How Russia Won: Why a New Book is Urgently Required Reading
The DSR Network
David Rothkopf hosts a discussion with David Corn and Ed Luce about Corn's new book, 'How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the F
Key takeaways
- Trump's relationship with Russia spans over 50 years, rooted in real estate, boxing, and mob connections.
- Russia's interference in U.S. elections is not isolated but part of a sustained strategy enabled by Trump's alignment with Putin.
Main topics
- Trump-Russia connections
- Foreign influence operations
Notable quotes
Russia won. We were in a Cold War. We thought we won the Cold War. But NATO's on the rocks.
Conclusion
Corn's book reveals that Russia's victory over America was not through
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:04) 9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 3. Speaker 4 (0:17) This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR. I'm David Rothkopf, your host. And this week, as every week, we're Speaker 3 (0:41) going Speaker 4 (0:41) to look at something that's in the news. Frankly, this week, we're Speaker 3 (0:44) going Speaker 4 (0:44) to look at something. that's in the news a little bit this week, but should always be in the news. And we are having more attention brought to it, both by headlines and by a new book that's out by one of our two guests today, our friend David Korn, who has a book called How Russia Won. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the fight for America. And of course, David is Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief and a regular on-air analyst for MS. Now, how are you doing, David? Speaker 1 (1:17) Well, you've been in this position, David, when you have a new book out. My book came out yesterday. You really want to like... do as many media hits as you can to get the word out. But you also, as you walk down the street, and I'm in New York City right now, you want to grab people by the lapel and say, I have a book. You should buy it. You got to read this book. It's really, really quite important. And I have managed so far to resist doing that. But I am making the circuit, and the headlines, the recent news have been beneficial to me. But you put a lot of time and effort into these things. Book writing, as Ed knows as well, is a solitary pursuit for a long period of time. And then you have this book come out, and you have a brief window to get the rest of the world to pay attention when there are so many other things. to pay attention to. Well, Speaker 4 (2:15) yes, but I think you've hit this one right on the nose. And I'm sure our other guests, our friend, our regular, the dependable and wise Ed Luce of the Financial Times agrees. And I suspect you don't have to be grabbed by the lapel, Ed, to say, oh, what David's doing here is important. Speaker 3 (2:36) No, I mean, it's not just the history of this, which is absolutely sort of critical to explaining the rise of Trump, but it's also, as you mentioned, David Rothkopf, the current situation with Russia and why Trump yet again is rolling over and doing its bidding. So this is a supremely relevant, relevantly timed book. Speaker 4 (3:04) Yeah, and so that's where I would personally like to start. And it's going to take just a bit of a preamble, maybe a 90-second preamble for me, David, and then you can get into your response to this. But, of course, I've known you've been working on this book for a while. I've followed your other writing on this. I think it's real important. I also feel it's really, really... essential that people understand that the Russia, Russia, Russia story never went away. And that, in fact, it's absolutely critical to understanding not just this moment in our history, but also the president. And that was hammered home again, not just because... Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the real estate developers turned diplomats, extraordinaire for the US, went off to Russia and said to Vladimir Putin, you know, after this is all over, we're going to look back and cherish these moments we spent with you, Uncle Vlad, because you're such a special guy. But there was another story this week. broken by ProPublica about Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding. Now, you might say, well, that's pretty extraneous. Who cares? President's son. What is this more Hunter Biden stuff? But then it turns out that Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding in the Bahamas had a couple of days during which the bulk of the activities were underwritten by someone who Trump Jr.'s wife, later referred to as a dear friend, A Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin, close to Vladimir Putin, who paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fireworks displays and trips to private islands and appeared in a lot of photos that were not publicly released with a bunch of other Russians. Now, you may remember Donald Trump Jr. met with Russians in 2016, and that was part of where the story started. But when I looked at it and I said, gee, this is kind of interesting because this guy is the head of the International Boxing Federation and Trump has always had these ties to boxing. And I started doing a little bit of digging. And what I started digging into is stuff that David Korn knows. And I'm halfway through my preamble here. But I went back further and further into the roots of Donald Trump, to the core of Donald Trump. Who was it that was Donald Trump's original mentor? It was a guy named Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn was a mob lawyer with a sort of checkered history advising people in Washington, but also, interestingly, was involved in the boxing business as Roy Cohn's father was involved in the... boxing business. And Roy Cohn helped young Donald Trump as he was getting set up by connecting him not just to the Republican Party, but to the mob and to boxing promoters. And as Donald Trump got started in the 80s, if you read the work of sort of predecessors of the work of David Corn, like Wayne Barrett of The Village Voice, you would have found out that Donald Trump was building his real estate empire by leasing out apartments or selling apartments to Russians who were essentially money laundering by buying apartments in his buildings. And he was also getting deeper and deeper into bed with boxing promoters Don King and others, including a bunch of Russians who were... boxing promoters, including one who was a direct predecessor of this guy who was at Don Jr.'s wedding, who operated a for-profit illegal betting operation out of Trump Tower. And where are we today? Well, we have Don Jr. advocating Donald Trump ties to the to the prediction markets, to CalSheet, urging that we expand the ability to do sports betting in the United States. And this is where I wrap up my little thing. All you have to do is go back 45, 50 years, read Wayne Barrett, read Jack Newfield, and you see that David Korn's brilliant work on all of this and this new book was out there in plain sight to everybody. For 50 years, the Russian mob, ties to the Kremlin, money laundering, ties to the dark demimonde of international boxing and MMA that led to an event for July 4th out on the South Lawn of the White House. What David's writing about here isn't an extraneous foreign policy story. He's writing about the core, the essence of the corruption that is Donald Trump. So that was my long preface because I've just been immersed in this all this week because I just find this so fascinating that it was all out there. And I read the Wayne Barrett stories and I was like, as any New Yorker, you're a New Yorker now, David, how the hell, of all the people in the United States, would you ever elect a guy with this kind of background? You detail it well. So I congratulate you on your timing. But I was just wondering how you connect these stories. Speaker 1 (8:55) Well, first of all, thank you for comparing my work to that of Wayne Barrett and Jack Newfield, who did a lot of that work for the Village Voice in the 80s and 90s and even afterwards. They were journalistic heroes of mine. And I knew Wayne. And I'm sorry he's no longer with us, as is also true for Jack. You know, I set out. in this book, David, to try to knit together a lot of things that have happened over the last 10 years that people don't see in terms of pattern recognition, right? The three of us are in the news business. Every day we're bombarded with different stories, different outrages, different pieces of stories. Things come and go so quickly. There are 20 scandals a day. People who are consuming the work that we do are... feel totally overwhelmed. And for the last 10 years or so, we've been arguing over what happened in 2016, whether Russia attacked the election to help Trump. The evidence is clear that it did. And the evidence is clear, whether you want to get into collusion or not,