In February, I published a breakdown of the claims in the Steele dossier in table form, so that they might be more amenable to analysis.
I have now updated that breakdown with material relevant to the claims. My objective is not to prove or disprove the material in the Steele dossier, but rather to provide evidence that has surfaced. What I have collected is not exhaustive, and it is more detailed for some claims than for others. I have used primarily major news sources.
Overall, there is much support for the claims of the dossier. Not surprisingly, there is much less information about interactions within the Kremlin than other claims. Other material that sometimes has been hailed as supporting the dossier’s claims does not fully connect all the parties or actions.
So here it is, a work in progress.
Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.
rikyrah
I believe that 95% of the Steele Dossier is true.
Truth, I think ALL of it is true, but I will give the skeptics 5%.
Jeffro
My RWNJ Dad and brother’s latest defense of Trumpov was that some of the journalists whose info went into the dossier were paid for that info…or something like that. I couldn’t rouse myself to try and figure out how that exonerates any of these GOP crooks
Another Scott
Thanks for collecting all this stuff, Cheryl. I’ll look at it more closely this evening.
If you’re around, could you free my dungeoned comment for the thread downstairs?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Eljai
Great work! I sure would love to know what Russia collected on the Republican-affiliated targets.
clay
@Jeffro: It’s like this: I’m paid to teach mathematics to high schoolers, so clearly they shouldn’t trust anything I tell them.
Amaranthine RBG
I understand that you are not trying to prove or disprove the dossier claims but in what way is (allegedly) declining an offer of prostitutes “evidence” of having hookers piss on a bed?
Is that that the guy is lying and they were not refused?
Cheryl Rofer
@Another Scott: Yikes! That’s quite a comment. Freed.
Cheryl Rofer
@Amaranthine RBG: I’m including stuff that may be relevant. Schiller has been Trump’s private security guy for a long time. If he says he declined the offer of prostitutes, he is indirectly denying the report.
Cheryl Rofer
@Eljai: I would like to know that too.
aimai
I had no idea that when you pie’d someone you would get such wonderful pie responses. I wish i’d done this years ago.
germy
Carter Page’s testimony is filled with bombshells — and supports key portions of the Steele dossier
Roger Moore
@Jeffro:
I think the unspoken idea is that real sources are just going to tell you what they have to say without any inducement, and that taking payment for information is somehow a sign that it’s dishonest. Of course if they volunteered the information without inducement, it would be taken as a sign that they’re dishonest because they have an ax to grind.
Uncle Ebeneezer
This just came across my FB feed. Courtesy of Bill Moyers, an interactive timeline of Trump/Russia. There’s a LOT of stuff there.
GregB
If your pappy objects to paid sources for information….ask him why he hates capitalism.
Cheryl Rofer
@germy: I can’t read that because of the Business Insider adblock policy. But I would say that Page’s testimony, which I spent more time on than any sane person should, suggests that something like the claims in the dossier took place. But the most damning claims about Page – that he discussed sanctions with the Russians, for example – are not supported by his testimony, and he explicitly denies some of them. That’s not to say that we should believe him. But I think Natasha Bertrand and others are half-remembering what the dossier says when they make claims like this.
That’s why I broke it down into claims and am trying to fill in the evidence.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Yep, CL was a real prick. Did you ever read Philip Roth’s Plot Against America?
clay
@Eljai: If I were one of the 15 or so Republicans who ran against Trump in the primary, I’d be wondering “If Russia was putting their thumb on the scale for Trump against Hillary, would they be willing to do the same against me?”
But it seems Republicans are a remarkably uncurious lot.
Mike in NC
All I want for Christmas are indictments. Lots and lots of big, beautiful indictments.
eclare
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Wow, that is impressive.
Schlemazel
@Roger Moore:
I am sure those same relatives were deeply suspicious of the claims against WJC because they had been paid for.
trollhattan
@Mike in NC:
Have you been vewy, vewy, vewy good this year? Please tell us you’ve been good.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@eclare: It’s a bit overwhelming when you scroll…and scroll…and scroll…and still aren’t even most of the way down.
