Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) This is a brief thread from a NYT-bestselling Trump biographer on what everyone—literally everyone—is missing about the 34 felonies Donald Trump committed to win the 2016 presidential election. This will change how you understand the 2016 election cycle.

Please RETWEET.

1/ I’ve been covering Donald Trump more or less full-time since the day he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015, so there are things I remember as part of my job that many who follow politics more casually don’t and wouldn’t.

One is that Trump believed he’d lose in 2016.

2/ There were many articles just before the 2016 election and just after it confirming that Trump ran in 2016 to elevate the only thing he really cares about—his brand. Of course he was *trying* to win and *sort of* even wanted to win, but mainly the run was to raise his profile.

3/ This is why it is not at all surprising—for all that his supporters are so scandalized by it that they cannot accept that it has been *robustly* proven—that Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016. Just *not in the way that most people think* (or MAGAs choose to engage with).

4/ Because he didn’t believe he’d win in 2016, Trump crafted a foreign policy agenda that had nothing to do with American interests; it was focused on his business interests. That’s why he had Cohen *negotiating a real estate deal with the Kremlin* throughout the election season.

5/ That’s also why, as the NYT reports, the Trump family responded approvingly to an offer by the Saudi and Emirati governments—made at Trump Tower in August 2016—to illegally aid Trump’s campaign with the aid of Israeli intel experts.

Those were nations Trump did business with.

6/ That’s why Trump hired Paul Manafort, a man he well understood had been working for the Kremlin since 2006, as his campaign manager: he was led to understand that it’d please the Kremlin, and Tom Barrack helped him understand it would please Russian allies like the Emiratis.

7/ That’s why his top adviser on Russia was a friend of Putin, Dimitri Simes (who fled the US, and now works for the Kremlin); that was why his top advisers on the UAE were Emirati agents: Erik Prince, George Nader (a convicted pedophile) and Yousef al-Otaiba (UAE’s ambassador).

8/ That’s why his top natsec adviser, Flynn, kept meeting with Putin and Putin agents like Kislyak; that’s why Kushner and Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee held so many pre-election meetings with Kremlin agents.

Trump believed he’d lose, but wanted a lucrative loss.

9/ Trump believed his only chance of willing—but it was a two-fer, as it’d bring him closer to those he wanted to do business with if he lost—was gaining aid from future business partners (Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, primarily) to ruin Clinton with a scandal.

10/ That’s why all the talk inside the campaign in Summer 2016—I have written about this extensively in my NYT-bestselling books—was about finding Clinton’s emails, maintaining relations with the Kremlin by Manafort passing proprietary data to a known Kremlin spy, meeting with...

11/ ...el-Sisi in a meeting arranged by Steve Bannon and Trump’s backchannel to the Kremlin (George Papadopoulos), savaging President Obama for the Russian sanctions Putin was so angry about...it was all preparing for a loss to Clinton, assuming the Russian hacking gambit failed.

12/ To be clear, Trump and his team had nothing to do with the hacking, and no one ever said otherwise. Nor did Trump and his team have anything to do with Russian propaganda, though they happily spread it after-the-fact (which was more or less legal). And no one said otherwise.

13/ The *only* exception to that last sentence was a brief implication in the Steele dossier—one of the few things it *definitely* got wrong—that the campaign helped finance the Russian troll farm. That was false; Putin didn’t need Trump’s money to interfere in the 2016 election.

14/ What people miss about the dossier—largely because no one really read it—is that it was actually all about Trump using Cohen and Manafort to maintain good relations with the Kremlin and to advance his interest in real estate deals the Kremlin was dangling.

All that was true.

15/ Again, because Trump thought he was going to lose—especially once DOJ decided not to prosecute Clinton in July 2016, which he believed was his only shot at winning unless damaging stolen info came out about her (which is why he spent July and August obsessed with WikiLeaks).

16/ When the Access Hollywood tape came out in early October, Trump went from near-certain he was going to lose to *certain* he was going to lose. But something else happened: Republican leaders were telling him he needed to drop out of the race altogether, and do so immediately.

17/ People forget how close that came to happening.

And it would have been the most embarrassing event ever to occur to a U.S. politician in U.S. political history—the literal *concession* of the presidency to the opposing party.

It would’ve destroyed Trump in *multiple* ways.

18/ Put aside that it would’ve ended Trump’s political career. At the time—not now—he was minimally invested in that and, post-Access Hollywood, he didn’t think he was going to have such a career. The *bigger* issue is that withdrawing from the race would end his business empire.

19/ Trump’s money is based on his brand, full stop. If his brand is destroyed, he is. One of many things the dossier got *right* was that after the Access Hollywood tape the Kremlin decided Trump was going to lose the 2016 election and it began preparing for a Clinton presidency.

