BREAKING NEWS: Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, Greenberg, Yass, TikTok—Dozens of Far-Flung Narratives Are Suddenly Coming Together As Trump Seeks a New Surety Bond to Avoid Ruin
As we learn more about the Trump-Evan Greenberg alliance represented by Trump’s shocking $91.63 million bond deal with Greenberg’s Chubb, Trump’s plan to quickly secure a much larger bond is emerging.
You can read the first section of this lengthy report for free, and the whole report for free—as well as 250+ others at Proof—by trying Proof for a week. To do so, click the red button below.
A free trial grants immediate access to Proof’s three prior internationally viral reports on the controversial $91.63 million Trump-Greenberg bond (1, 2, 3).
Introduction
{This report expressly incorporates all three prior Proof reports (1, 2, 3) on the March 8 Trump-Greenberg bond.
Update at 11:04 PM ET on March 14, 2024: a CBS News report from this evening appears to indicate that gross negligence by federal prosecutors in New York—a DOJ office that works in close consultation with the FBI field office behind the pro-Trump “Trumplandia” scandal in 2016; that office was at the time led by the now-convicted foreign agent Charles McGonigal—has led Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to request an emergency 30-day continuance in Trump’s March 25 trial on 34 state felonies. It appears that the Southern District of New York just sent Bragg’s office, eleven days before what is likely the latter office’s highest-profile ever trial, “31,000 pages of additional records [from an aborted criminal prosecution of Trump in New York, which aborting almost collapsed Bragg’s case] and represented that there will be another production of documents by next week.” Reaction to this astonishing undercutting of the prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, which will make substantially easier Trump’s securing of a supersedeas bond in his civil case with the New York Attorney General, is coming in fast and furious from key figures in American law and media and they are apoplectic—regardless of whether this was intentional sabotage or a grossly negligent firing offense that would be among the worst in the storied history of the SDNY. On social media, ex-Rolling Stone editor and current Wired editor Noah Schachtman wrote that SDNY’s actions are “absolutely bananas.” Former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder called them both “unacceptable” and “unbelievable.” Former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann revealed that he is “LIVID” (caps in original). CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen angrily noted that Bragg had requested the items he just received “a YEAR ago” (caps in original). The result of this misconduct or negligence is that Trump will have a clear schedule to focus on securing the bond that the Proof report below addresses, and will be a criminal defendant in “pretrial” rather than “mid-trial” or “before-the-jury” status.}
This is, in significant part, a report about an international trade partnership to which the United States doesn’t belong—and which even many avid news consumers in the States have never encountered in all their reading. But it is also a report about people, digital services, and events that have been the subject of recent viral reports not just in America but around the world. Some of these include:
A bill to ban TikTok that just passed the U.S. House of Representatives on a shockingly bipartisan vote of 352-65;
the imminent several-month federal incarceration of Donald Trump’s longtime chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro;
at least one secretive meeting between Trump and Elon Musk at Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, along with many other such conversations between the two that are just now being reported (not to mention another recent Mar-a-Lago meeting, between Trump and Hungarian antisemitic autocrat Viktor Orbán, which will also eventually become central to the narrative this report discloses);
Musk’s bizarrely public, personal, and hostile competition in the social media space with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which for months included talk between the two men of physically fighting one another until Musk backed down;
Trump’s ongoing “Mar-a-Lago documents case”, which features allegations that Trump still possesses and is looking to sell highly classified U.S. intelligence, possibly even to hostile foreign nationals;
breaking new reports that the United States anticipates China may significantly interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and could even do so via TikTok;
breaking news reports that China is livid about the bill to ban TikTok that just overwhelmingly passed the U.S. House of Representatives;
an increasingly conspicuous trend in which Trump holds meetings at Mar-a-Lago or via telephone with dodgy figures and/or highly partisan U.S. billionaires and thereafter immediately changes his proposed policy platform for a hypothetical second term, a course of possibly sub-statutory Bribery that matches the way he handled clandestine dealings with the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. presidential election;
growing discourse among policy wonks about whether the United States should join the 2018-signed Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (“CPTPP”), a replacement for the Trump-rejected Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (“TPP”), and how views on this among companies heavily invested in China—like Chubb, the company of Trump’s new lender, Evan Greenberg—can lead those companies to do favors for Trump they wouldn’t do for anyone else; and
the fact that by March 25, 2024—the day that (for now) Trump’s criminal trial on 34 felonies is due to begin in New York City (though he’s seeking a ninety-day continuance of that trial date as part of the desperate “presidential immunity” gambit he somehow got before the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States—Trump will have to come up with a bond proposal five times larger than the one he just agreed to with Evan Greenberg’s Chubb, one possible result of him failing to do so being him having to declare personal bankruptcy (a forced revelation of his decades-long campaign of public deceit as to his finances, not to mention a public relations disaster, that could doom the 2024 Trump presidential campaign).
If you understand how these ten news stories are interacting with one another in real time, you have the most sophisticated sense it’s currently possible to have about what is going on in the United States in terms of an unprecedentedly historically significant 2024 presidential cycle.
For those who doubt this last contention—that understanding what’s happening in the current election cycle is important for Americans in ways such knowledge never has been before—just take a look at the words of the most well-known historian in America right now, New York Times-bestselling author and revered Yale University professor Timothy Snyder:
Snyder’s primary academic focus in on Russia, Ukraine, and the state of democracy in Eastern Europe broadly writ—as well as the larger question of why some democracies thrive while others fail, a topic he addresses in his bestselling 2017 book On Tyranny, published three years before my own bestselling book on Russia and Ukraine, Proof of Corruption (Macmillan)—so his commentary on how the Russia-Ukraine War will inflect the 2024 U.S. presidential election is listened to by basically everyone in D.C.
As a news outlet in the field of U.S. Politics (using the designation Substack gives it), Proof is rather a more sprawling affair than any single book, however. So the narrative to be unfolded in this report indeed begins with what at first may seem to be an event far afield from discussion of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Evan Greenberg, Peter Navarro, TikTok, or for that matter some other topics readers would be surprised to see touched on below, such as MAGA’s Bud Light boycott and the about-to-begin civil lawsuit involving Trump’s Truth Social that is about to come before the Delaware Chancery Court on March 17. To be clear, the submission this report makes it not that everything is related, but that everything related is related and that major media has done a lousy job of late identifying for its audience which events are in fact part of the same metanarrative.
So while this is not a report about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to understand the far less well-known trade deal reported on here—the CPTPP, which will be much, much more influential on U.S. politics than even the TPP was—it’s important to know the political history of the latter. And that, therefore, is where this wild and sprawling and deeply harrowing story about how Donald Trump plans to win the 2024 presidential election begins.
How the TPP’s End Opened the Door to New Clandestine Collusion Between Trump and Hostile Foreign Nationals
In 2017, the New York Times called the Trans-Pacific Partnership former Democratic president Barack Obama’s “signature” accomplishment on international trade—and indeed, none doubted that it was an ineluctable component of his presidential legacy.
So it was almost a fait accompli that, if successful in winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election, passionate racist Donald Trump (whose campaign in 2016, and arguably his whole political career to date, has been animated by bigoted disgust at everything the smarter, calmer, cooler, more confident Obama represents) would back out of President Obama’s signature deal at the first available opportunity.
Which Trump did. In fact, his focus on embarrassing and denigrating his predecessor so outstripped any consideration for the well-being of the United States he was tasked to lead from January 20, 2017 onward that it took the new POTUS just 72 hours to yank America from a trade deal that could well have made it rich (a subsequent version of which has already done so for—among others—our neighbor to the north, Canada; the Wilson Center estimates the trade deal President Trump summarily rejected “would have boosted [Americans’] incomes by $131 billion a year, or 0.5% of GDP”).
Despite this not being a report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership—it’s merely useful to where this report is headed for readers to understand the long-beleaguered stateside support for that particular trade deal, and how it ebbed and flowed inside the United States in 2016—it’s still necessary, in the interest of fairness, to add to all this that the Democratic candidate for President of the United States in 2016, Hillary Clinton, also cooled significantly on the TPP over the course of 2016, if for reasons quite different than the racial animus that manifestly animated her neophyte political opponent.
