Photo by rob walsh on Unsplash
First, some history.
Back in 2016, Vladimir “Kompromat” Putin knew enough about Donald Trump to worry that Jeffrey Epstein’s close personal friend might be exposed as a serial sex predator prior to the Presidential election. To counter that possibility, Russian operatives got out ahead of the “Pussygrabber” story by launching “Pizzagate” — a baseless conspiracy theory that convinced many Americans that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant.
How much Pizzagate contributed to Donald Trump’s razor-thin victory (by a combined 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan) is open to speculation. But Pizzagate was clearly one of the storylines that helped energize Trump voters while depressing turnout for Hillary.
As 2020 approached, Putin had a different problem. Trump had successfully remade the GOP in his image. It may be a party of “Gropey Old Perverts” but Evangelicals didn’t care as long as their sex offenders were the ones in the White House and on the Supreme Court. And formerly principled Senators and greedy rich people, with their tax breaks already in the bank, were all, for whatever reasons, keeping their mouths shut.
The problem Putin saw coming in 2020 was simple: Corruption.
Multiple Trump associates were already in prison. Trump and his family were violating the Emoluments Clause on an hourly basis. And numerous Trump appointees were abusing their offices so badly and stealing such YUGE amounts of money that even Trump had to fire them.
Despite a brief attempt to turn Biden’s love of sniffing women’s hair into a scandal, the chiefs in Moscow soon realized America’s Uncle Joe would never be seen as a shameless sex predator on the level of President Pussygrabber.
Corruption Is the New Pedophilia
The answer was to create a new storyline that served Putin’s geopolitical interests while boosting Trump’s re-election hopes.
Just as Russia used Pizzagate to turn Trump’s weakness for young women against Hillary in 2016, the whole Ukraine scandal is part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign designed to turn Trump’s biggest 2020 weakness—corruption—against the candidate once viewed as Trump’s biggest 2020 rival.
You may think that whole plot died when Trump got caught red-handed and impeached for it.
You may think the plan lost its effectiveness when it got repeatedly debunked by every legitimate fact-checker and news organization on the planet.
But of course it didn’t. Although ABC News is one of the organizations that has debunked all of the Trump-Giuliani-Graham-Nunes conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, ABC debate moderator Linsey Davis even brought the topic up at last night’s New Hampshire debate:
The fact that ABC News even poses this question in a debate shows that the Trump-Putin plan is working. The unfair attacks on the Bidens are having an effect.
This morning, The Daily Beast’s Jackie Kucinich confirmed it. In an article headlined “Democratic Voters Worry Biden Has ‘Too Much Baggage’ After Trump’s Ukraine Smears,” she writes:
There is no evidence that Biden or his son, Hunter, did anything wrong when the younger Biden was put on the board of energy company Burisma—in fact, the claims made by the White House and its allies have been effectively debunked…
… For some Democratic voters, the damage of conspiracy theories circulated by Trump and his allies has already been done. And while certainly not the first issue voters raised, for some still rattled by the 2016 race any hint of wrongdoing—true or not—is enough to make them look elsewhere.
Not only did Trump get acquitted this week. Not only, in the words of Nancy Pelosi, does he “remain an ongoing threat to American democracy.” He’s also succeeding in what he set out to do in the first place: Weakening Joe Biden in voters’ eyes and, with help from the media and the GOP, allowing Putin to gain influence in selecting the next Democratic nominee.
Unprecedented from The Daily Edge is dedicated to exposing Trump’s and the GOP's corruption, cheating and conning. Because losing in 2020 is not an option.
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