a white man, I have never had to deal with the daily indignities that White America dumps on black folks, but my eyes have been gradually opened to the pervasiveness of racism in our country. Even so, until Trump won I really thought that things were getting better.
What feels different now, is that for the first time in my lifetime we have both a president and a Republican party that openly base their appeal on racial divisiveness. They are actually willing and often eager to inflame racial divisions if that’s what’s needed to stay in power. Before Trump, white nationalists had to stay in the shadows, but now his winking approval has enabled them to operate in the open. The message to racist cops and gun-packing white nationalists is: Don’t worry, we got your back.
They’re not quite mainstream, yet. That’s why Trump and his supporters still need to pretend to care about people of color and put on a show of faux inclusiveness as seen at the RNC. But it’s really just another form of contempt, because it says either that they think black folks won’t see through their hypocrisy or they just don’t care if they do or not because the show isn’t for them anyway.
It feels like we are at a watershed. I wish I felt some confidence about which way things will go.
Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, but for that you need an actual theory to explain how all the pieces fit together. Few can equal the ones swirling around erstwhile Trump pal and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, especially after his alleged suicide by hanging in a Manhattan prison cell under suspicious circumstances. So far, when it comes to linking up Epstein to Trump to Deutsche Bank to Russia, we have lots of shocking data points and some partial connections, but we still don’t know how or if all these rabbit holes connect. Clearly, there’s a lot more to the story if it is ever fully told.
The Epstein/Trump/Deutsche Bank/Russia (ETDBR) nexus is such a complicated jumble that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s go over some of the major pieces one by one, starting with the most recent. Because there is just so much material, I am making this a multipart post. I have provided links to sources for what follows.
The Attack on Judge Esther Salas and Her Family
On July 19, a man showed up at the home of federal judge Esther Salas in North Brunswick, NJ. He shot and killed her son and wounded her husband; the judge was unharmed. Hours later, NY state police found the body of Roy Den Hollander, an apparent suicide, near Liberty, NY, and law enforcement quickly attributed the Salas family shooting to him. Den Hollander, a Trump-supporting and violently anti- feminist 73 year old lawyer with terminal melanoma, apparently had a grudge against Judge Salas because he believed she was moving too slow on a case he had in her court. He left behind 2,000+ pages of writings on the Internet Archive expressing his views on this and other subjects. Two days later, the FBI linked him to a similar killing of a men’s-rights lawyer in California on June 11. Additional information about Den Hollander released by law enforcement leaves little doubt that he committed both murders.
How does any of this connect with ETDR? Two things:
First, just four days before the attack, Judge Salas had been assigned a civil lawsuit case brought by investors that involves Deutsche Bank’s handling of financial matters relating to Jeffrey Epstein.
Second, there is a Russia connection. According to NBC News, Den Hollander spent considerable time during the 1990s in Russia, where he reportedly ran a detective agency. He also claimed to have given a speech to the Kremlin in 1993, which he posted on his website. For at least some of that time, certainly from 1999-2000, he reportedly did investigations in Russia for Kroll Associates, for whom he “managed and upgraded…security and intelligence.” According to the company’s Wikipedia page, Kroll was hired by the Yeltsin government in the 1992 to help track down vast sums of money being laundered and sent out of the country through places like Cyprus. [nota bene] The semi-official Russian organ RT calls Kroll a “shadowy firm with ties to US and Israeli intelligence” and adds that “Kroll’s ranks were stacked with former agents of the CIA, FBI, Mossad, and MI6.” The RT story definitely hinted that the official story might not be the real one, but then one must consider the source.
Intriguingly, Robert Maxwell, the British newspaper mogul father of Epstein’s dearest friend and alleged procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, met with Jules Kroll (head of Kroll Associates) two weeks before Maxwell’s mysterious death while on his yacht off the Canary Islands in November 1991. According to participants quoted in a Vanity Fair article published in March 1992, Maxwell was convinced that his enemies were out to destroy him, and he wanted Kroll to find out who was behind it. He promised to deliver a “a memorandum of suspicions and unexplained events” which he was working on when he died. Reportedly, it was never delivered and Kroll was never formally hired.