Rather, Mrs. Clinton saw, correctly, that the deal could be a political albatross around the neck of whoever supported it in the 2016 election cycle. Why? Because Trumpism had already established that that cycle would center on various breeds of protectionism, meaning not just cultural protectionism (an undeservedly kind euphemism for U.S. neo-Nazism, white identity politics, white nationalism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and Christofascism) but also xenophobia-tinged economic protectionism.
While in her personal capacity as a civilian America’s former Secretary of State almost certainly supported former president Obama’s vision of expanded U.S. trade around the Pacific Rim—trade not just with Asian countries like Japan, but also Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Peru—Trumpism’s second type of protectionism, economic protectionism, was sufficiently and consistently enough given lip service to in MAGA circles (despite the focus of that “movement” perpetually being largely white identity politics) that the 2016 election cycle was co-defined by isolationist market principles that candidly the Republican Party had rarely practiced or actually advanced in the modern era despite its claims to the contrary.
Clinton saw that this thinking had crept, in a far more authentic way, into America’s sizable bloc of independent voters and economically moderate Democratic voters. It was an echo, indeed, of her and her husband’s first U.S. presidential election cycle, the 1992 U.S. presidential election, in which cycle Texas billionaire Ross Perot skewered future POTUS Bill Clinton for his open support for “NAFTA” (the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had been in negotiations since 1990, but was signed by Clinton in 1993 and went into effect on January 1, 1994).
{Note: Trump would withdraw from NAFTA during his first full year in office, almost certainly—given his proclivities, temperament, and obsessive grudge-holding—reveling in the fact that he was thereby undoing the crowning trade-policy achievement of his secondary arch-nemesis after the Obamas, the Clintons. NAFTA’s replacement, the USMCA, was signed into law at the end of 2018. It was rather transparently an attempt by then-President Trump to get a foreign policy win by largely redoing work already better done by others. He would engage in a similar bait-and-switch with respect to America’s southern border wall—which he mostly just repaired without replacing, only to later falsely claim he had built it—and in his nuclear-arms negotiations with North Korea, which took a different rhetorical shape than his predecessors’ but were essentially a mere continuation of them. Proof notes that this sort of stolen-valor-adjacent boasting—remember that Trump has called his active 1990s sex life his “personal Vietnam”, and yes, the draft-dodging alleged-bone-spurs-sufferer was serious—is common for megalomaniacs; we see the same behavior from Elon Musk, who routinely claims that his companies were the first to achieve things others long ago achieved, from crowing about Tesla robotics projects that mirror work done in the 1960s to crediting Twitter for having an influence on citizen journalism that it first began having fifteen years before Musk bought it, from being last into the AI industry with xAI while pretending xAI’s first product is pioneering instead of an apparent rip-off of existing products to falsely taking credit for founding Tesla.}
Surely aware that her family was seen by some, even within her own party, as only half in the camp of domestic labor unions and domestic consumer advocates, Mrs. Clinton made the call to pivot from her 2015 support for the TPP to opposition to it during the 2016 general election campaign—which also had the effect, to whose benefit is still unclear, of more or less taking the issue off the table when voters went to vote in 2016.
With both major-party candidates largely professing the same view of it—if, it must be said again, for different reasons, with Trump’s opposition born of racism and his own political opportunism rather than any deeply held views on U.S. policy at home or abroad—even foreign actors looking to interfere in the 2016 election were unlikely to conclude that either Trump or Clinton would handle TPP differently than the other.
Because it was in very early 2016 that the U.S. first entered into a tentative agreement to join the TPP, had Clinton not been running against a bigot temperamentally dead-set on opposing anything the nation’s first Black president had done, it’s a possibility public opinion wouldn’t have turned against the TPP as the election year wore on; but Trump’s opposition gave Republican protectionists even more cover for opposing the TPP than they would’ve had anyway, and Democrats quickly saw the political efficacy in Trump’s rhetoric on trade—one of the few issues in politics he had ever in the past seemed to authentically (if transiently) care about—especially inasmuch as his rhetoric on trade gave Trump a chance to stretch his legs as one American history’s foremost xenophobes, a vibe many 2016 voters were drawn to regardless of political affiliation.
It’s for this reason that despite its technical—theoretical—adoption by the United States in early 2016, the agreement was never formalized in Congress in that election year and was ready and waiting for Trump to light on fire finally and conclusively as soon as he came to power in early 2017. Of course, many newsreaders know this part.
What we do not talk much about is all the people Trump angered by opposing the TPP.
Nor did Trump much have to think about such people, as he did well in small-donor fundraising in 2016; believed (and was correct) that he would be able to easily use the presidency to further enrich himself; and didn’t at the time apprehend that a moment might come when he was so financially destitute that he would need the small but powerful group of voters—spectacularly wealthy businesspeople with major business interests in Asia—his vocal opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership had alienated.
Understanding the failure of the TPP in 2016 and 2017 brings us in short order to a trade deal in the same part of the world that could help determine the final result of the 2024 U.S. presidential election—despite the fact that the U.S. is not a part of it.
Unlike the TPP, the CPTPP is a trade deal that still exists and that the United States could still join, which gives both domestic and foreign actors with a vested interest in seeing a future presidential administration that embraces the CPTPP every reason to take clandestine or even unusual and semi-public actions to bring about that result.
The Rise of the CPTPP—and What It Means for American Democracy
Perhaps to the surprise of some politicians in the United States, who tend to see the United States as essential to any truly transformative international trade deal, all of the countries Trump had left in the lurch by precipitously pulling America out of the TPP continued negotiating with one another and in 2018 signed the CPTPP, as already noted the “Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
{Note: While the acronym “CPTPP” is often used in America as a means of implying that this is a wholly different agreement than the TPP, overseas the CPTPP is frequently called “TPP-11” or “TPP11” in recognition of the fact that it’s simply the old TPP minus one of its initial twelve would-be signatories, the United States.}
One might expect, given that the CPTPP is merely the TPP with one fewer member, that opposition to the CPTPP in the United States mirrors old opposition to the TPP.
But you’d be wrong.
Why? Not because the politics of the idea behind TPP/CPTPP—a free-trade-forward trans-pacific international trade agreement—has changed, but because the advisers of certain politicians, and certain parties’ finances, have changed dramatically since 2018.
In 2018, Donald Trump—who had mostly been relying, as to trade policy, on eccentric Democrat-turned-Republican Peter Navarro, a man whose radical disgust for China fuels a far-right protectionist ideology that advocates for the same staggeringly high U.S. tariffs that cause domestic inflation—brought into his circle of trust a new, much more widely respected trade adviser: Evan Greenberg, the CEO of Chubb Limited and The Chubb Corporation.
Whereas Peter Navarro—and, for that matter, virulent racists in Trump’s inner circle like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—looked on in satisfaction as President Trump dumped the TPP on January 23, 2017, and while Navarro would continue declaiming his “well outside the mainstream” views on China into 2019 and beyond, the arrival of Greenberg in Trump’s milieu (after what appear to have been years of ties between the Trumps and Greenbergs) caused Trump to realize, in the latter half of his only term, that (a) as he already had most of the China-hating white supremacists in the United States on his side, and (b) his fans would follow him with fanatical zeal no matter what he said or did, it might be time for him to (c) negotiate a sort of détente with the pro-free-trade business leaders who had wanted him to expand rather than restrict trade with China from the beginning.
But it wasn’t merely the influence of men like Evan Greenberg—who stood to gain tens of billions of dollars if Trump changed his stance toward China—that convinced Trump than amending his opposition to the TPP might be in his own best interest.
By 2018, Trump had realized, as discussed in some detail in national bestseller Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), that his likely opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election campaign would be Joe Biden—a seasoned white-male politician who he had always polled terribly against in part (or at least Trump believed) because he lost more of the white vote, and particularly the white male vote, to Biden than he would lose to almost anyone else the Democrats could conceivably nominate. For a politician like Trump who believes that demography is destiny, Biden’s facility as a politician was (and is) immaterial; if whites feel comfortable with Biden, and if it’s difficult to paint him as what most would-be Trump voters fear most—a minority radical—in Trump’s view Biden will perpetually be formidable as a political opponent.
