Trump / Russia: A Definitive History
by Seth Hettena
View on GoodreadsSeth Hettena's account — written before the Mueller Report — of the Trump organization's decades-long entanglement with Russian money, going back to the 1980s Soviet émigré underworld in New York and the post-Soviet kleptocracy that succeeded it.
Core ideas
- The Trump-Russia story is older and more financial than the 2016-election framing suggests — it's a Brighton Beach and Trump Tower story long before it's a campaign story.
- Russian money saved the Trump organization repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s when conventional bank credit had dried up; that financial dependency is the load-bearing fact.
- The book is more historical-context than smoking-gun — Hettena lays out the patterns without overclaiming on the 2016 question, which is part of its credibility.
Published2018
Pages276
ISBN9781612197401
ReadAug 2023
