Turkey began investing in Eric Adams a decade ago, when he was just the Brooklyn borough president. The Turks saw Adams as an ambitious politician “on the rise,” federal prosecutors say, and provided him with luxury air travel and hotels and illegal donations for a mayoral campaign. When Adams became New York City’s mayor, a Turkish businessman who helped woo him told people that “Adams would soon be president of the United States.” Alas, that plan went awry and ended in criminal charges, but sometimes, foreign governments make more successful bets.
In 1987, the Soviet Union began cultivating real estate mogul Donald Trump, inviting him to Moscow to discuss business opportunities. Two months later, Trump spent $100,000 on full-page ads in The New York Times urging the U.S. to “stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” It was Trump’s first public attack on U.S. allies and NATO, but not the last. He made many subsequent trips to Moscow.
In the 1990s, Trump went bankrupt after losing nearly $1 billion on his Atlantic City casinos. U.S. banks would no longer loan him money. In the 2000s, oligarchs and mobsters from Russia and former Soviet republics rescued Trump by buying hundreds of Trump condos in New York, Florida, and elsewhere, laundering tens of millions in the process. A Russian oligarch bought a Palm Beach estate from Trump for $95 million, four years after Trump paid $41 million for it. (The oligarch never moved in.) “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008.
Moscow’s investment has brought spectacular returns. Last week, Trump boasted of his “very good relationship” with the sociopathic Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and said that if Ukraine had only “given up a little bit” of territory instead of resisting Russia’s brutal invasion, hundreds of thousands of people would not be dead. Trump vowed that if he wins the election, he will work out “a fair deal” for all. In Moscow, Putin was grinning that Cheshire-cat grin.
This is the editor’s letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.