King of Kompromat

People think of Donald Trump as a real estate developer, a casino owner and a grifter-politician concerned more with his own profits than the future of democracy, or the well-being of the American people.

And of course all of those resume points are real - along with money laundering for the Russian mob, six bankruptcies and involvement in nearly four thousand lawsuits before Trump became President of the United States.

Trump also had a lifelong reputation as a sexual predator with dozens of credible accusations, and as of now, one conviction for sexual battery and defamation in the case brought by E. Jean Carroll.

Trump Model Management company and Trump’s two beauty pageants were basically fronts and feeder systems for his own deviant desires and exploitative agenda with his business associates.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s he used teenage Eastern European models as bait to attract and ensnare his male business associates.

A partnership with John Casablancas’s Elite Model Management and the ‘Look of The Year’ contest was a big part of this strategy for Donald Trump.

Trump Model Management would house the young aspiring models, six to a bedroom, in an un-air-conditioned apartment on the lower east side where they slept in bunk beds while they tried to pay off the exorbitant rent and travel fees he charged them.

The models were basically indentured servants for a white collar sex-trafficking ring; another of the maddeningly blatant crimes Donald Trump got away with for decades in New York City.

Trump wasn’t just hoarding innocent and beautiful teenage girls for his own malfeasance during these years.

He was a hoarder of information that would allow him to blackmail his business associates and public officials he lured into his web of vice and vanity.

Trump profited from the results of his lurid and amoral activities for decades.

In his earliest days as a New York City real estate mogul when Trump was building his eponymous tower on Fifth Avenue there was a Teamsters strike in the summer of 1982.

John Cody was the Italian-Mafia-linked head of Teamsters Local 282 when the cement trucks ground to a halt and stopped spinning their payload that Trump desperately needed to keep his vanity project reaching towards the sky.

‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and his ‘Five Families’ associates supplied the concrete Donald used to build his gaudy tribute to 80’s decadence but unless the concrete poured Trump’s project would soon be a disaster.

A deal was struck to give a free penthouse apartment to the Teamster leader’s mistress upon completion of Trump Tower; even though she had no visible means of income, a deal was secured.

Upon completion, the mistress took possession of a duplex condo right below the ridiculously large apartment Trump kept for himself and his family.

After the mobster’s moll moved into the condo, she got a knock at the door from a couple of Trump associates who said they were there to wire the apartment for phone lines.

She demurred on orders from Cody not to allow them in but the pattern was playing out.

Trump would get revenge by stealing information.

The mob-builder was trying to bug the Mob itself (which more than anything speaks to the insane hubris of the man with the fake tan and tiny hands).

Cody and ‘Fat Tony’ knew they were dealing with a rat; in the coming decades Trump would partner with Giuliani to help marginalize the Italian Mafia, most notably the Gambino family, run in that time by John Gotti, for the more lucrative and far more lethal and ruthless Russian Mafia.

Trump is a man without honor or loyalty, who has always tried to get a leg up on partners by stealing and hoarding information from those greedy or misguided enough to do business with him.

He most certainly carried these personality traits with him into the White House.

On day one, he and Jared, who along with his daughter Ivanka, were the chief strategists for what I will call Trump, Inc., would have been looking around the Oval Office and the access it affords, to glean the most valuable information they could keep and hoard for themselves.

This is why one of Trump’s first actions as POTUS was to override his own national security experts and grant a top secret clearance to Kushner who had been denied one due to his nefarious financial entanglements with overseas investors, most notably in the Middle East.

The Trump clan was doing in Washington, D.C. what they had always done.

You can bet the Trump Hotel in D.C. was also a clearinghouse of sorts for kompromat and a way to entangle - and enforce strategic loyalty of - his newly-found GOP sycophants.

It’s why Rudy Giuliani posted up in the restaurant there most days during his presidency, even bringing a little name plate he would put on the table, holding court until he got too drunk to function for the rest of the day.

As Trump’s fortunes soared in the 80’s (before crashing down again due to his business incompetence), his cocaine and ‘model’ parties held in the Plaza Hotel (when it was under his ownership) became the stuff of infamous legend in New York City.

Trump was an expeditious user of kompromat long before that term became well known in political circles.

Blackmail, especially of the carnal nature, became one of the dark arts he used to continue to build his empire of empty promises and chintzy glamour.

At Mar-a-Lago, Trump installed a custom switchboard in his private suite so he could listen in on any calls his guests made.

He also had a pass key to all the rooms and more than once a young model or beauty contestant woke up to find Donald Trump standing over their bed in the middle of the night.

You can safely assume that any and all Trump properties are wired for sound - and any and all of the sexual dalliances and improprieties that his guests and associates engaged in were recorded for posterity.

This was the nexus of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein who himself was a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, as was Trump at Epstein’s East 71st Street Manhattan brothel (in addition to other billionaires such as Bill Gates, Steve Wynn and Elon Musk).

A partnership the full extent of which will never fully see the light of day - thanks to Epstein’s very convenient death in federal custody under the care of A.G. Bill Barr, whose father was a mentor of sorts and early backer of Jeffrey Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein was a man whose tentacles reached deep and wide into the netherworld of international human trafficking and money laundering.

The same can be said for most of Trump’s top advisors and former officials when you think about the resumes of a Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon and Alex Acosta.

Not to mention the B-players like Felix Sater and Trump’s army of sleazy lawyers and sketchy political courtesans.

Kompromat of course works both ways though; a lot of the Russians that Trump sold condos to (in all-cash deals processed through anonymous LLCs) were used as brothels and poker dens, where Trump himself would often turn up to ‘sample the goods’.

All this is a fraction of the leverage Putin holds over Donald Trump but a very potent one, as evidenced by Trump’s infamous ‘Reek’-like walk after their private meeting in Helsinki, where Trump took the translator’s notes and kept them for himself.

The King of Kompromat then went out and said he believed Vladimir Putin over his own U.S. intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election.

A low point if ever there was one, in an era of beyond the pale idiocy, with treasonous bile pouring from the thin lips and addled brain of one of the worst, if not the worst, human being this country has ever produced.

Lets make sure it doesn’t happen again.