20/ So at that point, Trump was ruined. No presidency. No future deals with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. No brand that anyone would respect anymore. He was finished. His life was over in every way that ever mattered to him.

And then he learned a Daniels scandal was coming.

21/ When Hicks describes a crisis situation in Trump’s camp in early-/mid-October 2016, that was the crisis. They believed they would lose the election, but *also* believed Trump was going to lose what he really cared about, and his actual reason for entering politics: his brand.

22/ The Russian, Saudi, Emirati, and Israeli pullback from aiding Trump was *real*—he looked like a tainted loser there was no reason to do business with.

The Kremlin deal Cohen had been negotiating was dead, and the Saudi-backed AMI was now refusing all catch-and-kill payments.

23/ Trump had had to fire the Kremlin agent Manafort in August due to bad press, which didn’t please the Kremlin and is likely a reason Papadopoulos’ Kremlin backchannel had dissipated by the end of Summer 2016. Trump was alone, about to lose an election, and also lose his brand.

24/ With Manafort gone—a man who’d advised him voa Roger Stone’s consulting firm since the 80s—and Stone himself long ago fired as an adviser due to (again) bad press, Cohen was the loyalist remaining (and Flynn, but the Kremlin had lost interest in Trump, so he was less useful).

25/ And Republican leaders were telling him to drop out, which would make him a laughing-stock for the rest of his life.

26/ So of *course* it was Cohen, trusted so much he’d been negotiating secretly with the Kremlin on Trump’s behalf throughout the election—the crux of Trump-Russia collusion, established in the Steele dossier before being confirmed by Cohen himself—who came to Trump’s rescue.

27/ Cohen wasn’t rescuing Trump’s electoral chances per se—even burying the Daniels story did nothing to change the fact that GOP leaders, who didn’t know about Daniels, wanted him out over the Access Hollywood tape—but rescuing what Trump really cared about: his business future.

28/ Would you believe we haven’t gotten to the good part of the story yet?

That’s what comes next.

29/ By October 20, 2016, calls for Trump to drop out had died—only because Trump (buttressed by knowing the Daniels issue had been handled) refused to do so, so there was no point in pushing it.

All sides—GOP leaders, Trump, the Kremlin, everyone but Trump voters—knew he’d lose.

30/ Had the Daniels story broken, Trump *might well* have been forced to drop out, which would have been the end of his political career, his brand, and him.

Cohen had saved Trump—though Trump was still planning on stiffing him—just as he’d taken the lead on getting Trump all...

31/ ...he’d ever really wanted from his candidacy, which was the most lucrative business deal of his professional life (the Trump Tower deal) and continued aid from the only banks in the world that would still lend to him, as Eric Trump had by then conceded: Putin’s Russian ones.

32/ But by October 20—with the Access Hollywood scandal over, the still-secret Stormy Daniels scandal over, Trump’s foreign allies having pulled out from aiding him, and Clinton up by a *lot*—the simple fact is that Trump was still facing having given up his TV show for nothing.

33/ He was going to lose the election, and by then had realized the Russians, Saudis, and Emiratis had only been interested in him because they thought he could win—and he had *literally* developed his *entire* foreign policy agenda *purely* to please them and meet their needs.

34/ He had one card left to play, and it was the same one he had tried to play in Summer 2016.

Not foreign policy—*that* had been based on attracting illegal foreign election assistance, which was now gone—and not domestic policy, where Trump was barely even a Republican at all.

35/ The only card left was putting Clinton at the center of a scandal. It’s likely Trump realized how he could still do so via a series of conversations with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who told him that many in the FBI were loyal to him and angry over Clinton not being prosecuted.

36/ His sense that the FBI was willing to aid him would have been buttressed by several indicators:

i. When the NYT asked the FBI in mid-October if it had evidence Trump had colluded with Russia (e.g. in the ways I’ve noted), it lied and said it had none—though it had *so much*.

37/

ii. Another of his lawyers, unscrupulous election-interferer Joe diGenova, had offered his services for free to rogue FBI agents who claimed to be whistleblowers and had gone out to conservative media with their message (which was intended to interfere in the 2016 election).

38/

ii (cont). That message was really no message at all, just illegal election interference in which rogue FBI agents who supported Trump would leak to media internal FBI conversations about a prosecution declination that they would shade with semi-fictional political intrigue.

39/

iii. Giuliani began going on Fox News to start spreading claims that FBI agents had secret information that they were going to reveal about Clinton and the FBI, information Giuliani had either made up, gotten from lying rogue FBI agents, or from fellow Trump lawyer diGenova.

40/

iv. Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon brought Trump national security adviser Erik Prince on Breitbart for an interview in which Prince lied through his teeth and said NYPD and the FBI had evidence Clinton was a pedophile and murderer (basically, the rankest QAnon bullshit).