Amaranthine RBG
@Cheryl Rofer:
I see. And was this Trump’s _only_ trip to Russia? Meaning the hookers peeing on the bed had to happen that trip or not at all.
lgerard
Meanwhile trump is intimating that the Access Hollywood tape is not authentic
it is amazing how he revises history in his head
eclare
@Uncle Ebeneezer: I know! I kept looking at the scroll bar, barely moved.
Brachiator
@Cheryl Rofer:
Don’t you mean indirectly “confirming” the report?
Anyway, if I got it wrong, great work.
Cheryl Rofer
@Amaranthine RBG: You are getting entirely too tied up in the pee tape. As I said, I’m collecting evidence, not confirming or denying anything.
One of the biggest mistakes people make about the Steele dossier is thinking that the pee scene is the most of it. It’s a good comic line, but as kompromat, it’s weak. Trump lives for news of his sex life, and something a little kinky like this isn’t going to hurt him. The kompromat is more likely on the financial side, although deeply sadistic or homosexual activities might be part of it.
Cheryl Rofer
@Brachiator: No prostitutes = no peeing on the bed.
Mary G
@Cheryl Rofer: I ? scientists!
That thing that journalists do when they don’t go back and check earlier reporting drives me nuts.
Kathleen
@debbie: I did. Great read.
cynthia ackerman
@clay:
Stipulating that, assuming Russian counterintelligence may also have attempted to co-opt any or all of those 15, the candidates and/or campaigns were smart enough to steer clear.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Clearly not. If he turned down the offer of prostitutes, he’s confirming the general circumstances but he’s denying that the prostitutes ever came up to Trump’s room, so the actual peeing part of the allegation can’t be true. Now people have looked over his denial and pointed out that he left after some point in the incident and can’t confirm or deny what happened after that point, so his indirect denial is weak, but it is a denial.
James E. Powell
@clay:
The barely covered by really huge story of last year was Trump beating the best and most well-funded that the GOP had to offer. And he did it solely by being a loud, unapologetic bigot rather than a code whisperer. There was nothing else he had over the other GOP candidates.
Steeplejack
@Cheryl Rofer:
You can open the story in a private/incognito tab. The story is from November 6, if that makes a difference.
Mnemosyne
@James E. Powell:
Except for having Russia and its hackers on his side. One wonders if the RNC or other Republican fundraising orgs have something to hide when it comes to their own email scandals.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
I just opened the Business Insider story in a “regular” tab, no problem.
Cheryl Rofer
@Steeplejack: I’ve been wanting to read that article since it came out and finally gave up my adblock purity and read it in an incognito tab. Thanks for reminding me.
It’s what I said at #16. Bertrand actually cites the dossier but glosses over the differences and Page’s denials. I’ve included the things she cites from the testimony, but none of them fit exactly, so if you want to take them as confirmation, it’s very weak confirmation. Also, Page goes back and forth, contradicting himself in ways that are very confusing.
I will probably write another post on some thoughts I’ve had as I put that all together. Mainly, there are intriguing parallels that suggest that some of Steele’s sources might have gotten some things not quite right, like heard or read Diveykin in place of Dvorkovich. That’s speculating, but it’s also the kind of thing that happens in raw intelligence. However, it doesn’t confirm the dossier because it reports a person with a name beginning with D and Page says he talked to a person with a name beginning with D.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer:
I just sent you an email with the text of the article.
Cheryl Rofer
@WaterGirl: Thanks.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer: If I had your email address, I could send you the .pdf – as it was, I had to copy and paste and formatting might be a little odd.
Cheryl Rofer
@WaterGirl: No problem.
Ken
@lgerard:
You say amazing, I say diagnostic. Or symptomatic.
Bill Arnold
@Cheryl Rofer:
General question to all who use Firefox; is there a decent stopgap for NoScript while the author fixes it for the new firefox? Using “uBlock Origin” for now but it’s disturbingly trouble-free and insufficiently geeky for my tastes.
Oh and thanks for the dossier notes. (There are a few items that could explode into significance with confirmation.)
Starfish
@Bill Arnold: I use uBlock, and you can make it nerdier if you like by using custom blocks on elements. Sometimes you can block the ad block popups.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
Depending on exactly what you want it for, you might want to consider Privacy Badger. It is specifically designed to block various approaches to tracking rather than JavaScript specifically, but it does a remarkably good job of blocking the noxious uses of JavaScript while allowing helpful ones.
schrodingers_cat
@Cheryl Rofer: My guess would be that the women in question were underage girls.