Den Hollander also briefly acquired a Russian bride in 2000, and their quick and explosive breakup and divorce evidently fueled his raging misogyny.
So does this really connect in any meaningful way with the ETDBR nexus? A good screen writer could probably concoct a rather Byzantine plot that would make this fit coherently with the larger picture. But maybe it’s all just coincidental. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one.
Suicide of Thomas Bowers, Deutsche Bank private banker
On November 19, 2019 the body of Thomas Bowers was found in his Malibu, California home. The Los Angeles County medical examiner quickly ruled the death was suicide by hanging. Until 2015, Bowers had been the head of Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management division, and as such had approved controversial loans to Donald Trump. (Note: There is some question about when Bowers left DB. David Enrich, who wrote extensively about the bank for the NY Times and published a book about it, says he left in 2013.)
The bare outlines of Deutsche Bank’s extraordinary relationship with Trump have been extensively reported. As the NY Times reported in March 2019: “Over nearly two decades, Deutsche Bank’s leaders repeatedly saw red flags surrounding Mr. Trump. There was a disastrous bond sale, a promised loan that relied on a banker’s forged signature, wild exaggerations of Mr. Trump’s wealth, even a claim of an act of God. But Deutsche Bank had a ravenous appetite for risk and limited concern about its clients’ reputations. Time after time, with the support of two different chief executives, the bank handed money — a total of well over $2 billion — to a man whom nearly all other banks had deemed untouchable.”
According to the NYT investigation (source for most of what follows), the first DB loan to Trump was approved in 1999 for $125 million for “a gut renovation” of 40 Wall Street. At the time, Trump was a “a casino magnate whose bankruptcies had cost banks hundreds of millions of dollars.” Next came $300 million for a building across from UN headquarters. Another request for Trump Marina casino in Atlantic City went south when a top Deutsche Bank executive, Edson Mitchell, discovered that the signature of the credit officer who had approved the deal had been forged. Tragically, Edson Mitchell died in December 2000 in the crash of a small plane in which he was the only passenger.
Nonetheless, the bank’s commercial real estate division, then headed by Justin Kennedy (son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy), continued to lend money to Trump, including funds to buy the General Motors Building in Manhattan. [Justice Kennedy retired in July 2018, reportedly after extensive consultations with the White House, creating the vacancy filled by Brett Kavanaugh.] A DB team was formed to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds for Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. In 2004, Trump defaulted on the bonds, and the investment banking section of the bank stopped doing business with Trump–for a while.
But Trump continued to hit up Justin Kennedy and the commercial real estate unit to ask for more loans to build his 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, saying that Ivanka would be in charge. Trump claimed his net worth was $3 billion, but a bank investigation concluded that it was only about $788 million. Still DB agreed to lend over $500 million for the project with Trump personally guaranteeing $40 million. When the Great Recession hit in 2008 and the bulk of the loan became due that November, Trump used a “force majeur” clause in the deal as grounds to sue Deutsche Bank for $3 billion in “damages”. DB countersued and demanded the $40 million Trump had personally guaranteed. At that point, senior investment banking executives again cut ties–sort of.
Around the same time, DB was expanding its private banking section, and in September 2006 hired Rosemary Vlablic for a reported $3 million/year. She reported directly to Thomas Bowers, head of DB’s Private Wealth Management section. According to the NYT, she was encouraged to make loans that rival banks considered too large or complex. In 2010, Trump and DB settled their litigation, with Trump promising to pay up by 2012. Jared Kushner, who had married Ivanka in 2009, was a client of Vlablic. Jared introduced her to Trump, who flew her to Miami to see the Doral resort that he needed $100 million to buy. A DB team looked over Trump’s assets and concluded that he was overvaluing his assets by as much as 70%, but he had a television hit with The Apprentice, and had money coming in from that. What Trump was asking for was a complicated and unorthodox deal, involving borrowing from one part of the bank to pay another. Vlablic and Bowers approved the loans, but needed approval from higher-ups in Frankfurt. According to the NYT account, Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, supported the loans and the bank’s committee approved them.