41/

iv (cont). Michael Flynn quickly made the Prince interview go viral on social media with the help of Trump Jr. (who had failed in his late summer and early fall attempts to get Clinton dirt from WikiLeaks, just as Flynn had failed to get it from indirect Russian contacts).

42/ Inside the FBI, FBI director James Comey was expressing to his deputy Andrew McCabe that he had concerns these rogue FBI agents were going to destroy the FBI’s reputation and cause election interference. He began looking into what had happened with Anthony Weiner’s seized PC.

43/ It was then that he learned that an FBI field office run by a *since-indicted-and-convicted-Russian-agent* had sat on the PC rather than searching its metadata as Comey had ordered it, which disobedience is *exactly* what had allowed the rogue FBI agents to feed Team Trump...

44/ ...false claims about what was on the computer, *exactly* what enabled Prince to spout his QAnon bullshit and say that that was what was on the computer, *exactly* what allowed Trump’s lawyers Giuliani and diGenova to darkly aver some big reveal was about to drop (it wasn’t).

45/ When did an FBI office run by a foreign agent make its decision to disobey Comey and not run the Weiner PC metadata—which would’ve confirmed there was nothing on the PC the FBI didn’t know about, and therefore no reason to reopen Clinton’s case? 48 hours pre-Access Hollywood.

46/ That’s right: at the last moment before Trump lost his illegal foreign election assistance—which had been prompted by his foreign policy promises, which promises had been intended to win him foreign business deals, not an election—actions were taken that won him the election.

47/ When Comey learned that (a) the Weiner PC hadn’t been looked at and (b) everyone on Trump’s team (Bannon, Prince, Trump Jr., Flynn, Giuliani, diGenova) was working in tandem to create a fake October surprise involving false claims about what the FBI “knew” the PC had on it...

48/ ...he reopened the Clinton case to save the reputation of the FBI by doing the work on the PC he’d ordered done weeks earlier, which work took only a few days and *could’ve* been completed in early October, but as it was changed all the election polls: fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-c…

49/ Was the FBI lying to the NYT on Trump-Russia pre-election—election interference by the FBI—ever investigated? No. Were the rogue agents who fed disinfo to Team Trump pre-election—election interference by the FBI—ever investigated? No. Was Giuliani and diGenova’s blackmail...

50/ ...of Comey to reopen the Clinton case ever investigated? No. Were the actions of the foreign agent running the New York field office in terms of disobeying Comey in early October—election interference by the FBI—ever investigated?

No.

And perhaps you are all wondering why.

51/ Fortunately, we know the reason.

The Washington Post wrote a whole feature report on it last year.

52/ In 2023 the Post revealed that ever since Trump entered politics the FBI has been terrified of him. It seems they know him to be a career criminal who needs the FBI to look the other way if he’s to be in national politics. So they fear tweets, firings. washingtonpost.com/investigations…

53/ Trump began training the FBI to fear him during the 2016 election, and the FBI was so easily intimidated by him that that has been his M.O. since then. Trump does not think the FBI is a danger to him; he *knows* the FBI can be manipulated as long as they’re constantly...

54/ ...under threat by him. Which they are. And as the Post makes clear—if only impliedly, as it’s future events that’d reveal it—it was FBI fear of Trump, residual from 2016, which pushed back the January 6 and stolen documents cases *so far* they will not be heard pre-election.

55/ So what does all this have to do with the case now ongoing in Manhattan?

56/ First, one can’t understand the Daniels Plot unless one understands that it was Trump bringing along Pecker for the policy-for-future-business-deals ride—enticing AMI with future Saudi business in exchange for catch-and-kill ops—that allowed Trump to stay in the race at all.

57/ Bannon told Michael Wolff that Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz—note the theme here; Trump attorneys doing the shadiest sh*t imaginable to keep him a viable candidate—paid off at least *100* women prior to the 2016 election. And that doesn’t even count *anything* that Pecker did.

58/ Trump wasn’t paying that money. He’s too cheap; he’s too afraid of it coming back to bite him legally; he hates any woman who’d seek any money from him. So who was paying it? I don’t know. I only know Eric Trump said the Trumps were getting all their money from Russian banks.

59/ As to Pecker, the Saudi involvement is clear, and has by now been written about by many major newspapers and media outlets in the United States.

So now try seeing the Trump 2016 campaign as three things: foreign collusion, hiding Trump scandals, and blackmailing the FBI.

60/ The foreign collusion relates to the only reason Trump was in the race—setting a foreign policy based on future business deals, knowing he’d likely lose the election but would build goodwill if he was seen to be making a real effort to win via a bought-and-sold policy agenda.

61/ That collusion appears to have paid for his catch-and-kill ops, directed his policy agenda, offered him later-dashed hopes of getting dirt on Clinton—that never existed but which Team Trump was willing to accept even if fake—and as a last gasp, botched the vital Weiner probe.