Cheryl Rofer
@schrodingers_cat: Underage girls might be persuasive kompromat.
Suzanne
@James E. Powell:
As I noted on the earlier thread, I think we (as in the politically aware liberal “elite”) are still fully failing to grasp is how much of the Trump cultural appeal is tied up in how much of a champion he has become to the white trash. And I’m using that term instead of “white working class” or “deplorables” or “hillbillies” or whatever because it is useful. And bigotry is certainly part of that appeal. But bigotry doesn’t explain why Trump was selected when they had a whole bigot smorgasbord from which to choose. There’s a huge chunk of Americans who have lost cultural status, and even other white people think they’re gross. They picked the dude who eats Big Macs instead of nice food, who covers everything in gold schlock instead of developing real aesthetic taste, who makes them feel good about not being educated. I am musing on my trip to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, which was built to house the art collection of Alice Walton. Every visitor was given STRICT INSTRUCTION not to touch any of the art in the galleries before being allowed to enter, and those trashy bastards put their hands all over the art anyway. I was horrified.
But, as I also said, they wanted Trump in the presidency, and they got him, but there is no way that he will restore their cultural status. There’s not TV show that depicts this class of people in a positive way. They don’t have any cultural influencers like the Kardashians or music stars or popular Instagram feeds. No one aspires to their lifestyle. Even they don’t aspire to their lifestyle, but no one wants to feel like a cautionary tale. I know it seems dumb that this kind of stuff matters, but it does.
sharl
OT,
Al Franken did a radio (audio) interview with Minnesota Public Radio; it runs about 19 minutes. I was in and out of the room while it was playing, so I didn’t hear it all, but I think it exclusively covered the charges of sexual harassment that have been made against Franken recently.
From what I heard, I don’t think much new ground was broken, and as such, I doubt that the interview will change many minds, however they are made up (or not). The interviewer did concentrate more on the “kiss during rehearsal” aspect, but despite a relatively aggressive bout of questioning, nothing new came up there. Franken was also asked how his family was taking all this; ‘holding up and being fully supportive’ would be a decent summary of his answer, I think.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Cheryl Rofer: Also, if the story about peeing on the bed that Obama once slept in did happen, maybe it’s not so much the peeing and prostitutes, but something he said about Obama (racial epithets, threats, wishing the KGB would somehow take him out etc.). I wouldn’t put any of those past this racist ass-hat, but I’m not sure if any of them would be bad enough to be deemed worthy of Blackmail/Kompromat material.
debbie
@Suzanne:
He spoke their language, using the words they use.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Suzanne:
.
He separated himself from the pack by screaming the quiet parts and taking pride in the bigotry in a way no other candidate would. There’s a reason these people bought and proudly wore “Fuck Your Feelings” tee shirts. This is a big part of why the love Trump.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: I have to disagree, my anecdata of T supporters all two of them, are upper middle class and comfortably well off. They do not look or sound like the media caricature of his supporters at all. BTW both these men are Jewish. Make of that what you will.
Another Scott
@debbie: Not yet. I added it to The List. Thanks for the pointer. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@debbie: He also aligned himself with them semiotically. He ate fast food and dressed badly and took the piss out of Jeb! and lil Marco like an ill-bred playground bully.
The ill-bred playground bullies among us were watching.
Teddys Person
@Uncle Ebeneezer: I think the only area where Dolt45 is susceptible to blackmail is in his finances, specifically that he’s not a successful multimillionaire (or billionaire). If he didn’t already think that the sex stuff doesn’t matter, the AL election has demonstrated that he could probably ride out a sex scandal. Underage girls don’t seem to matter to the Republican base. Maybe under-aged boys would leave a mark? I’m skeptical, they can taste their masters’ tax cuts and will forgive/ignore anything.
debbie
@schrodingers_cat:
I know several of those also. They supported Trump for the tax cut specifically and also because of their Hillary hate. They refuse to accept that that choice ties them to anti-Semites and racists, but it does.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: I live in AZ, so I have a LOT of Trump-voting neighbors and colleagues and acquaintances. Most of them make a very comfortable living and many have college degrees, but are still from a lower-class culture. I’m talking Mormon families with eight kids, or from somewhere rural and not-thriving, so they went to college and got out. Lots of gunhumpers. They LOVE the fact that Trump is trashy, because they are also trashy, even if they now have money.