By 2019, as Trump’s old leading trade adviser Navarro was still scourging China in public addresses, behind the scenes, per former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton, Trump was begging the Chinese Communist Party for illegal foreign election interference.
The CCP saw Trump’s plea for them to enter into a Criminal Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (also arguably chargeable as a Criminal Conspiracy to Commit Election Fraud) as a sign of weakness it could exploit even if it never offered him such assistance. Why? Because as Bolton would allege, Trump “being driven by political calculations when making national security decisions” necessarily included this corollary: that in crafting political schemes, Trump gives no consideration to national security whatsoever. This is why, as the Associated Press reports, it was during a trade negotiation with China—a type of negotiation that always implicates national security due to copyright law, illegal transshipment issues, and much else—that Trump turned what should have been a conversation on trade and national security into one relating exclusively to his own political future.
But Trump didn’t stop there. After the infamous June 2019 trade summit in which he secretly sought to collude with Chinese communists, he followed up a few months later with a televised appeal to the CCP to collude with him in illegal foreign election interference that probably should have led to impeachment proceedings but did not.
By the end of 2019, Trump had both moved away from fealty to Navarro’s far-right thinking on China—a loss of influence Navarro would keenly feel throughout 2020, and which perhaps he hoped to win back in taking an outsized role in Mr. Trump’s backroom plot to overthrow American democracy post-election—and moved toward men like Evan Greenberg, who were urging him to (a) listen more to businessmen (e.g., Greenberg) and less to academics, economists, or career civil servants (e.g., Navarro); (b) devolve national security considerations—one of Trump’s least favorite topics as president, Bolton confirms—to being the province of American businessmen sitting on presidential trade councils, and (c) see American business and Chinese favor as useful to his political designs because free trade between the U.S. and China helps to grow the American economy.
At the same time, Trump had moved from feeling that scare-mongering about China was his best bet politically to thinking that maybe speaking kindly about Xi Jinping and the Chinese (with whose government he maintains significant business ties, as explained in a long chapter in Proof of Corruption) might be a better alternative.
When the CPTPP came into effect at the very end of December 2018, there was much talk about Trump’s past decision to exit TPP. In point of fact, it was serious Chinese consternation with Trump’s alternative approach to trade—bilateral trade deals that enabled Trump to get into a room with autocratic leaders he admired—that led to the June 2019 conference at which Trump sought collusion from Chinese communists without any pesky, democratically elected European leaders around to hear his words.
But Trump showed up to talks with China’s communists in June 2019 with much more than a bilateral trade deal to offer. In fact, over a year earlier, in April 2018, Trump had begun the slow process of reopening his trade policy to include possible future U.S. involvement in the TPP in a way the Chinese—who preferred the idea of the TPP to any bilateral deal with America—would have found deeply alluring. So while, by June 2019, the CPTPP already existed without the involvement of America, Trump could credibly suggest—as he was seeking clandestine, illegal foreign collusion to defeat Joe Biden in November 2020—that he had long been open to the United States joining it.
And why would China care so much about that? Because it had been left out of both the TPP and its predecessor, the CPTPP. And it wanted in. But it felt it needed the United States as a sponsor for that to happen—so any promise from Trump to the effect that America might re-enter the TPP would have seemed to the Chinese like a strong possibility of U.S. sponsorship for its application for admission down the line.
{Note: The Chinese Communist Party, lacking the U.S. sponsorship it had hoped for, would ultimately settle for submitting its formal CPTPP application on September 16, 2021.}
So while many in major media have correctly identified the significance of Trump’s new lender, Evan Greenberg—the American billionaire with an almost endless China portfolio—having been installed on Trump’s Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations as a top presidential adviser in 2018, a position he held at the time Trump sought to collude with Chinese communists against Biden and U.S. voters in June 2019, it’s just as important to note that Trump had more reason to reverse course on how best to trade with China than just a new leading trade adviser who was telling him to rethink his position: he had an election to win and business assets in China to see grow, and the olive branch of a U.S.-sponsored admission to the CPTPP (once the U.S. had reentered the CPTPP itself) to dangle in front of Xi Jinping and his coterie.
Then the pandemic happened.
While Trump spent the first two months of the pandemic, January and February 2020, inexplicably “heaping praise” on the Chinese for their handling of it due to his belief they would still collude with him and a fear they’d back out of all trade negotiations with him if he angered them—thus proving his trade policy a fraud and a failure, as it involved neither successful multilateral nor successful bilateral negotiations—by mid-March Trump had relented to the new mid-pandemic political reality, which urged him to use the phrase “the China virus” or “the Chinese virus” as often as possible on TV. For U.S. trade policy as for so much else, the pandemic was a key inflection point.
An Aside: On Causation
Attorneys like me are by training and temperament obsessed with causation—from the most technical applications of that concept, such as we find in civil tort litigation, to the more fanciful extensions of it that lead us to concepts like The Butterfly Effect.
Attorneys do not believe, as so many high school yearbook quotes would have it, that everything happens for a reason. But we do think that there’s reason—in the broadest sense of the word, something akin to Aristotle’s logos—ready to be found in anything.
The greatest test of this idea is any global tragedy that kills millions, whether it’s the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event that killed all non-avian dinosaurs and two-thirds of all living creatures on Earth almost (in relative terms) instantaneously to the interlocked conflicts we know as World I and World War II, which in total killed between 65 and 100 million people, tens of millions of them innocent civilians.
After World War II, there was an attempt—an admittedly halting one—to find some whisper of reason in it and World War I, and what the world seems to have lit upon decades hence is that the two global wars fought across continents in the twentieth century were at once the natural result of the Industrial Revolution and, far more importantly, a signal to humankind, from humankind, that if we continued down the path we were on we would eradicate our species in short order. One reason the Cold War was “cold” and the deaths in the Korean War and Vietnam War—two proxy U.S.-Russia/China conflicts—were (at least among the soldiers engaged) a fraction of those in World Wars I and II is that the example of the latter two wars hadn’t been forgotten.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a “crisis” and not a war because of World War I and its sequel. The same may be said of the comparatively low-casualty collapse of the former Soviet Union. We all know that NATO, the most powerful military alliance and force for regional peace in human history, was an outgrowth of the two world wars, but many fewer realize that while it did have a predecessor (the League of Nations), the United Nations as we know it today might not have existed but for World War II. If there’s one group that never fully found any reason in the events of World War II, and understandably so, it’s a group I belong to—the Jewish people, who with The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834) still fresher in mind than you would think suffered so cruelly in World War II that I don’t know that anyone could attach reason of any variety to it.
Some Jews, like Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, valiantly tried to do spiritual labor in the aftermath of World War II, asking the question that I submit here many attorneys naturally gravitate toward: can some utility be found in senselessness, if what happens is at least capable of reduction to its discernible building blocks (as would not be the case, say, with some fanciful supernatural encounter well beyond the laws of physics)?
This form of labor for Jews post-WWII was so impossibly arduous that Wiesel’s Night had to invent a new genre of literature to even try to do it: the nonfiction novel. Indeed, one way of understanding those Jews who fled to what was then Palestine after World War II (only a percentage of the Jews in Palestine when Israel was founded in 1948, as almost half a million were present in Palestine before WWII began) is that these were people who individually and/or collectively had experienced a series of depredations in which neither utility nor Aristotlean reason could be found in Heaven or on Earth.
So what does all this have to do with the subject of this report? A lot.
One reason even one of the most murderous autocrats of this century, Donald Trump friend and ally Vladimir Putin, “only” aims to steal about 12% of Ukraine, maintain Belarus as a “vassal state” with its own government, sow the seeds of revolution in Moldova, and make violent incursions into Georgia—as opposed to attempting, all at once and wholesale, to not just reconstitute the Soviet Union but take over the world—is because the actions of Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito in the 1930s and 1940s appear to have permanently put dreams of world domination to bed for anyone who might ever be in a position to execute them, including a vile and sociopathic former KGB agent like Putin. Putin is willing to kill millions to get what he wants, of course, but his vision of what’s possible, just like Kim Jong Un’s vision of what is possible for his own nation-state-sized playground, is blessedly limited by a slim awareness of the failures of the past.