62/ So if the second component was hiding Trump scandals, obviously he had to hide Manafort’s involvement with the Kremlin (he fired him), had to hide Cohen’s clandestine dealings with the Kremlin (he’s now spent years trying to discredit him), and used others’ money for payoffs.

63/ But the Access Hollywood tape was a shock—*no one* knew it was coming. It nearly ended Trump’s campaign as conceived (i.e. the tripartite scheme mentioned above).

It *would* have ended it if the Daniels scandal had hit, as Trump’s foreign-money catch-and-kill kitty was gone.

64/ Cohen—literally Cohen and no one else—saved Trump’s campaign, which is exactly why Trump has been lying about him for years, aims to destroy him on the witness stand, and has marshaled the GOP to try to make him the most hated man in America.

Because he was the *most* loyal.

65/ And once Cohen had saved the campaign, a combination of past foreign collusion efforts and the time and space afforded him by mass payoffs of women put him in a position to use the very same small cadre of vile men to blackmail the FBI into reopening the closed Clinton case.

66/ It may be the most amazing 7-10 split in American political history, and frankly *wasn’t* one Trump expected to work.

He didn’t anticipate becoming President of the United States, and was a little bummed about it—because it’s *not* how he saw his life going from 2017 onward.

67/ But now that he’s well and truly in politics for the rest of his life—he literally plans on dying in office, either in the next four years or the third term he plans afterward—all this history must be erased. Cohen must be erased. His Kremlin real estate deals must be erased.

68/ Pecker must be kept on his side. The Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis and Russians must continue to be appeased. The Steele dossier—which got more right than any realizes because no one ever read it; Trump now owes Steele money for frivolously suing him—must be discredited forever.

69/ This Manhattan case is the shibboleth that unlocks it all. It’s the tip of the dirtiest iceberg in U.S. political history.

So what does Trump do? He sleeps through it, trying to convince the jury it’s all immaterial. But then he goes online and raves like a lunatic about it.

70/ He got media to say the case was about hush money, which is like saying Watergate was about negligently dirtying office carpets. He got all of us to talk about his claims that the case is a massive conspiracy—a claim he makes because that’s what the case reveals about *2016*.

71/ I’m not one of those who says Trump was an illegitimate POTUS because more Americans voted for Clinton in 2016 than him. No—more Americans voted for Trump. Any illegitimacy in Trump’s election came via the crimes he committed to make it happen, some of which are now on trial.

72/ But I also know, as a Trump biographer, that Trump never drops a successful scheme.

Foreign collusion worked for him in 2016, so it is happening now.

Payoffs to hide scandals worked for him in 2016, so they are happening now.

Using lawyers for your dirty work? Same story.

73/ Threatening the FBI? Just so. Erasing history? Just so. Going back to all the same vile figures, like Giuliani and Prince and Bannon? Just so.

Trump has never had *any* intention of winning an American election through core principles, a coherent policy agenda, or fair play.

74/ In the sense we’d use in common parlance, 2016 was a stolen election—for all the reasons just noted.

Trump can’t and won’t win any election fair and square.

Which is why his daughter-in-law—who he just installed atop the GOP—is suing to *pre-throw out valid U.S. ballots*.

75/ When the NYT now says democracy isn’t a top concern because other issues poll better, it fails to understand that the whole Trump political enterprise is a fraud—top to bottom. It’s a means for him to enrich himself, whitewash his legacy, exert his will and manufacture chaos.

CONCLUSION/ The terms of every debate the NYT thinks really matters—immigration, inflation, and so on—are poisoned by the fact that Trump’s political career has been a fraud *at least* since he first met with Pecker and then with Flynn at Trump Tower in August 2015. All issues...

CONCLUSION2/ ...other than the poisoning of our democracy by this man’s operations are the equivalent—not permanently but *for now*—of someone pointing behind us to get us to look at their made-up distraction rather than the thing we should really be looking at.

And right now...

CONCLUSION3/ ...the thing we should all *really* be looking at is the thing that takes us closer to Trump’s vile, decade-long scheme of anything that will be visible to us pre-election (especially with media like the NYT off in the ether): this ELECTION INTERFERENCE TRIAL in NYC.

CONCLUSION4/ All of Trump’s *other* state and federal criminal cases are about what he did when his political career *ended*: January 6; stealing classified documents.

*This* case is about how he got and maintained his career in the first place—which makes it *more* interesting.

CONCLUSION5/ Just so, Trump’s civil cases—even how he bonded himself in those cases—is about something far more expansive than merely what Trump did when his political career ended: they’re about *what sort of vile man he’s been his whole life*. Which—again—is *more* interesting.

CONCLUSION6/ So no, voters probably won’t get to see Trump go on trial, before we vote in November, as to events we all witnessed ourselves: what Trump did as his political empire crumbled. But the cases we *can* see are arguably much more revealing of previously *hidden* things.