Trump rigged Miss Universe pageants to favor countries where he had business interests

[basquebromance]

there's your collusion!

Trump rigged Miss Universe pageants to favor countries where he had business interests: report

 

[John Shaw]

OH.MY.GOD!!!

Just kidding. IDGAF

 

[Pogo]

>> Toobin writes that this episode is illustrative of the way Trump now conducts himself as president, as he seems to have no problem linking the success of his businesses to his duties as President of the United States.

“Miss Universe represents a paradigmatic example of Trump’s business style in action—the exaggerations that teeter into lies, the willingness to embrace dubious partners, the hunger for glamour and recognition,” he writes. “Trump got away with this kind of behavior for decades, and he played by the same rules during his run for the Presidency.” <<​

Yeah no shit. Like we haven't been describing exactly this for two and a half years while low-info voters go "la la la IDGAF".

From the original:

>> Trump has long viewed his businesses as mutually reinforcing, with all the products—from hotels to steak, vodka to golf resorts—complementing one another.

... Trump often staged the Miss Universe pageant in cities where he had other business interests, and finalists usually came from countries where Miss Universe had strong television ratings. Under Trump, the pageant was held twice in Las Vegas, twice in Florida, and twice in Puerto Rico. In the other years, Trump kept the pageant true to its origins as a swimsuit competition by setting the ceremony in warm-weather locations like Panama City, São Paulo, Quito, and Mexico City. (Although interest in beauty pageants has faded in the United States, it remains high in Latin America.) Only once did Trump steer the pageant away from temperate environments—in November, 2013, when Miss Universe took place in Russia.


>> Trump made his first foray into the Russian market when he lent his name to Trump vodka. “By the summer of ’06,” Trump said in a news release, “I fully expect the most called-for cocktail in America to be the ‘T&T,’ or the ‘Trump and tonic.’ ” The product was launched at a series of parties in New York, Miami Beach, and Hollywood. Among the guests, according to news reports, were Stormy Daniels, the porn actress, and the former Playmate Karen McDougal, both of whom were reportedly later paid to conceal their relationships with Trump. In 2007, with similar fanfare, Trump announced that his vodka would expand its distribution into Russia, with a $1.5 million deal for ten thousand cases. The vodka flopped, in Russia and elsewhere. A longtime vodka executive in Russia told me, “Trump vodka never even showed up on our sales reports—that’s how little it sold.” Production ceased in 2011.

>> On June 18, 2013, just after Trump announced that the Miss Universe pageant would take place in Russia, he tweeted, with a kind of desperate giddiness, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow—if so, will he become my new best friend?”

.... The 2008 recession shattered the real-estate market, but Trump’s position was cushioned by the success of “The Apprentice,” which was being syndicated around the world. Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium in New York, had already begun selling space. His partners in the project included Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, two real-estate operators who were born in the Soviet Union and maintained strong ties to Russia. Sater, the son of a Russian mobster, had immigrated to the United States as a child. In 1993, he went to prison for fifteen months after stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass during a barroom confrontation; and in 1998 he pleaded guilty for his role in a forty-million-dollar stock-fraud scheme carried out with mobsters. In 2010, Arif, who had worked at the Soviet Ministry of Trade, was arrested in Turkey with ten others aboard a luxury yacht and accused of being part of a prostitution ring. (He was later acquitted.) Sater and Arif were principals in the Bayrock Group, which invested in Trump real-estate ventures from its offices on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower.

..... Trump later boasted about how many important people he met during the weekend, telling Real Estate Weekly, a trade publication, “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” This was far from true––very few attended––but photographs and news reports show that Trump did cross paths with some wealthy Muscovites and a variety of prospective business partners. Perhaps the most notorious guest was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian businessman widely suspected of fixing an ice-dancing competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics. At the time of the pageant, he was a fugitive from justice in the United States, where he had been charged with running an organized-crime money-laundering operation from an apartment at Trump Tower, three floors below Trump’s penthouse. (He denies the allegations.)

.... As a Presidential candidate, Trump continued working on a plan to build in Russia. In October, 2015, based on a proposal by Felix Sater, Trump signed a non-binding letter of intent to license the Trump name to a potential office tower in Moscow. In an e-mail sent at the time to Michael Cohen, Sater wrote, “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. . . . Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this.”

..... On June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone, Emin Agalarov’s publicist, e-mailed Donald Trump, Jr., offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Donald, Jr., replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.” Six days later, Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, the candidate’s son-in-law, and Paul Manafort, then the chairman of the campaign, welcomed a group of visitors to Trump Tower led by a Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya.... << --- Rump's Miss Universe Gambit​