[Digression: Josef Ackermann’s scandal-ridden tenure at Deutsche Bank ended in 2012. In 2014, he was recruited by Wilbur Ross and his Russian partner Viktor Vekselberg to become the new chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, which was a haven for expatriated Russian money. Ross became Trump’s Secretary of Commerce in March 2017. For more detail, see here. End of digression.]
Vlablic’s ties to the Trumps continued to deepen. “Deutsche Bank lent money to Donald Trump Jr. for a South Carolina manufacturing venture that would soon go bankrupt. It provided a $15 million credit line to Mr. Kushner and his mother, according to financial documents reviewed by The Times.”
Trump wanted to buy the Buffalo Bills NFL franchise, and needed to show that he could pull off a billion dollar transaction. He asked Vlablic for help with the loan, and produced “bare-bones financial statements” estimating his worth at $8.7 billion–a figure that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, later testified to Congress had been “inflated” with Trump’s knowledge. The bank’s own analysis reportedly concluded that they needed to reduce Trump’s valuation of his assets by up to 70%. They agreed to the loan anyway, but the bid for the Bills wasn’t successful.
Next up was Trump’s bid to turn the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue into a luxury hotel. Trump needed about $200 million and again turned to Vlablic and DB in February 2013, as he was still considered too risky by other banks. Ultimately, DB came through with a loan for $170 million for the project two years later, and Trump plumped up his brokerage account with the bank.
By August 2015, the NYT report concludes, Deutsche Bank had lent Trump more than $300 million under Rosemary Vlablic, who (as previously mentioned) reported directly to Thomas Bowers. Thus Bowers presumably knew chapter and verse about many of Trump’s financial dealings that House of Representatives committees have been unsuccessfully trying to pry loose.
Jeffrey Epstein also had major financial ties to Deutsche Bank, the details and consequences of which are what the lawsuit in Judge Salas’ court seeks to establish.
Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have reported that Epstein had been a client of DB’s private-banking division–i.e., the one formerly headed by Thomas Bowers–since at least 2013.
According to the NY Times:
In a $150 million settlement announced on Tuesday [July 7, 2020], the New York Department of Financial Services said Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had engaged in suspicious transactions for years, even though Deutsche Bank deemed him a “high risk” client from the moment he became a customer in summer 2013.
“Despite knowing Mr. Epstein’s terrible criminal history, the bank inexcusably failed to detect or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions,” Linda A. Lacewell, the department’s superintendent, said in a statement.
A year and a day after Mr. Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges, the settlement described how bank employees had relied on informal meetings and institutional momentum to allow suspicious activity to proceed largely unchecked. Instead of performing appropriate due diligence on Mr. Epstein and the activity in his accounts, regulators wrote, the bank was focused on his potential to “generate millions of dollars of revenue as well as leads for other lucrative clients.”
It wasn’t until after the Miami Herald published in late 2018 an explosive investigation into Epstein’s activities that Deutsche Bank decided that he was no longer desirable as a client. “The process proved more complicated and time-consuming than executives had initially anticipated because Deutsche Bank’s private-banking division had opened several dozen accounts for Mr. Epstein and his businesses.” In July 2020, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a penalty of $150 million to settle charges by a New York state regulator that the bank suffered from “significant” compliance failures in its relationships with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, Danske Bank Estonia and FBME Bank..
What’s not clear is whether or how much Epstein’s ties with Deutsche Bank involved Thomas Bowers. If, as David Enrich asserts, Bowers left his job in the private-banking division in 2013, then he probably would have had little or no knowledge of Epstein’s financial activities with the bank. If, on the other hand, he continued in that position until 2015, then he might well have known quite a lot.