J R in WV
Thanks Cheryl, lots of work in this. I have trouble staying with it, will let pros do that work.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Trump’s always, always been a bully.
Suzanne
@Teddys Person: I am skeptical that Trump is vulnerable to blackmail at all for the reasons I just described. His core supporters, as detailed in the Politico piece about some shit town in Pennsylvania, will stick by him no matter what. The more horrible he is proven to be, the more he’ll be loved.
God, the only thing that I think could break that cult of personality would be videos of him being well-mannered and evidence that he ethically ran his businesses.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: PalmBeachPost (from May):
Putin’s people undoubtedly know much more about Donnie’s kinks (and those of his associates) than is in that story. That is their business, after all…
:-/
I haven’t heard anything about the outcome of the lawsuit (but haven’t looked either).
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@debbie: Yes, he has always been a bully, and most bullies, in my experience, don’t go on to be successful people. They go on to be the unattractive losers at the high school reunion who show up only because the bar is hosted. Losers wanted a champion.
Now, that’s not to say that everyone who voted for him is this way. And I think it’s important to remember that plenty of these people are relatively successful—many have degrees and middle-class lifestyles. But culturally they’re still these people.
I remember my cousin, who is decidedly not rich and lives in the tri-state area, mocking white trash people who shopped at Tiffany’s. How they always wanted something with a gaudy logo on it so people would know exactly where they shopped and how much they spent. I asked, “White trash shops at Tiffany’s?”. She said, “White trash goes everywhere.” Trump named his daughter Tiffany, after the store.
schrodingers_cat
@Suzanne: I am just saying that there is more than one type of T voter, that’s all.
Teddys Person
@Suzanne:
So true!
I guess was approaching the question from the perspective of what Dolt45 would want to be made public and what he wouldn’t want to become public. I don’t think his supporters would care if it was shown he’s flat broke, but I don’t think his ego could recover since so much of his self-image is wrapped up in his personal myth of rich, rich businessman. He can deflect most criticism, but being outed as a financial fraud would do some psychological damage.
Suzanne
@schrodingers_cat: Yes, for sure. I am trying to describe a specific slice of his supporters who I don’t think we’ve (again, a royal we) accurately described yet.
chris
@Suzanne: Roseanne Barr once said something along the lines of, “We’re your worst fear, white trash with money.” Guess she was right.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
Out of the 60 million that voted for drumpf not all of them are going to be poor white trash like him. Some of them are going to be moderately well off white trash, some are going to be rich white trash, and some are going to be just poor lost souls.
Bill Arnold
@Starfish:
OK. Hoping that NoScript returns to usability; was surprised to see it so broken/nerfed after a firefox update.
@Roger Moore:
Re privacy badger, use it, but thanks for the mention. People, particularly activists, should be tooling up with this stuff. (Seriously edgy work requires significant additional measures.)
Suzanne
@chris: Yeah, that’s why I am using the term “white trash” and not “white working class”. When we describe them as “white working class”, someone always points out that Trump voters trend middle class or better, which is true—but misses the point. There’s a lot of people who are doing fine financially by our typical measures but who behave and consume and identify in a culturally different way.
th
@Teddys Person: I predicted a few weeks ago that they will eventually turn on Trump, but when they do it will be about something that we look at and say “THAT’S a bridge too far? Everything else was okay?”
After reading your comment, it occurs to me that maybe the sex scandals and underage girls and the Russia scandal will matter to the base ONCE THEY FIND OUT THAT HE LIED TO THEM ABOUT BEING A BILLIONAIRE.
Once they figure out that they were marks – that they were played – they will be furious and will turn on Trump, and once it starts it will happen so fast that our heads will spin. That’s what I think, anyway.
Roger Moore
@Teddys Person:
Sorry, but you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from Roy Moore. The base may be willing to stick by him enough to keep him from dropping out, but it looks as if they may not be enough to win him the general election. That’s pretty devastating, considering just how strongly the Republicans dominate Alabama state politics. And it’s hard to imagine he would have been nominated had the scandal broken during the primary, when the base had the choice to vote for another Republican.
