Antipresident Donald

Trump's shadow State Department

During the 2016 presidential campaign, astute readers may recall, close associates of Donald Trump held numerous clandestine meetings with close associates of Vladimir Putin. When the press would find out about one of these meetings—like, for example, the rendezvous in early December of that year, when the Russian ambassador was smuggled into Trump Tower; it was at that confab, which included Mike Flynn, that Jared Kushner proposed setting up a “backchannel” via the Russian embassy, an audacious and lowkey treasonous suggestion—the Trump camp reflexively lied about it.

The denials happened a lot, because the Trump campaign knew that acknowledging all the Russia meetings would have an adverse impact on their guy. It was unsavory for a candidate—who was, after all, still a private citizen—to liaise with a foreign leader, especially the leader of a country that was, for the second half of the 20th century, our primary adversary. It was embarrassing for the “Make America Great Again” candidate to be perceived as “Putin’s Puppet,” as Hillary Clinton unforgettably put it. It was also arguably illegal—a violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits such intercourse:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Many of us (rightly) feared that Trump was in cahoots with, if not outright subservient to, the Kremlin. How else to explain all these secret meetings? And why else would the Trump people deny them?

This is what I wrote in Dirty Rubles, a short book on the subject, published in May of 2018:

Throughout the 2016 campaign, during the transition period, and after inauguration, Donald Trump and his surrogates vehemently denied meeting with Russians of any stripe, for any purpose. Every time they were asked about a connection between the campaign and the Kremlin, they shot it down. And they were indignant about it. The response was always something along the lines of, “Russia? Us? How dare you accuse us of such a thing!” ….

In July of 2017, when the press got wind of the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian attorney that took place the previous June, the Russia Lie became impossible for any thinking person to believe. Yet even with this bombshell, the denials continued. Junior put out a statement on July 8, 2017—one his father the president helped him craft, with help from his communications director Hope Hicks and others: At the Trump Tower meeting, Junior explained, “[w]e primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”

Three days after Trump’s namesake son issued that statement, the New York Times was set to publish the emails proving that Junior had in fact met with Russians, and damned well knew what was going to be on the agenda. How could he not have known? The subject line of the emails was this: “Re: Russia - Clinton - private and confidential.”

That’s not a joke. That’s not me being cute. That was the actual email subject line. And it appeared in the inbox of Junior, and also of Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. (Trump, a Luddite, famously does not use email). Astute readers will observe that the word “adoption” is nowhere to be found in the subject line. Nor was it in the email exchange itself, which Junior published himself on Twitter, to “get ahead of the story” and scoop the Times.

Again, this happened in July of 2017—more than a year after that Trump Tower meeting. Until then, for months and months, it was a string of denials, the Russia Lie repeated ad infinitum. It took a major newspaper threatening to publish emails proving Russian contact to finally get the Trumps to cop to the truth.

Maybe this could be forgiven if the Trump Tower meeting were unique—if that rendezvous had been the only time Donald & Co. powwowed with the Russians. But this was not the case. Contrary to their vehement denials—their reiterations of the Russia Lie—there were many meetings between associates of Donald Trump and agents of Vladimir Putin. Not two or three. Not a few. Many.

I was not the only one concerned about malign Russian interference. The U.S. Intelligence Community was worried about it. So was the FBI. Christopher Steele, the former head of the Moscow bureau of MI6, went to extraordinary lengths to warn our government about it. Alexander Downer, the former Australian foreign minister who met with Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, raised such an alarm that it launched a federal investigation. Reality Winner threw away her career and spent time in prison in an attempt to expose it. Trump’s own Justice Department had enough reservations about it to appoint a special counsel to look into the matter. Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone were convicted because of it. The findings of the aforementioned special counsel, Robert Mueller, were significant enough to fill a book about it: Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee subsequently produced a similar document on the subject.

Because of connections between a presidential candidate and a hostile foreign power, all of that happened.

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Fast-forward to 2024. Once again, Donald Trump is running for president. Once again, his camp is meeting with representatives of foreign governments. But this time, it’s happening right out in the open. And this time, no one seems to give a shit. He is like one of those medieval Antipopes, running his own parallel administration.