So when Timothy Snyder tells us that everything is on the line in 2024, he means it.
Putin, in league with other autocrats around the world—including Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán and Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping and Nicolás Maduro and Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Benjamin Netanyahu and (Putin and Trump had hoped) Jair Bolsonaro—wants to make one last grand attempt to completely dismantle the mechanisms for a lasting peace that were devised by the victorious Allies in the shadow of World War II.
Working in smaller groups—sometimes multilaterally, sometimes bilaterally; at times unilaterally and at times only in response to one another’s venal foreign adventures— these men have sought to achieve desperately dangerous aims that would bring the entire planet to ruin: ending NATO; ending the European Union; ending American democracy; spreading white identity politics to the point that this poisonous ideology again sparks race wars and genocides worldwide; ending all asylum rights; increasing nuclear arms production; degrading or rendering inert most international treaties and organizations, including the Geneva Convention and the United Nations; subjugating ethnic and racial minorities as well as women, LGBTQIA2S+ persons, and/or Jews, all while entrenching religious fundamentalism and autocracy in all its forms (including plutocracy, kleptocracy, autocracy and oligarchy). Some of these ten to twenty men are sociopaths and some psychopaths; some are Muslim radicals, some Jewish radicals, some Christian radicals, some heretics or atheists who pretend to be devout; some are motivated by greed and others by power. Many by both. But what all these men share is a desire to crush humanity beneath their collective boot while richly profiting by it.
The chief divide in American politics right now between those who understand all the foregoing and those who don’t. Oddly, in the camp of those who do understand all this are both those committed to fight for human rights and democracy and those who, with their eyes wide open, chosen to join the side advocating for global chaos because they believe its victory would be a victory for them and theirs and that that’s all that finally matters. Some of this latter group are Christofascists, some techno-optimists, some white supremacists; some are colonizers, some madmen, and some—like Trump—believe in nothing at all besides making money and being publicly adored as a god.
The camp of those who do not understand the turning point in human history we’ve arrived at—in which everything that’s kept Earth both relatively peaceful and relatively prosperous over the last eighty years is at risk—is equally heterogeneous. It includes all those who proudly term themselves “apolitical” and those who just lack the funds for a television set with a cable package; those who are so invested in their own bag—for instance, international businesses—that, like Evan Greenberg, they are blind to their own blindspots; those so indifferent to the fate of the world that they would just as soon have it burn as thrive and those too young, too simple, too uneducated, or too aloof from any community to be in a position to appreciate the state our planet is in.
None of this changes the facts: when we discuss whether or not Donald Trump will be able to secure a bond by March 25, 2024 that saves him from personal bankruptcy and preserves his political ambitions, and when we discuss whether men who seem aloof or indifferent to the stakes of this (like Greenberg) or wise to the stakes but scornful of them (like Musk) are going to help Trump dig out of the hole he made for himself via decades of crime and graft and deception, what we’re discussing is what role America will play in the defining geopolitical tilt of our epoch in human history. Will America be aligned with Putin, Orbán, MBS, MBZ, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, El-Sisi, Maduro, and Xi Jinping—all men Trump has befriended and whose causes he has sought to collude with in ways large and small, public and clandestine—or will we be on the side of the EU, NATO, the United Nations, democracy, human rights, and rule of law? When we speak of attempts by men like Greenberg and Musk to aid and/or rescue Trump, or when we speak of clandestine attempts by men like Putin or Netanyahu or Xi Jinping to aid and/or rescue Trump, what we’re describing is one front in a much larger war.
When matters of causation reach a scale on the order of the whole world rather than a single transaction between human beings, we find ourselves much closer to thinking in terms of The Butterfly Effect than about civil torts. But international diplomacy and international law, much like rule of law and the many other democratic principles we celebrate in the United States, aren’t as inchoate as a theory about the connectedness of everything or the feeling many of us have that we’re inside the “darkest timeline.”
Why? Because there are historical precedents and existing statutes and longstanding traditions whose breach we can track. Laws are not theories; we can follow them or choose not to follow them, but it simply doesn’t do to say we cannot understand or believe in policies we ourselves previously wrote down and insisted were inviolable.
When Evan Greenberg lends to someone he would normally never lend to, we can mark it, just as we can when Elon Musk claims to be a champion of free speech and one of the good guys but immediately starts spreading racial hatred and—not for nothing—a staggering degree of cynical, partisan, behind-the-scenes censorship.
When the former President of the United States publicly seeks aid from one of the several villains who unambiguously seeks to destroy the post-World War II order we can notice it, just as we can notice when for no evident reason Donald Trump starts singing the Chinese Communist Party line on TikTok, relishing the ethnic cleansing being conducted by longtime Trump family friend Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, or making the dropping of all sanctions on Russia a cause célèbre.
We can track who meets with Trump and then track the aftereffects of his meetings.
And while we can also, simultaneously, track political cynicism on the left—and it’s certainly there, and possibly includes the current hardline opposition to Obama-era trade deals that we now see in the Biden administration—we can’t analogize garden-variety electoral politics with apparent attempts by Elon Musk to stoke racial hatred on Twitter, or analogize Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis possibly making a bad decision about when to start a particular romantic relationship and with whom to Donald Trump brazenly and unambiguously violating, dozens and dozens of times, state and federal criminal statutes that were on the books before he entered politics.
Many online are wont to call discussing the great geopolitical battle of our time mere “rage-farming”; to these folks, anything that enrages is unhealthy, counterproductive, and likely fraudulent in its means of conception and in its substance. And surely that is, from time to time, true; I would point, for instance, to most one-day “scandals” involving celebrities as an example of sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.
But Trump saving his political career with a corrupt backroom bond deal? It matters.
What a very small group of rich and powerful men are doing to us—yes, to us, and to the world we want for ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and our homelands—matters. So I hope readers will see that behind every sentence at Proof in which I’m speaking of esoteric issues there are stakes that really couldn’t possibly matter more.
The Biden Era Begins
After Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, his Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, confirmed within the first nine months of her term that—contrary to the desires and plans expressed by Trump and Greenberg—President Biden would under no circumstances agree to bring the United States “back” into the TPP/CPTPP.
Within a few months of Secretary Raimondo’s announcement, Greenberg—who had stayed aboard the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations in the hope that better trade relations between the United States and China, the very ones Trump had been aggressively pursuing when the pandemic hit, might yet be realized under President Biden—had left his role as a top adviser to the Biden administration. One imagines he was livid in doing so, given how close he had come to succeeding in his foreign policy aims in the final year of President Trump’s term.
If you want to understand exactly what game Greenberg is playing, you need merely watch his Center for Strategic and International Studies (“CSIS”) speech from 2023, which runs for just over forty minutes:
The key points Greenberg makes in the speech above are these three:
America needs to have a “fulsome debate” on a “serious” subject: how concerns about U.S. national security have impacted trade relations with countries in “Asia”, a continent whose members include both of the two countries Greenberg has spent his professional life focusing on: Russia and China. Greenberg’s view is that the resolution to this dilemma is understanding that corporate interests and national interests are essentially one and the same—a neo-Randian view that aligns with those of amoral tech moguls like Elon Musk, corrupt U.S. politicians like Donald Trump who use public service as a means of self-enrichment, and avaricious billionaires like Greenberg who appear to be plutocrats—that is, persons who hold, ideologically, that governance by the wealthy (which somehow, historically, always ends up being a government for the wealthy) is inherently just.
America’s economy and national security benefit from trade engagement with the rest of the world. This, of course, is self-evidently true. Countries that trade with one another are less likely to go to war with one another. And equally self-evident is Greenberg’s contention that the more businesses are forced to compete internationally, the more they innovate, which means that open markets often lead to more international competition and therefore better products (Greenberg might also say “and more efficient corporate operations,” but my father was for many decades a product manager at a major international player in the computer industry, and his specialization was quality control, so I know this contention to be untrue). Where Greenberg goes off the rails is in believing that corporations know best the “risks and benefits” of international trade, and therefore should be at the center of “policy” debates. In fact, Public Policy is a discrete field of study, in fact is a profession encompassing international diplomacy and city planning and much else, so for a mere businessman to insist on a right to dress up as an amateur policy analyst is like saying that firemen are the same as fire insurance salesmen.