You can imagine applying the same thing to Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Do you really think he would have won the nomination had a scandal involving him with underage sex had broken in time to influence voters in the primary? It’s hard to believe so, given that they had plenty of other solid racists to vote for. Do you think he could have shrugged it off in the general election? Considering how slender his victory was, it’s hard to believe he would have won there, either.
Thoughtful David
@Ken:
I like the fact that he’s bringing it up like this. Now someone will have to go back and run the recording again, and … woops, suddenly it’s big news again.
Not a super-sharp idea to bring something like that back to life at this moment.
Yoda Dog
@lgerard:
Well he should really let Billy Bush know this then, I’m sure he’d like to have his NBC gig back.
Schlemazel
@Suzanne:
Dump tossed the dog whistle in the trash and said ni***r, ni***r, ni***r outloud. Lee Atwater was wrong
Schlemazel
@schrodingers_cat:
There were a number of Jews serving in leadership of the SA before the night of the long knives. Gay men too. They suffer from “well, they don’t me ME” syndrome.
mike in dc
On the hookers/Schiller thing, Schiller said he walked Trump to his hotel room, waited outside for “a while” and then went back to his own room. He did not guard Trump’s room, and Malcolm Nance in one tv appearance asserted that Schiller went back to his own room “around 10 pm”. I’m not sure where Nance got that from, but if true it means it’s entirely possible that Trump invited the women up to his room after Schiller left.
Great work on the update, by the way. I think there’s a few more things that evidence exists for, will comment as they occur to me.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
It wasn’t an ordinary update. Firefox just changed the way extensions are allowed to work in a way that crippled lots of extensions. It sucks for people who use those extensions, but the old extension mechanism- which basically allowed extensions to muck around as much as they felt like with Firefox’s internals- was seriously interfering with development. It was also a key reason extensions occasionally broke before- if the internals changed, it could break extensions that depended on them- and was a security nightmare. The new system should be more maintainable for both Firefox and the extension writers. If there’s an extension you really depend on, you can probably keep nursing it along by reverting to the most recent LTS version, which still allows the old extensions.
chris
@Suzanne: Yup, I know people like that. Fair number of people here in the backwater have neither brains nor education but lots of money. Resource extraction is quite lucrative in the good years.
Suzanne
@Schlemazel: That is true, but I still think it misses part of the Trump appeal. They had sixteen other assholes to choose from, all of whom would have been better and more capable at delivering the agenda they want. Even Miss Lindsey. What they really want is to have cultural influence, and they don’t really. It’s not an accident that they voted for a game-show host.
Cheryl Rofer
@mike in dc: I’m glad to have more, and I’m making this table generally available so that others can work with it. There is so much to this story that we need to have multiple people working on it. Of course, Mueller will outdo us all because he’s got experts working full-time with material we can’t access, but there’s always a chance that one of us “outsiders” will contribute something. Or that we’ll bring something up or fit something together in ways that help reporters or the Mueller team to do their jobs.
Schlemazel
@Suzanne:
And I believe they wanted someone to say it out loud. They figured out that the dog whistles were not making America White again. They started to doubt the sincerity of the normal Republicans and needed someone that made it ok for them to use those words in public.
Kathleen
@chris: My ex husband, who was born and raised in the 40’s & 50’s by a relatively poor family in Covington, KY (they lived in “the projects”) used to say, “There’s nothing worst than a hillbilly with 2 nickels to rub together”.
He was pretty open minded considering his background. He pretty much disliked everyone regardless of race, creed, religion, or country or origin.
mike in dc
@Schlemazel: Ernst Rohm, the leader of the SA, was reportedly gay.
WaterGirl
@sharl: Just listened to the 18-minute interview. I do not know who this Cathy Wurzer person is, but she is coming after Al Franken very hard. It does not appear to be a neutral interview; it feels like she is out to get Al, pursing very hard over and over for his resignation.
Jeffro
@GregB: that is a great angle – thank you!