Like, Trump hosted another country’s prime minister—at Mar-a-Lago! Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic leader and like Trump a Moscow marionette, made the trek from Budapest to have a sit-down with FPOTUS. He did not go to Washington. He did not meet with President Biden. He did not meet with anyone from the State Department. He only had an audience with the presumptive Republican nominee. (Well, and with Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, prime mover of Project 2025, who said in a statement that Heritage is “especially proud of our relationship with Prime Minister Orbán, whose leadership in Hungary on immigration, family policy, and the importance of the nation-state is a model for conservative governance.”) Now it may be that Trump and Orbán were merely forming a Putin Puppet support group. (“Hi, my name is Viktor, and I’m owned by Russia.”) But that beggars belief.

Tucker Carlson, the smug Trump ally who, rumor has it, is in consideration to be Donald’s running mate, has been gallivanting around Eastern Europe, interviewing the despotic likes of Orbán, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, and, infamously, Vladimir Putin. Nominally a journalist, Carlson is free to interview whoever he likes, but it’s fair to ask: Why is Trump’s chum hobnobbing with so many foreign dictators?

Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting DNI (and a man who while in the latter job quote-tweeted me, denying he was a Russian operative…even though I didn’t accuse him of being a Russian operative), has reportedly been operating abroad as Donald’s “envoy.” Per the Guardian, Grenell was recently mucking about in Guatemala, “where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared ‘free and fair’ by international observers.” He’s also been busy in the Balkans, “building on a previous role as the Trump administration’s special envoy to the region and working on property deals in Serbia and Albania with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” This may be perfectly above board, but it certainly has the look of a candidate’s lackey engaging in shadow diplomacy.

And then there’s Kushner. He’s now heading up a big-money investment firm, Affinity Partners, that exists mostly because the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, his bestie, felt like it was good business for the Kingdom to have close relations with the son-in-law of a once and potentially future president. As the New York Times reported last week, Jared’s

$3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.

In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March.

Mr. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, is collecting approximately $40 million a year in management fees from those investors even before any share of profits earned on investments.

A former Reagan official interviewed by the Times noted that a former White House official entering into such a huge foreign-money venture was unprecedented. Oh, and according to the article, Kushner still visits MbS “several times a year.”

All things being equal, I’d rather Jared devote his energies to investing some dictator’s blood money than managing a pandemic response or negotiating Middle East peace plans. From the looks of things, he probably feels the same. But it takes a real hidden genius to perceive Affinity Partners as anything other than a great big payoff from various unseemly foreign governments to the Trump family.

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Individually, these acts are perhaps excusable. But taken together, they seem to thwart both the spirit and the letter of the law. Why does the Logan Act exist, if not for his?

Eight years after Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign, the Overton window has moved. Candidates canoodling with foreign governments has been normalized. No one in any position of authority seems to care about Donald’s shadow diplomacy. Certainly Merrick Garland has other priorities, such as Not Appearing Political. Perhaps that was the real purpose of the GOP’s Hunter Biden attacks: to deny the President the moral high ground, and maybe the appetite, to go after Trump’s associates for trading on a family name and political connections to make bank overseas. Either way, it looks like the Logan Act is yet another statute that Trump will violate with impunity.

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The Antipope John XXIII assumed the papacy in 1410. And “assumed” is the correct word, because, while he enjoyed the support of a number of powerful entities—England, France, and Venice among them—his ascension to the top job was unsanctioned. He was a Cardinal who disavowed the sitting Pope, Gregory XII. In other words, he was an insurrectionist who refused to accept the results of an election.

For a while, there were three holy men claiming to be Vicar of Christ, an unsustainable arrangement. In 1414, Sigismund of Luxembourg—Holy Roman Emperor; King of Germany, Hungary, and Croatia; and creator of the Order of the Dragon, from which Vlad the Impaler would get his “Dracula” nickname—organized the Council of Constance to resolve the problem. There it was decided that all three Popes would resign and a new one would be selected.

John XXIII didn’t like this. He fled from Constance disguised as a postman, accompanied by the lone duke who still supported him. But he was soon captured, whereupon, in the exquisite words of the great Edward Gibbon, “The more scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was accused only of piracy, rape, sodomy, murder, and incest.” He was convicted, served time in prison, was freed in 1418 when the Medici family ponied up a vast ransom, and died a few months later.

Will Antipresident Donald suffer a similar fate?

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Photo credit: Patrick Barry. 1915 world map.