Trump’s Orange-Headed Revolution

As seen in September 2016, on stands August 2016

For a long time, no levelheaded person took Donald Trump seriously as a presidential contender. He actually ran back in 2000, nabbing more than 15,000 votes in California as the Reform Party’s candidate, and he has been publicly flirting with the idea since the 1980s. People thought it was more grandstanding, the type one might do if one is in the business of owning casinos, hosting beauty pageants, importing trophy wives, and starring in reality TV shows.

In fact, if you believe Stephanie Cegielski, the onetime spokesperson for the shuttered Make America Great Again super PAC, Trump himself once considered his 2016 run alternately as a “protest candidacy” and a way to further his brand, nothing more. In an open letter to Trump supporters, published on the site xoJane, Cegielski wrote that Trump never expected things to go this far:

“…And I don’t even know that he wanted to, which is perhaps the scariest prospect of all. He certainly was never prepared or equipped to go all the way to the White House, but his ego has now taken over the driver’s seat, and nothing else matters.”

“Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican,” said Seth Meyers, when he hosted the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Which is surprising, because I just assumed he was running as a joke.”

So did a lot of us, perhaps to our peril. But we thought our well-founded ridicule of the bombastic and buffoonish, semi-bronzed birther billionaire seemed like a sufficient weapon to send the famously thin-skinned, dim-bulb populist packing, a la Sarah Palin. But Trump has handily defeated a massive, unregulated militia of rivals, beating his nearest challenger, Ted Cruz, by nearly 20 percentage points overall in the primaries. And it seems like no amount of daylight shed on Trump’s racism, vanity, bad business deals, misogyny, poor grasp of history and geography, or—let’s face it—shoddy English will sway his followers, who, even if they have their misgivings about the guy, hate Hillary Clinton enough to give the dealmaker a pass.

“His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who worked for them.”

While detractors of Barack Obama lampoon the president’s teleprompter reserve, and distrust the Clinton machine’s meticulous production design and assimilation, they flock to Donald, who seems off-the-cuff and, by comparison, authentic. And while Trump’s continued popularity is confounding to some (and the enduring narrative suggests that he is as surprised by it as you are), the very real potential of a President Trump come next year poses legitimate logistical concerns to civil servants whose job it is to keep government functioning no matter who is president.

Trump dropped out of the 2012 race, eventually endorsing Mitt Romney, who stood stiffly through the photo op. This March, Romney (who, by comparison with the field of misfits Trump faced, now looks like Marcus Aurelius) called Trump “a phony, a fraud.”

“His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who worked for them. He inherited his business, he didn’t create it. And what ever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks and Trump Mortgage,” Romney said. “A business genius he is not.”

Romney’s statement, delivered the week of the Iowa Caucus, reflected Republicans’ vivid concern that Trump the Buffoon might have a shot at being President Buffoon, a dispiriting situation that had lost the GOP the White House in 2008.

And yet Trump still powered through. Even though “the establishment” was taking notice, Trump refused to act presidential, making menstruation jokes about debate moderator Megyn Kelly and imitating the physical disability of a hostile New York Times reporter.

The disparity between taking things seriously and running a brand campaign or protest candidacy (like Vermin Supreme, but with actual vermin) was evident in Trump’s hiring of the belligerent Masshole Corey Lewandowski as his campaign manager. Lewandowski had been, at times, a lobbyist, a police officer, and a congressional staffer who had failed in every attempt to elect either an employer or himself. Probably his most dubious pre-Trump achievement was “forgetting” he was carrying a loaded handgun in his laundry bag when he entered a congressional office building in Washington, D.C.

As Trump’s campaign manager from January 2015, Concealed Corey repeatedly came under fire for allegedly roughing up protesters and reporters. When he was dismissed in June (Lewandowski is now a CNN commentator, go figure), the campaign lost 50 percent of its unpredictable players, leaving only Trump.

But now there are scripted policy speeches versus stream-of-consciousness rants. Now Trump himself uses a teleprompter. Now Trump, for the first time in his career, is being packaged. Packaged like a Russian nesting doll, in fact. And if it’s possible, Republicans might be more worried about The Donald’s new strategists—a pair named Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—than they are about the candidate.