Companies need only act “in accordance for their vision of corporate governance and values” when operating abroad, because they can be trusted to be “transparent,” “fair,” and “respectful of the individual.” Obviously the whole history of corporations—surprisingly short as it is—confirms this to be a wildly false assumption, and indeed underscores that the very notion of “corporate governance” as a structure for profit-seeking enterprises is often at odds with the values corporations like to profess when they’re trying (as Greenberg is above) to pretend that their interests and their nation-of-origin’s interests are inseparable.
Readers should remember that it is in fact not in democracies, but in autocracies like Greenberg’s favored markets—Russia and China—where there’s a general belief that public and private interests can readily be aligned. In America, we believe in checks and balances, instead, a mutual zealous advocacy by two often opposing forces that we believe ultimately leads to the best outcome (a value system that also happens to undergird America’s adversarial system of justice). By comparison, an autocrat like Trump or apparent plutocrat like Greenberg believes corporations and governments can work together because only a small, incestuous cabal need be in control of both.
A world in which the Trumps and Greenbergs together determine what “national security” does or doesn’t mean, and where profit for the Trumps and Greenbergs is redefined as automatically to the benefit of America, is a world that’s possible only under a President Trump, not the Democratic Party as it’s currently constituted. It may even be telling that Evan’s father, business partner, and former boss—Maurice Greenberg—supported the extension of the Bush dynasty to a third president from that family before finally and begrudgingly agreeing to jump on over to Trumpism.
Evan Greenberg admits, in the speech above, that Chubb has a “clear financial stake” in the outcome of debates over whether—for instance—America will join the CPTPP and then encourage China to join it, as Trump wants, or instead launch a new multi-lateral international trade agreement from scratch, as President Biden has proposed.
Chubb’s financial hopes lie wholly in a Trump revival, as a desire for a “TPP-12” once again—ironically what President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton all wanted as recently as 2015—now lives only in Obama, who’s out of politics.
Greenberg’s speech warns that the “extremes of the [U.S.] political spectrum” have been driving the debate on international trade, which is likely true and indeed once would’ve been a coy reference to Donald Trump on the one hand and the Democratic Party post-Obama (at least on the issue of trade) on the other; it’s true that, pursuant to Trump’s benighted version of populism, free trade has become a rather unpopular premise across the spectrum of American politics. But the difference between the GOP and the Democratic Party at present is that the latter is now run by a seasoned and sober politician who’s made up his mind about the TPP/CPTPP and feels no need for any plutocratic input on the matter—after all, as the longtime senior senator from Delaware, where almost every company you could ever name is headquartered to gain the benefits of Delaware’s capitalism-friendly legal subschema, Biden hardly needs a lecture on corporations or their governance from the likes of Greenberg. In contrast, the current leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, continues to act not just like the relative political neophyte and ideologically unanchored wastrel he is, but like a man who is looking to (a) stick it to the U.S. intelligence community (which ordinarily would be deemed the resident locus for expertise on national security matters in the absence of a plutocratic intercession), (b) profit on a personal basis from deals with plutocrats at home and abroad, and (c) be advised by people he respects (fellow businessmen) rather than groups for which he’s long had contempt (whether public servants, who he calls the “Deep State”; members of law enforcement, who he claims are now persecuting him; and U.S. soldiers, who he has deemed “losers” and “suckers” and who interest him only to the extent he believes he can order them to do as he says, however illegal).
In other words, for Greenberg—as between Biden and Trump—there’s no comparison.
So whither, in all this, do we find consideration of the four other Asian giants—Japan, Russia, South Korea, India? Well, Japan is a member of CPTPP, which China will also join if its current application is accepted. South Korea publicly expressed its intent to apply to join the CPTPP in the future. India is an outlier Greenberg would be unlikely to focus on, as it’s withdrawn from the ASEAN group Greenberg has spent his career helping to manage and is infamously a “foot-dragger” with international agreements.
In Asia, this leaves only one half-Asian giant unaccounted for: Russia. Russia’s land area is overwhelmingly in Asia, while its population is more in Europe than in Asia.
Russia has long been categorically treated as “apart” from Europe, with good reason— as we’re now seeing with its invasion of that continent and attempts to undermine the EU. The world presently faces the rank impossibility of Russia being deemed a member in good standing of the community of nations, given that as you’re reading this it is criminally waging war upon its democratic European neighbor to the west, Ukraine.
Sanctions placed on Russia by the Obama-Biden administration remain in effect and would preclude the United States from being involved in any trade partnership that Russia is in, just as they’d preclude most democratic nations worldwide from doing any significant business with Russia.
All this must be kept in mind as Greenberg spends his forty-minute speech above referring not just to China but to “Asia”—thereby capturing Russia, the country his family has been so interested in and invested in for many years, as well—and making statements that could apply equally to Russia as the United States, such as when he notes that any company anywhere in the world that is kept from competing in the global marketplace necessarily stagnates (which is surely true for Russian companies under sanctions). At times Greenberg is even clearer on the fact that his ideology is intended for worldwide consumption and execution, such as when he opines that “It is strong, thriving businesses that create jobs at home and abroad” (emphasis added).
That Greenberg is thinking first and foremost, in all of the above, about the CPTPP is clear. “Regional economic integration in Asia has advanced considerably in recent years without the United States” (emphasis in original), which Greenberg complains has instead “retreated” from such international trade agreements. “This has placed America firms at a disadvantage with their international peers in the world’s most dynamic region.”
Greenberg continues as follows (bolding supplied, capitalized emphasis in original):
The Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the US-and-EU Technology Council are both good-faith efforts to build rules for 21st-century trade challenges. The [Biden] administration deserves credit for prioritizing efforts in Asia and Europe to advance digital trade and develop standards for new and emerging technologies.
While unpopular to say, we should ALSO seek to join the CPTPP. The truth is that ANY trade initiative [from the Biden administration] that does not include market access to services, investment, and intellectual property protection; or dispute-settlement provisions; and doesn’t tackle subsidies, will fall WELL SHORT of our most recent high-standard agreement, [the Trump administration’s Greenberg-advised creation], USMCA.
This shot across President Biden’s bow would have been unmistakable to Biden trade advisers, especially coming from a prior member of their group who recently stormed off in a huff. Greenberg’s message in 2023 was clear: when he was a top trade adviser to President Trump in the 2010s, he was listened to and taken seriously and as a result the USMCA was signed, pleasing him far more than the agreement it replaced—the Clinton administration’s NAFTA. Now that the Biden administration is in charge, Greenberg implies, hopes for joining the CPTPP (as Trump says he wants to do) or passing a new trade deal like the USMCA (which Trump did with Greenberg’s help) are fast disappearing. And as Greenberg made clear in his speech both before and after the indented excerpt above, an abiding difference between the Trump and Biden administrations is that the former listened not just to men like him but him specifically whereas the Biden administration had failed (in Greenberg’s view) on both counts.
And what applies to China, with respect to the CPTPP, now applies with equal force to Russia and Ukraine. Why? Because around the time of the speech above, Ukraine asked to join the CPTPP.
And that is something that cannot happen while the Russia-Ukraine War that Biden and Trump are now effectively on opposite sides of continues.
Revelations From the Trump-Orbán Mar-a-Lago Summit
For a moment let’s jump ahead from events that took place in 2021, 2022, and 2023 to one that just took place in 2024: a secretive meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Trump and the antisemitic Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.
It was international news when, shortly after their Florida meeting—and presumably with Trump’s agreement, given that it might have severed a longstanding bromance had Orbán spoken out of turn—Orbán revealed that Trump had disclosed to him his previously secret plan to ending the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” if elected: as the BBC reports, Trump would force Ukraine to surrender by permanently denying it any American funding until it does so.
