Trump didn’t fail at the casino business. He succeeded at something else entirely. His Atlantic City casinos racked up 106 Bank Secrecy Act violations and the largest fine in history for anti-money-laundering failures. The Taj Mahal was a laundromat.
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Knowledge isn’t enough – you need daily practice Reading 27 essays about how your brain fails you does not make somebody a critical thinker. It makes somebody a person who… Read More
The Jackson-Vanik Amendment opened American doors to 600,000 Soviet emigrants. It also let in the Russian mafia. By the 1980s, Brighton Beach was the headquarters of America’s most ruthless criminal organization – and Trump Tower was their favorite laundromat.
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Intelligence doesn’t protect you from bias – it makes you better at rationalizing Intelligence does not protect you from bias. In some ways, it actually makes you worse at it…. Read More
In July 1987, Donald Trump flew to Moscow at the invitation of Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin through Intourist – a known KGB front. He came home and immediately spent $95,000 on newspaper ads attacking NATO, echoing Soviet talking points word for word. Czech intelligence files show foreign agencies were tracking his political ambitions.
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The less you know, the more confident you feel The less somebody knows about a subject, the more confident they tend to feel about it. This sounds counterintuitive. It isn’t…. Read More
Trump Tower opened in 1983 and immediately became a magnet for dirty money. Baby Doc Duvalier, Russian mob operative David Bogatin, and mob-connected gambling kingpin Robert Hopkins all bought condos with cash through shell companies. BuzzFeed found 1,300+ suspicious shell company purchases totaling $1.5 billion across Trump properties. He never asked where the money came from.
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Your brain sees patterns everywhere – but most of them aren’t real Conspiracy thinking feels like critical thinking from the inside. That is what makes it so hard to fight…. Read More
The KGB literally wrote down what kind of person they were looking for – ambitious, egotistical, susceptible to flattery. Czech intelligence had been monitoring Trump since 1977 through his wife Ivana’s father, an StB informant. Roy Cohn connected him to the Russian mob. The recruitment profile was a perfect match.
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Changing your mind isn’t weakness – defending wrong beliefs is Changing your mind is supposed to be a failure. That’s the cultural story, anyway. Politicians get destroyed for “flip-flopping.” In… Read More
Starting in 1977, Czech intelligence opened a file on Donald Trump. The KGB identified him as a recruitment target. Russian oligarchs laundered money through his properties. Deutsche Bank kept him afloat when no one else would. This is the documented, sourced, receipts-in-hand story of how Russia bought an American president.
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He admitted “mistakes in judgment.” He just thinks you shouldn’t care. Here’s the thing about the Eric Swalwell allegations – he hasn’t denied sleeping with his staffers. He just said… Read More