(THREAD) Trump's 2016 campaign made a pre-election grand bargain with Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE and Russia that required Ukraine's approval. Ukraine said no—and Trump spent years getting revenge via savage acts spanning continents. This book is that story. amazon.com/dp/1250272998?…
1/ Many people don't realize that Trump's two most important campaign advisers—Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner—had devised, by the end of 2015, an *entire foreign policy* for Trump that met his only requirement: that it would make him rich. He *wanted* that foreign policy agenda.
2/ The foreign policy Kushner and Flynn devised for Trump in 2015, and perfected in 2016, was a "grand bargain" between Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt that would benefit all parties geopolitically and Donald Trump both politically and financially. It was genius.
3/ The broad strokes of the plan—called "the grand bargain" or "the Middle East Marshall Plan"—were that Trump would do enough to please the nations involved that he'd be able to do stunningly lucrative future business in their countries while receiving election aid from them.
4/ Much of the bargain came to pass: Trump set up a campaign foreign policy on nuclear power, foreign sanctions, and the U.S. embassy in Israel that these foreign autocrats wanted—and in turn four of them (Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) delivered illegal election aid.
5/ These events are documented—with 7000+ major-media citations—in my books PROOF OF COLLUSION (2018) and PROOF OF CONSPIRACY (2019). But of the course the other shoe had to drop: Trump wasn't supposed to just set a *campaign policy*, he was supposed to *deliver on his promises*.
6/ The promises had helped get him elected via various—actually quite different—means of illegal pre-election aid, but the *point* of him getting elected was a) to effectuate the foreign policy he'd articulated, and thereby b) please these autocrats enough to get their business.
7/ *Everything*—and I can't stress this enough—*everything* in the grand bargain/Middle East Marshall Plan *depended* upon Ukraine agreeing to the plan (in exchange for a lot of money). Why wouldn't Ukraine agree? Because they'd have to support the lifting of sanctions on Russia.
8/ But it was far more than that: Ukraine would have to accept Russia facing no penalty for *stealing* 7% of Ukraine's vast land area—not a typo—*and* would have to *let that 7% of the country go*. Permanently. So Ukraine said no. Of *course* it said no—*any* nation would say no.
9/ This was Ukraine's "cardinal sin": it frustrated the entire, fully developed foreign policy that had been handed to Trump on a silver platter. Trump needed that policy because he felt he knew how to govern domestically—red meat to his base—but was *clueless* on foreign policy.
10/ Trump's plan had *always* been to enrich himself *internationally*—not domestically—via his presidency. If he didn't have a foreign policy, he not only couldn't be a Reaganesque tough guy, but *also* couldn't get what he wanted for being president: *insane* amounts of money.
11/ By the end of May 2017, it was clear Flynn's plan—you now understand why it took him so long to fire Flynn—was not moving forward. So *Rudy Giuliani* was dispatched to Kyiv in June 2017 to demand of Petro Poroshenko the cooperation that Trump's foreign policy required of him.
12/ What followed—from June 2017 through *now*—is the most spectacular course of bribery, extortion, money laundering, fraud, illegal campaign finance activities, foreign-agent crimes and international intrigue you could possibly imagine. Most have hardly heard about *any* of it.
13/ The short version of *this* part of the story—only about 20% of what PROOF OF CORRUPTION is about—is that Trump spent *three years* trying to destroy a European ally from within in cooperation with America's enemies. The acts covered by impeachment were the tip of an iceberg.
14/ The Ukraine scandal isn't about a damn phone call. It's about Trump joining a cadre of U.S. enemies to try to collapse the West as we know it via the destruction of NATO and the EU. And he did it for the same reason he's done everything in his life: *insane* amounts of money.
15/ When the "grand bargain"/Middle East Marshall Plan fell through, Trump scrambled to deliver on every scrap of the original plan that he could. Moving the U.S. embassy. Providing arms to Saudi Arabia. Dragging his feet on sanctions against Russia. Aiding Putin in Venezuela.
16/ Trump's goal now is the same as the goal he had in 2020: determine which autocrats will give him illegal election assistance and make policy promises to them—or, when possible, *deliver* on foreign policy initiatives *right now*, no matter how reckless and dangerous they are.