According to Trump, this would almost immediately force the Ukrainians to drop their weapons and cede a significant part of their country to longtime Trump ally, prospective business partner, and past collusion partner Vladimir Putin. It should be noted that undermining Ukraine financially has been Trump’s policy agenda from the very start of his political career in 2015, when he swore he would drop all sanctions on Russia over its 2014 invasion of Ukraine—an act that would almost guarantee the fall of Ukraine. Or we might revisit 2016, in which Mr. Trump unilaterally amended the Republican Party platform to eliminate its support for arms to Ukraine. Or we could revisit 2018, in which Trump withheld Javelin missiles from Ukraine for many months to the amazement and consternation of his entire administration. Or 2019, when he infamously (and thankfully, unsuccessfully) tried to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into colluding with him to steal the 2020 U.S. presidential election in exchange for continued U.S. military aid. This last course of spectacularly corrupt official conduct led to President Trump being impeached for the first time.)
So what Greenberg and others of his mindset—like Elon Musk, who we’ll discuss more below—know for certain is that whereas a second Biden administration will continue supporting Ukrainian freedom-fighters and thereby delay Ukraine’s capacity to the join the CPTPP (while keeping Russian markets largely closed to American businesses, including Greenberg’s Chubb, which only recently relented to pressure and announced that it was “separating organizationally” its Chubb Russia division due to the losses it’s incurred from the Russia-Ukraine War and presumably the Obama-Biden sanctions), a second Trump administration would drop all sanctions on Russia and force Ukraine to surrender to the Kremlin, thereby opening up two major markets at once (remembering here that Ukraine is the largest nation fully in Europe).
Whereas under President Biden America will not join the CPTPP, under a President Trump it will. Whereas under President Biden the advice of avaricious plutocrats like Evan Greenberg is ignored, under President Trump the advice of such men leads to deals Greenberg likes like the USMCA and would surely lead to more such deals in the future. An end to the Russia-Ukraine War would also presumably lead to a slight diminishing of the tensions between the United States and China, which has been aiding Russia in ways that outrage U.S. officials and have a chance to be determinative in the war. In short, a Trump administration would seem to solve every problem Evan Greenberg sees in the world stage in one fell swoop, not to mention lead to a mending of fences between the United States and Russia of the sort Greenberg’s Center for the National Interest has been clamoring for for decades, a return to great profitability for Evan’s father Maurice’s Russian (including Kremlin-connected) business ventures—with which Evan Greenberg’s business interests are entwined—and a retrospective rewriting of history to further diminish the central role that Greenberg’s CFTNI had in advancing illicit Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential election.
And to top it all off, with China currently being in the midst of a CPTPP application that may well be rejected if the eleven former TPP nations believe accepting it would forever close the door on America returning to the fold, Greenberg likely believes that only in a Trump administration will China gain the access to the CPTPP benefits that would, in turn, benefit all of Chubb’s current and future business interests in China.
Not to mention the gratitude that would be lavished on Greenberg and his enterprises by the Chinese Communist Party and murderous kleptocrats in the Kremlin if he is seen as being Trump’s savior, and therefore the man who brought untold riches to two of the world’s three remaining superpowers. (And Greenberg has made clear that he believes, or at least is willing to say he believes, that his actions greatly advantage the America as well—which creates a trifecta of influence and “being owed” sufficient to make an aspiring plutocrat and billionaire who’s only a centimillionaire now salivate.)
And given that war is bad for business—unless one’s business happens to be in the military-industrial complex, which Evan Greenberg’s isn’t—Greenberg can’t help but consider that whereas tensions between the Biden administration and China have been elevated and appear likely to continue elevating because of Biden’s support for Taiwanese independence, under a second Trump administration China would be free to do “whatever the hell it wants” to Taiwan in exactly in the same way Trump said this of a hypothetical, greatly expanded Russian invasion of the European continent.
With all this in mind, it seems telling that Donald Trump was at Mar-a-Lago with Putin friend Viktor Orbán discussing what he could do to aid the transnational cabal discussed in the “Aside” section above on the very same day his legal team announced he’d been saved by an eleventh-hour bond proposal green-lit by Evan Greenberg, who has made a career out of advocating for open-handed U.S. relations with dangerous and unscrupulous autocrats, especially China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
This is not to say that these two events are connected, merely that their confluence is telling—as even analyzing each event in isolation, they appear to be part of Trump’s modus operandi. Orbán has become a pariah in Europe because he’s done all he can to aid Putin in an illegal war against Ukraine that one could argue Evan and Maurice Greenberg’s years of work at the Center for the National Interest didn’t just make more likely but actually made possible; certainly, without their colleague Dimitri Simes, a Kremlin agent, advising the Trump campaign in 2016, it would never have become so clear to Simes’s now-boss Putin that Trump is willing to play ball with every aspect of the above-named global autocrats’ unified agenda: from abandoning Ukraine to abandoning Taiwan, from inviting foreign election interference to ending free and fair elections, from persecuting minorities to elevating white identity politics.
But the Orbán visit was useful to journalists in another way. It put a new spotlight on who has been visiting Mar-a-Lago recently—and why.
Elon Musk, Jeff Yas, TikTok, Bud Light, and the CCP
It wouldn’t be possible for Proof to summarize certain of the events to be discussed in this section better than Rachel Maddow already did a few days ago on her MSNBC show, so Ms. Maddow’s lengthy segment below deserves placement atop this section.
What Maddow establishes, above, is that a passionate—bordering on violent—national campaign coordinated by Donald Trump and MAGA leaders to boycott Bud Light for almost a laughably insignificant reason (one that would indeed be funny were it not underwritten by transphobia) ended instantly on February 6, 2024, on Trump’s orders.
What caused this sudden reversal in what had been, up to that point, a Trumpist cause célèbre? What happened to change Trump’s mind with such an astonishing alacrity?
It turns out that on February 6, approximately six hours before Trump dropped his crusade against Bud Light and its maker Anheuser-Busch, a lobbyist for Anheuser-Busch announced a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser for Trump. And just like that, Trump’s supposedly principled (but actually just transphobic and nihilistically opportunistic) campaign against Bud Light and its parent company died. The ex-president had been bought off in plain view of all America, and he hadn’t even tried to hide it. This last part is critical: Trump was so sure that there would be no consequences for selling off his public position on matters of great import to his base that he did nothing at all to obscure the fact that he was selling his fans out in real time.
And what a man with pathological inclinations does once, he will do again and again.
Just as Trump agreed to end a year-plus war with a major American company once it promised to pay him off, his year-plus war against the social media platform TikTok—whose parent company ByteDance has long been intimately interwoven with the Chinese Communist Party’s military-industrial complex—ended instantly on March 7.
This reversal was substantially more shocking than Trump’s Bud Light turnabout.
Why? For three reasons: (1) Because Trump’s long opposition to TikTok had been (to hear him tell it) a matter of national security and opposing Communism; (2) because in 2020 Trump had done almost exactly what he had just done in March 2024, flipping from strong opposition to TikTok to a transient support for it, and for exactly the same apparent reason (as close Elon Musk business associate and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison was at the time both donating generously to Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and trying to become the primary cloud provider in the United States for TikTok; when Trump learned of this confluence of a donor’s private financial interest and giving to his campaign he instantly became a public, if only temporary, advocate of TikTok); and (3) Trump’s latest reversal on TikTok came soon after a March 1 Mar-a-Lago meeting with Jeff Yass, an American billionaire with a 15% stake in ByteDance who is a Trump mega-donor.
So it took about six hours for Trump to betray his base over its Bud Light boycott, and only about six days for him to betray all America to the CCP. This despite—or maybe, more harrowingly, because of—the fact that the U.S. intelligence community says the CCP might specifically use TikTok to bump Donald Trump’s odds in the 2024 election.
It’s important to understand that the concerns about TikTok’s impact on American national security—unlike any concerns MAGAs had about Bud Light—are justified.
There is a reason the U.S. government and thirty U.S. states have active bans on putting TikTok on a government phone; there’s a reason that in August 2020 Trump tried to ban TikTok unilaterally via an executive order; there’s a reason a bipartisan House bill to ban TikTok—keeping in mind that almost nothing is bipartisan in the current House—just passed with a staggering 352-65 majority. The reason is that the U.S. government has assessed that the Chinese Communist Party will likely work to illegally interfere with the 2024 presidential election, and will likely do so either to aid Trump or simply to sow sufficient chaos to cast the results of the election, whatever they are, in doubt.