Allegations that Bowers’ ties with Epstein were more extensive and long-standing appear to come mainly from a website called True Pundit, which Media Bias/Fact Check calls: “not only Questionable, but also a far right conspiracy site that rarely publishes credible news. This is a far right conspiracy source that cannot be trusted for accurate news reporting.” Politifact calls it “a conservative website and aggregator” and the one check listed for the site is rated “pants on fire”. True Pundit also seems to be the primary source for the allegation that the FBI was planning to interview Bowers at the time of his death. The aim of several right-wing websites that have picked up on these allegations appears to be to deflect attention away from the bank’s ties with Trump toward those with Epstein.
Eventually, the court cases in New York (Trump v. Vance) and New Jersey (Karimi v. Deutsche Bank–the one in Judge Salas’ court) may provide more details about Deutsche Bank’s entanglements with both Trump and Epstein, but it will probably be quite some time before such details become public. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s ruling on congressional attempts to subpoena Trump’s financial record (Trump v. Mazars) has dealt a major blow against success in shaking those loose and making them public.
Suicide of William S. Broeksmit
The NY Times described William S. Broeksmit as “a derivatives trader with a risk manager’s nose for spotting financial dangers”. He was recruited from Merrill Lynch by the late and aforementioned Edson Mitchell to create for Deutsche Bank “a world-class investment bank in London and spare no expense in doing so.”
But on Jan. 26, 2014, instead of meeting his wife and son for lunch, Mr. Broeksmit slung a dog leash over a door in his London home, and hanged himself from it. Left by his side was a neat stack of company documents related to Deutsche’s New York banking operations, and suicide notes addressed to relatives, as well as one to [Anshu] Jain [Mitchell’s successor and eventual co-CEO of DB, 2012-2015]. “You were good to me,” Mr. Broeksmit wrote to the man he had known for over 30 years, adding, “I am eternally sorry.”
It was really only years later, after the 2016 presidential campaign and election, that the general media started looking again at Broeksmit’s death in the light of Trump’s unorthodox financial relationship with Deutsche Bank and its involvement in a series of banking scandals. In May 2017 Daily Kos published a story headlined “Was suicide of Deutsche Bank executive linked to Trump and Russia money laundering?” The piece was prompted by an article in the German newspaper Die Welt that referred to the bank’s loans to Trump and $10 billion in laundered money for Russian customers. The unstated inference was that given revelations about Trump’s suspiciously numerous ties with Russia and his primary financial backer’s involvement in Russian money laundering that the two were somehow connected and that Broeksmit had known important things.
On October 1, 2019, David Enrich published an extraordinary account in the NY Times of his contacts with Val Broeksmit, the step-son of the deceased banker. (The source for what follows, unless otherwise indicated.) Val, a sometime musician with various personal issues, had found the passwords for his step-father’s email accounts, and in July 2014 he shared some documents with Enrich, who was then working for the Wall Street Journal. Based on that, Enrich wrote in the WSJ that DB’s “giant U.S. operations suffer from a litany of serious financial-reporting problems that the lender has known about for years but not fixed.”
The elder Broeksmit had also stumbled across, but failed to realize the import of, documents relating to the manipulation by DB and other banks of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR), the benchmark that determines interest rates around the world. This blew up into a huge scandal in 2012, and Deutsche Bank ultimately paid $2.5 billion in fines and penalties in the US and Europe for its participation. William Broeksmit had been worried that he might be prosecuted or bankrupted.
In early 2017, Val Broeksmit met with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS (of Steele dossier fame), and they traveled together to DC, where he shared documents with a Senate investigator and a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office. The documents eventually ended up in hands of money laundering investigators in the New York Fed. “A few months later, the Fed fined Deutsche Bank $41 million for violations inside the American unit that Bill Broeksmit had overseen.”
This is all very interesting material, but so far there is nothing in the public record that specifically connects William Broeksmit to either Trump or Epstein. He clearly had extensive knowledge, however, about DB’s shady practices and was disturbed by what he knew. Whether that included knowledge about the bank’s alleged involvement in laundering money for Russian oligarchs is unclear.
TO BE CONTINUED…