17/ The original plan called for Trump to give Russia leeway in Syria—so Trump pulled out of Syria. In 2016, Turkey promised (see the Stone warrant application) to give Trump anti-Democratic intelligence via Israel—so Trump permitted Turkey to invade Syria and massacre the Kurds.
18/ The original plan called for the US to assist a Saudi alliance in toppling Iran—so Trump brought the U.S. to the brink of a war in Iran in January 2020, telling so many lies in the process most voters don't know the scope of them. Or that Trump's actions caused US casualties.
19/ Trump had to use Erik Prince, Harry Sargeant, Rudy Giuliani, Pete (not Jeff) Sessions and Lev Parnas to create a bizarre scenario in Venezuela that would enrich the Kremlin beyond the Kremlin's wildest dreams—which it now has. But Trump also had to seek out a new ally: China.
20/ This is why the 4,800 major-media citations of PROOF OF CORRUPTION don't just take the narrative through Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Hungary and Venezuela, but also through a course of Trump-China collusion that led to disastrous consequences here at home.
21/ The whole of Trump's "foreign policy" is the corrupt—indeed criminal—aftermath of the means he used to get elected in 2016, now re-assembled, Frankenstein-like, in a fashion aimed at securing illegal foreign election assistance in the run-up to the 2020 general election, too.
22/ Lest all this maneuvering sound very grand, don't misunderstand: it requires no great genius. It's merely the esoteric operations of a garden-variety mafia, elevated to occupy the White House rather than a swanky downtown office somewhere in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
23/ But the *implications* are indeed grand: that the President of the United States is a criminal whose foreign policy is a historic betrayal of America, intended only to enrich him and do nothing—quite literally, *nothing*—that relates in any way to America's national interest.
24/ Many don't realize that political nonfiction today is usually run by marketing teams that determine if the *2 to 5* "reveals" in your 300-page book will get you on television. The reveals are always much smaller than they seem. That's not how PROOF OF CORRUPTION was written.
25/ PROOF OF CORRUPTION is a report. It's a 550-pg. book—plus 375 pages of digital endnotes—in which each sentence is intended to have heft and nearly every sentence is endnoted. It reads like a book 3 times longer. And it exposes this president far more than the impeachment did.
PS/ And if you don't think the 86,000 COVID-19 deaths major media calculates as attributable to Trump's early March delay in issuing social distancing guidelines are connected to this, they are. The COVID-19 story begins much earlier than you know, and involves U.S. intelligence.
PS2/ The longest chapter in PROOF OF CORRUPTION is its last one—and it comprises the most comprehensive recitation of the COVID-19 scandal in print. It differs from the profoundly incomplete NYT summaries in that it starts where it should: in 2017. And it focuses a *lot* on 2019.
PS3/ Those who haven't read any of the Proof books may assume that the 2,250-page Proof trilogy is about some massive conspiracy theory. It isn't. It's just the true story of the most venal, treacherous, destructive clandestine geopolitical alliance ever struck by a US president.
PS4/ No part of the books is given over to vain theorizing. Instead, the 11,000+ major-media citations of the Proof trilogy use the best *major-media* investigative reporting from around the world to tell the story we'd all already know if we read *every* piece of news available.
PS5/ This isn't hard-news reportage from some shadowy source. It's a form of digital-age investigative journalism known as curatorial journalism or metajournalism, which uses the vast resources of the existing media to tell the *full* story that individual articles contribute to.
PREORDER/ The Amazon preorder link for PROOF OF CORRUPTION is at the top of this thread. If instead you prefer to preorder through Barnes & Noble, Bookshop (which links you to local independent bookstores), or Books-a-Million, Macmillan has the links here: read.macmillan.com/lp/proof-of-co…
THE PROOF TRILOGY/ If you need help distinguishing between the 3 Proof books—PROOF OF COLLUSION (2018, black cover), PROOF OF CONSPIRACY (2019, red cover), and PROOF OF CORRUPTION (2020, blue-green-gray cover)—this guide will help (second-printing PROOF OF COLLUSION cover shown): 
RETWEET/ If you haven't already, I hope you'll RETWEET the first tweet in this thread. The NYT-bestselling Proof books may be more honest, sourced, probative, informative, and responsible than Bolton's book, but they can't get anything like the attention Bolton does without help.