Or we could note a second reason: that the United States Armed Forces are currently running “war games” to figure out what America should do if China invades Taiwan in the next few years.
In short, China is already America’s foremost economic competitor, and a military conflict between the United States and China is very much a possibility in the next few years, perhaps even during the administration of the next U.S. president (which will be either Joe Biden or Donald Trump). And China is believed to be engaged in a hot cyberwar against American interests, including our elections. Its implicit control over TikTok is therefore of grave concern, whether the Chinese Communist Party should decide to use TikTok to spread dangerous disinformation in the midst of some future military, paramilitary, or cyber attack against America or whether it instead simply steals the personal data of millions of Americans using sophisticated spying tools. Whether one supports banning TikTok or not, the fact remains that America’s leading intelligence experts perceive a potential threat from it, as do majorities of both major political parties, and it’s therefore incumbent on any would-be President of the United States to take a strong and principled stance on the matter that cannot be changed without an enormous stock of new evidence that has nothing to do with that particular president’s wallet.
But to lay Trump’s new TikTok reversal on one meeting with Yass would be a mistake.
Because of course Trump’s reversal came on the very same day that the most outspoken advocate for a quick normalization of U.S.-China relations, the much-discussed Evan Greenberg, green-lit a Trump bond at a time that no other lender on Earth was willing to agree to one. And this happened in the context of there being little doubt that the Chinese Communist Party is livid about the now-looming TikTok ban—a sentiment it has almost certainly made known to U.S. businessmen with significant financial interests in China. particularly if those men are longtime Donald Trump advisers and particularly if those longtime Donald Trump advisers are also now key Trump lenders.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Because in doing an about-face on TikTok during a week he had interactions of various kinds with both Yass and Greenberg, Trump also decided to entertain his base and journalists by declaring a new social media platform-related war: a crusade against Facebook, the company that arguably helped him win the 2016 U.S. presidential election both by spreading domestic and foreign pro-Trump disinformation without moderation and allowing a Russian researcher and Steve Bannon to secret collect micro-targeting data on U.S. voters via Cambridge Analytica.
So why in the world would Trump suddenly write, in announcing an end to his attacks on TikTok, that “Without TikTok, you could make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.” And why would he care that “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business”? Is the answer to these questions as simple as just looking at who’s been visiting him at Mar-a-Lago?
Once again, the answer might well be yes.
We recently learned from a Washington Post report that behind the scenes Trump has been trying to sell his propaganda website Truth Social to none other than chief Mark Zuckerberg enemy Elon Musk. Such a transaction is not only urgent for Trump now due to his lack of financial liquidity but because his far-right social media platform has lately become embroiled in lawsuits over whether (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) Trump engaged in a fraud relating not just to Truth Social but to his proposed new media company, Trump Media & Technology Group.
Many forget that, like Greenberg, Musk is a longtime Trump adviser—and even after leaving two Trump advisory councils (which Musk now says he joined in part to work on immigration policy, where he has been and remains in lockstep with Trump’s cruel and xenophobic approach) Musk admits he continued regularly discussing “politics and business” with Trump. While Musk’s experiences advising then-President Trump were apparently rockier and less productive than Evan Greenberg’s were, for his part Trump has cryptically said that he “helped” Musk while he was POTUS in unspecified ways. Certainly, he’s right now trying to get Musk a high-profile speaking slot at the July 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and is likely to, according to experts, help Musk eviscerate his present regulatory challenges if he’s re-elected.
It’s in this context—and an apparently real animosity between Musk and Zuckerberg that has now expanded to soap-opera proportions—that Trump effected an about-face on Facebook and announced that it was the “enemy of the people” and TikTok was now simply healthy for America’s youth (per The New Republic, he opined that “There’s a lot of good [about TikTok]….and young [American] kids…will go crazy without it”).
All of the foregoing is so obviously at least a potentially illegal sale of future U.S. policy to rich American businessmen that even Steve Bannon—yes, the convicted criminal, currently accused felon, avowed white supremacist, and proud insurrectionist leader—saw enough in it to declare publicly on Gettr that, despite years as a Trump adviser and ally, he now sees “Yass coin” as being sufficient to get Trump to betray America with respect to TikTok (which Bannon sees as a legitimate threat to the United States).
Donald Trump and Joe Biden Aren’t of the Same Species of Political Actor
The foregoing is surely sufficient to raise significant questions about undue domestic or illegal foreign influence every time Donald Trump either (a) reverses himself on a policy position or (b) has a meeting with (or engages in any financial transaction with) a current or former adviser or donor who has significant foreign interests. Jeff Yass is in that category; Evan Greenberg is in that category; and so too is Elon Musk—who, well beyond his personal and corporate rivalry with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, also (a) has major “business ties” to the Chinese Communist Party and has a “close relationship” to Chinese Communist Party leaders, according to NBC News; (b) wants to build a Tesla factory in largely unregulated Russia, buys aluminum from Russia, has been accused of selling Starlink to Russia to aid it in its war efforts against Ukraine (an allegation that is now under congressional investigation), admits to having private conversations about the war with Vladimir Putin, has acted as an intermediary for the Kremlin in trying to convince Americans to accept a unilateral Ukrainian surrender, and is so obsessed with cozying up to Russia that even theWall Street Journal notes that many now call him “Moscow Musk.”
No two countries have more interest in helping Donald Trump defeat Joe Biden than Russia and China—the former because Trump will end the sanctions upon it and force Ukraine to surrender to it (while also exiting NATO and letting the Kremlin do “whatever the hell it wants” to nations in Europe well beyond Ukraine) and the latter because Mr. Trump will let it invade and seize Taiwan, take steps that make China’s ascension into the CPTPP a near-certainty, and make his top advisers once again rich American businessmen with a stunning array of business entanglements with China, namely Evan Greenberg and Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Russia and China both associate Joe Biden with the Obama-Biden sanctions on Russia, continued military support for Ukraine, a refusal to participate in the CPTPP, and a passionate allyship with Taiwan.
Whether Trump “ends” the Russia-Ukraine War by cutting off all funding to Ukraine; terminating the sanctions on Russia that are crippling its economy and therefore its war effort; somehow green-lighting Musk providing Starlink to Russia (which current regulations disallow); causing NATO to collapse by yanking the United States out of it precipitously; sharing classified intelligence with the Kremlin that gives it a massive advantage on the battlefield; or some combination of all of these, Vladimir Putin can have no doubt that Joe Biden would stymie his European adventurism at every turn—not merely via (entirely accurate) rhetoric about this century being a long war between democracy and autocracy, but with action-items that disadvantage Russia in real time.
More broadly, whatever he chooses to do in Russia—a country whose interests his new lender Evan Greenberg’s far-right Washington think tank has sought to advance for decades now—Trump distinguishes himself from the incumbent POTUS, his 2024 Democratic opponent, by placing corporate profits over national security, clandestine backroom networking between billionaires over workers’ rights at home or abroad, and putting plutocrats like Greenberg in charge of America’s foreign policy instead of career diplomats.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that with longtime Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro headed to federal prison for four months on March 19—meaning that Navarro will be behind bars for half the remaining 2024 election cycle—Trump needs the trade advice of Evan Greenberg more than ever before.
In Ukraine, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party define United States national security as supporting Ukraine financially and militarily.
Meanwhile, the man who Greenberg just lent nearly $100 million to when there was no objective business reason to do so apparently hopes to, in beating President Biden in the 2024 presidential election, cement in U.S. foreign policy the idea that there are no U.S. national security interests in Ukraine whatsoever and that an end to the war in Ukraine that sees Ukraine surrender a good portion of its land to Vladimir Putin is best for Ukraine, Russia, and the United States—which is another way of saying that it’s better for international corporations like Chubb that do business in those nations.
In China, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party define United States national security as supporting Taiwan financially and, if necessary and under certain circumstances, militarily.
In contrast, the Trump family has so many business interests in China and receives so much money from China that its financial entanglements long ago prompted Trump to make clear that he has little interest in seeing Taiwan’s independence as a national security issue.
