American Kompromat
By Craig Unger
(How the KGB cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery.)
It’s right there in the subtitle. This is the first thing I thought about when considering how to review this. Because it does stray from the initial topic quite a bit and may cause the casual reader to wonder “what does this have to do with THAT?” But the scope of the book is broad and paints a picture that we all recognize at this point. But the wrinkle of Trump being recruited as an asset back in the 80’s (one of many) by the KGB and then unwittingly parroting back the whole Soviet/Russian worldview as a platform for a major political party is the kind of thing that was supposed to be exposed by the Mueller Report. As explained in the text, it was all skillfully buried by AG William Barr. Barr gets a lot of time and airplay in this. It does offer a relatively damning summary of Trump’s time in public life, how one can trace back 40 years to see how the former Soviet Union saw promise in this brash young real estate tycoon on the rise, and how his ascent to the top office in the United States would have gone beyond any KGB recruiters’ wildest dreams.
But like a lot of books from the era of Trump, it will convince the initiated and be dismissed by his supporters who may or may not bother to read books. By the very nature of the subject, it can only be hearsay. And the book makes a point about how all the best intelligence operations are done with very few laws broken.
The last chapter sums up the last year of the Trump administration and the attempt to overturn the election. Somewhere Vladimir Putin is smiling.
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