“It is Manafort’s work for foreign leaders that has DC insiders munching Tums.”

The history of the lobbying firm the two cofounded in 1980, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (BMS&K), is a truly jaw-dropping litany of Washington intrigue and machinations that would make Jimmy Stewart’s earnest senator from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” shit himself and die.

Known as the “quiet” one, Manafort consulted and lobbied for the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dole. Manafort is credited with stage-managing several Republican National Conventions and overseeing Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign, which resulted in the biggest electoral-vote haul in U.S. history, and the largest popular-vote landslide since Richard Nixon beat George McGovern in 1972. (Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon’s face on his back).

But it is Manafort’s work outside the United States that has Washington insiders munching Tums.

Manafort has had numerous lucrative side gigs working for some of the worst strongmen and dictators on earth. So much so that, in 1991, the Center for Public Integrity included BMS&K in its “Torturers’ Lobby” list. Manafort took millions from representatives of Angola, Nigeria, and the Philippines in the 1980s, helping those countries (or the people trying to topple the governments of those countries, depending on who was paying) squeeze foreign aid and favors from Congress and the White House.

Prior to pitching in for Bob Dole’s 1996 run, Manafort was embroiled in what became known as “the Karachi Affair,” in which he admitted to being paid—get ready for this—in kickbacks for submarine sales to Pakistan in his work to elect Édouard Balladur to the presidency of France. (By comparison, I once did a job in exchange for someone’s HBO Go password.) The French publication Libération, among others, reports that, when Balladur was defeated by Jacques Chirac in 1995, the new president cancelled all kickbacks and “commissions” to corrupt Pakistani officials, who may have retaliated in 2002 with a terrorist attack in Karachi that killed 11 French engineers.

“Trump sounded coherent and not at all himself.”

Manafort’s greatest international hit, however, and the project that seems to make him ideally suited for Trump, is his work with Ukrainian thug Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych failed to win Ukraine’s presidential election of 2004, in a campaign that was beset on all sides with widespread allegations of voter intimidation and fraud. Fed up, young protesters took to Kiev’s Independence Square and other public arenas (including the internet) in what became known as the Orange Revolution. It was a heady time that suggested the possibility of Kiev as a more European, less Soviet, capital.

Yanukovych’s people hired Manafort, and, according to a comprehensive article in Slate, the Connecticut native spent the next several years shuttling between the U.S. and Ukraine, remaking Yanukovych for public consumption. Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 (he was ousted and fled the country four years later, but Manafort’s checks had already been cashed), but at the expense of some delicate maneuvering the U.S. had done to remove Kiev from Moscow’s sphere of influence.

“When American Ambassador William Taylor arrived in Kiev in 2006, he summoned Manafort to a meeting in his office,” Slate’s Franklin Foer writes. “Manafort would become a fixture in the offices of American ambassadors to Ukraine, the U.S. government’s primary conduit to Yanukovych and the pro-Russian camp. As Taylor told a group of American democracy activists just after the meeting, he had asked Manafort to tamp down Yanukovych’s criticisms of the joint operations NATO was conducting with the Ukrainians. The implications of his ask were clear: The interests of American security were hurt by such rhetoric. ‘American to American, I’m asking you to talk to [Yanukovych].’ Manafort scoffed at the notion. He bluntly announced that he wouldn’t ask Yanukovych to dial back the rhetoric. It polled too well.”

This is a similar story to one related in a piece for the late Spy magazine, by journalist Art Levine. Following the success of Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign, Manafort was hired in 1985 by Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi in his crusade against his country’s Moscow-backed government. Manafort groomed Savimbi and took the ragged rebel leader (whom Levine describes as the planter of indiscriminate landmines and a soldier who literally burned his enemies as witches) and squired him around Washington, opening up the taps of proxy-war funding. But when Moscow stopped its own gravy train to the Angolan government, Manafort kept the pipeline going for Savimbi.

“So the war lasted another two more years and claimed a few thousand more lives!” Levine wrote. “What counts to a Washington lobbyist is the ability to deliver a tangible victory and spruce up his client’s image.”