Suzanne
@Schlemazel: I agree with you. I just think that bigotry is only one part of what they were looking for. They want society at large to validate all of their lifestyle choices. They want it to be an aspirational lifestyle to be poorly educated, to hump guns and go to trashy megachurches, to drive gas-guzzling pickups and live in gross McMansions in crappy towns—in addition to keeping minorities and women in their place. The fact that the aspirational lifestyle depicted in every bit of marketing produced in the last 15-20 years is overwhelmingly urban, fashionable, multiracial, skinny, educated, and well-traveled is proof that these people are pissed AF. Noting that they want someone to be openly racist is just the tip of their iceberg.
mike in dc
@Cheryl Rofer: Oh, yeah. Now I remember. Google “Trump Tower Moscow”. That was in the works in 2015 and early 2016. Not sure who did the declining. That’s for your #3.
Schlemazel
@mike in dc:
That was Hitler’s excuse to get rid of him when he had to win the Army’s support and consolidate his power. Ernst was not the only one but the total is unknown because they killed off a lot of people and then accused them of homosexuality.
Yoda Dog
Goddamn liberals. Turns out its all our fault that Republicans support racist agendas and elect racist fuckwads to office. Who knew?
Suzanne
I should also note that I think that many/most Trump voters genuinely don’t perceive of themselves as racist. The ones I know truly do not see that MAGA is entirely built on racial subjugation and keeping women in their place. Paraphrasing Rick Perlstein, they don’t realize that they have been raised to expect a petty lordship for being born with white skin and a penis.
It’s no accident that they’re trying to devalue college now that women and minorities are doing better than them at it.
Suzanne
Oops, comment stuck in moderation. I referred to a male body part in clinical terms. Should have said “weenis”.
chris
@Kathleen: The only difference here is that the hillbillies have boats.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I still don’t think it was a coincidence that the Comet Pizza hoax just happened to involve sex trafficking of underage kids. That’s exactly what Trump’s buddy Epstein was up to. The way Republicans try to pre-empt these kinds of stories is by accusing Democrats of doing the same or worse.
Cheryl Rofer
@mike in dc: Thanks.
@Suzanne: Released.
lgerard
Interesting article Republican Experts
then it gets better
ThresherK
@WaterGirl: That woman wants Mara Liasson’s job, obviously.
Manyakitty
@Cheryl Rofer: Especially if they look like Ivanka. When I heard about the peepee tape, I immediately recalibrated it in my head to “raping a little girl who looks like Ivanka.”
Aleta
Thanks for this Cheryl.
chris
@lgerard: That’s an excellent piece. The GOP motto should be: Always Wrong, Never in Doubt.
zhena gogolia
@Yoda Dog:
This is what ENRAGES me. The guy who just listened and giggled is fired, and the predator is POTUS.
Bill Arnold
@Roger Moore:
Not arguing with any of this, it’s just that NoScript was part of my personal security posture (which is layered, how deeply/paranoid depends on machine and activity), and I need something in the interim.
Anyway, uBlock Origin seems to be working. Ramping up use of private windows as well.
Uncle Cosmo
@ThresherK: You meant Mar-a-Liarspawn, right?
Doug R
@clay:
This explains the few Rs that spoke out and then “decided” to endorse trump after a meeting or two.
Doug R
@Bill Arnold: I have AdBlock plus on one computer and UBlock on this one. I find UBlock a little less twitchy and easier to use. When I bump up against a page that doesn’t like adblockers, I generally just whitelist it until the ads get too annoying and then fire it up again. A lot of pages don’t even notice when you turn the block back on.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
Most blatant white supremacists who go on about black genetic inferiority and want black people driven out of the country don’t even perceive themselves as racist. They’ll insist that it’s not racism because it’s true.
“Racism” gets interpreted to mean “whatever kind of bigotry is worse than mine, but definitely not mine.”
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: They’ve got an alternative niche culture in which that is depicted as the aspirational lifestyle–consider how many modern country songs are about nothing other than how culturally “country” the singer/POV character is, and “country” is really a kind of reactionary suburbanism. You also see a fair bit of it in the kind of TV ads for trucks and beer that run during football games. It’s not as if it’s completely submerged. They want everybody to buy into it, though, and it burns them that there even are people who don’t.
burnspbesq
Just for ease of reference, at Rosneft’s current market cap, 19 per cent of its stock is worth around $11 billion. And we still have no idea who the transferee is.
If that can be plausibly linked to Trump, game over.