To be fair, Washington lobbyists and fixers, who are associated with D.C.’s K Street the way advertising pros are “Mad[ison Avenue] Men,” are a part of life in the capital. Following his success with the Bill Clinton War Room, strategist James Carville assisted campaigns in Afghanistan and South America. Tad Devine, Bernie Sanders’s former senior advisor, also worked for Viktor Yanukovych. Every campaign employs “opposition research” to find, and in some cases place, skeletons in the closets of opponents.

Manafort’s colleague Roger Stone is just such an opposition-research professional, described in a Daily Beast story as a “self-admitted hit man for the GOP.” Stone’s flamboyant style is a stark contrast to his partner’s (in addition to the Nixon tattoo, Stone has admitted placing swinger ads for himself and his wife, and, in clear defiance of the new Republican antiporn plank, flaunted a photo of himself with Penthouse staple Nina Hartley, both wearing skimpy bathing suits).

Of BSM&K’s dealings with unsavory international players, Stone has said, “Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. [After all,] dictators are in the eye of the beholder.”

So this is who Trump has in his corner. Shortly after Manafort came on board officially, Trump delivered—by teleprompter—a policy speech worthy of May Day in Moscow.

“We will no longer surrender our country or its people to the false song of globalism,” Trump said, sounding coherent and not at all himself. “The nation-state remains the true foundation of happiness and harmony.”

If this sounds like something Vladimir Putin might say, bare-chested, in his clipped Russian, you have Paul Manafort to thank. Ever since taking Viktor Yanukovych from red-faced mouth-breather who didn’t wear clean shirts to the presidency of the Ukraine (and, most importantly, back under Russia’s thumb and away from NATO), an American oligarch like Trump is the perfect next step.

And Trump is playing right into it in a way that almost makes you feel sorry for him, as it appears that he’s being flattered into someone else’s agenda. Both Trump and Putin have bromanced each other in the press, Putin calling Trump “bright” and “talented” and Trump cheering Putin’s leadership, especially in the way the latter silences journalists. If only Trump could dispatch the Washington Post the way Putin crushes Fourth Estate dissent.

“I got to know [Putin] very well because we were both on 60 Minutes,” Trump said during one Republican debate. “We were stablemates, and we did very well that night.” (They never met—Putin appeared via satellite.)

We get the sense that Trump, a self-aggrandizing man if not a self-made one, doesn’t know he’s being played by members of a class of people who are globalists themselves, in the sense that they are not loyal to the interests of a country so much as those of the highest bidder.

Sensing this, the intelligence community is wary of providing security briefings both to people like Manafort, for fear of where his real loyalties lie, and to Trump, whom they worry will just blurt out anything.

Says Gary Schmitt, a former Reagan administration official now at the American Enterprise Institute, to BuzzFeed:

“If Trump is to be given access to sensitive intelligence, which can’t help but implicitly involve even more sensitive information about ‘sources and methods,’ then it’s imperative that any campaign staff who have had commercial ties with foreign governments and politicians not be given access as well until they have gone through a full, thorough background check — not the typical perfunctory review.”

The prospect of Manafort’s and Stone’s security review is mind-numbing.

“Would you sell out the United States to a foreign prince or potentate?” they might be asked.

“How much we talking about here?” they might respond. “I like boats.”

Maybe Trump is still reeling about how his publicity stunt got him here, but the real engineers of the Trump Train are as serious as a heart attack about making 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the least-gaudy jewel in The Donald’s empire come January, 2017. And what may surprise Trumpeters most is that their idol might unwittingly bring a little Red Square to the White House. Trump is just the sort of puppet Putin courts: an uncouth blowhard subject to flattery and really into Eastern Bloc women. What kind of deal will Trump make with Putin to Make America Great Again?

These are confusing times for a lot of people. Only Trump supporters seem united. So thank God for Pokémon Go. It’s the only thing that has brought the country together these past few months. Whereas people used to wander the streets dazedly lamenting Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton, or pondering head-scratchers like how a clown-topped peddler of bad steaks and unaccredited degrees could possibly get 14 million people to vote for him, now they just want to capture Jigglypuff without getting hit by a car. A nice Soviet car.

Dasvidaniya, comrades.

PHOTOS: Getty Images/ Petra Malukas, Getty Images/ John Moore … ILLUSTRATION: Jason Johnson

WRITER: Marty Barrett