Trump may pound lecterns decrying China over nonsense conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic, but he appears to do this merely to exculpate himself of any responsibility for hundreds of thousands of American deaths during the pandemic and/or to appease his white supremacist base—which is ready and willing to believe a country of non-white foreigners is a far graver threat to the United States than (as is Russia) a nation largely composed of white Christians.
While Evan Greenberg almost certainly doesn’t share either Trump's prejudices or conspiracy theories, when he speaks at such astonishing length—as he did at CSIS— about his opposition to the Biden administration’s approach to national security in Asia, he’s speaking concurrently of two of the three national security crises that are defining the foreign policy debate—to the extent there is or will be one—in the 2024 presidential election cycle. Both of these two center on events in Asia, specifically in Moscow and Beijing.
{Note: The third major debate is of course over the war in Gaza, which is beneath Greenberg’s notice from an economic standpoint but in any case also doesn’t need his policy intervention. It’s already clear that Trump would aid his family’s friend, Mr. Netanyahu, in eradicating the Palestinians, possibly an acceptable hardline pro-Israeli policy outcome from Greenburg’s perspective for a variety of reasons, among them that the end of the Palestinian people would eventually lead to freer trade in the Middle East between Israel and its Muslim neighbors, most notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.}
Evidence That the First Trump Bond Deal Was Corrupt Emerges
The Daily Beast now reports that the first Trump bond deal—the one Trump secured on or just before March 8 through the largesse of Evan Greenberg—“wasn’t standard.”
Greenberg’s agents (or Greenberg himself) amended the standard Chubb bond deal to give Trump more time to pay monies owed on the back end. This means that Chubb didn’t merely rescue a notoriously unworthy lender, it actually gave him special terms to do so.
Nor do we have any information on whether there was a co-signer on the bond deal, which matters because of Trump’s history of begging billionaires with major foreign business interests like Elon Musk to help him out of his seemingly perpetual financial distress. Consider that Musk has said that he’s not “donating money to” Trump, but that him co-signing a loan for Trump wouldn’t be covered under this seemingly quite carefully written public statement. Further worthy of note is the fact that after quite melodramatically banning a Twitter feed that tracked his private jet, Musk met with Trump in West Palm Beach on Sunday, March 3—an event at Mar-a-Lago that media first learned of from plane-trackers, suggesting it might otherwise have been secret.
And according to this MSNBC report, it’s vital that we have information about what collateral Trump put up for his March 8 bond. According to an insurance-industry professional interviewed by leading MSNBC journalist Kate Phang, Neil Pedersen of Pedersen & Sons, for a bond “of this size” an insurance carrier would require “liquid collateral” rather than real estate—real estate being the only asset Trump has said he has available to act as collateral, per his filings with New York courts—because most bonds require payment in “10 days”, and while the Trump bond has a “30-day” clause instead, per Pedersen “if you had to liquidate real estate in 30 days, it would be a fire sale” and the insurance carrier therefore wouldn’t get the actual value of the collateral.
Pedersen further notes that because insurance carriers are “risk-averse” by definition, the asset base a carrier would normally demand for a bond like Trump’s March 8 one would be “several times what Donald Trump is worth…[so] $17 billion to $30 billion.”
Pedersen’s assessment, which has since gone viral, has led to a universal belief that Trump would have needed a co-signer to get his bond—and that that person would have to have a minimum of $17 to $30 billion in assets. According to the renowned Forbes World’s Billionaires List, only 40 Americans have over $17 billion in assets. This tiny list includes, notably, a number of people who would never lend to Trump due to past conflicts with him (for instance, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Charles Koch, Julia Koch, and Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott) but also, far more significantly and troublingly, several names readers will recognize from this report and others on Trump: Musk, Yass, Ellison, Miriam Adelson (the widow of Sheldon Adelson), Len Blavatnik, and Carl Icahn.
In fact, it’s hard to find any names at all on the Forbes list that most Americans would be comfortable having Donald Trump be financially beholden to—a fact that led ex-DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to opine on MSNBC with evident concern, “Is [Donald Trump] going to be beholden to somebody [because of this March 8 bond]?”
We also now know, from a Washington Post report, that in addition to the already-mentioned reasons Chubb shouldn’t have looked twice at Trump as a prospective borrower—given his desperate financial straits, nearly ninety pending felonies, and a history of defrauding lenders—Chubb specifically had good reason to never lend to Trump again after a very disturbing 2010 incident in which “Chubb sent an insurance appraiser to determine the worth of Trump’s triplex penthouse apartment at Trump Tower…[but] Trump rushed the expert out of the premises within fifteen minutes before the assessor could take any measurements. The Chubb appraiser was also not allowed to see the primary bedroom, because he was told that Melania Trump was sleeping. Trump later falsely tripled the size of the 11,000 sq. ft. apartment, using that false measure to drastically inflate his worth by overvaluing that property.”
This alone would be sufficient evidence of fraudulent intent with respect to Chubb-related insurance activities to preclude the company ever being involved in a financial transaction with Trump again, especially as this incident came to light in the midst of a sprawling and successful fraud prosecution of the Trump Organization for defrauding lenders.
In view of the foregoing, a bizarre public letter recently published by Evan Greenberg about the March 8 Trump bond raises many—many—more questions than it answers.
First and most important, the fact that Greenberg, and Greenberg only, signed this new public letter acts as an acknowledgment that he has sole responsibility for the Trump bond issued by Chubb. But Greenberg’s letter is misleading in several ways:
It contends that Chubb offered Trump a $91.63 million bond (despite him having attempted to defraud Chubb in the past) because it’s committed to “supporting and [being] part of the justice system plumbing included in this case.” But in fact Chubb made a business decision to aid Trump; all other bond companies had refused him, reports indicate, and Chubb doesn’t have a special obligation to aid the civil justice system. Trump isn’t a charity case. Rather, this appears to be a continuation of Evan Greenberg’s penchant for framing corporate decisions that benefit him financially as having been taken for the public good.
Greenberg underscores—without further comment—that E. Jean Carrol had “the right to approve the terms of the bond before the court accept[ed] it, as Ms. Carroll did in this case.” But that blithe summary—which encompasses an earlier implication that Chubb issued the bond for Carroll’s sake—is simply an appallingly false framing of what supersedeas bonds are. And what Greenberg leaves out in his letter is that Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, had to enter into negotiations with Chubb to compel it to amend the terms of bond proposal so that it would not be so spectacularly (and quite unusually) beneficial to Trump.
Greenberg’s letter also acknowledges that people with an interest in Chubb have expressed their “concerns” about the bond to him—indeed so many people that he had to issue a public statement about it, This too is hardly normal process (or policy) with respect to Chubb surety bonds, and would seem to confirm just how abnormal the bond was and still is.
Separate from Carroll’s right to contest the bond—granted to her by Judge Lewis Kaplan, not Chubb, of course—is the bare fact that Greenberg’s company agreed to a rider in Trump’s bond that’s non-standard, adjusting the usual 10-day period for payment to a 60-day period (later rolled back by Carroll’s counsel Kaplan, via her negotiation with Chubb, to a 30-day period), meaning that not only did Chubb choose to work with a borrower who in way qualified for assistance from a carrier of Chubb’s reputation, but actually sextupled the usual, industry-standard payment period in an acknowledgment that Trump likely didn’t and wouldn’t have the means to pay Chubb back. Imagine for a moment all the qualified borrowers who have never gotten such a sweetheart deal from Chubb. And we are leaving out, here, whether Chubb accepted an abnormally low asset base from Trump or a lack of co-signer, as despite Evan Greenberg’s gesture toward transparency with his recent letter he in fact has refused to reveal (or been denied the right to reveal) any significant details of the bond besides its massive, widely reported face value.
Greenberg, who has received substantial professional benefits from Trump in the past by being named to high-profile public service positions—not just Trump’s trade council, but a public-facing subunit of it focused on COVID-19 pandemic recovery measures—simply cannot represent that “Chubb provided a bond in the ordinary course of its surety business and is acting as a neutral party” unless he can also represent he knew nothing of the bond agreement before it was signed—a representation he doesn’t make, and whose absence from his latter is very loud.
In fact, Greenberg seems to do the opposite in his letter, implying that he had knowledge of Trump seeking a bond from him from the jump. In writing, “I fully realize how polarizing and emotional this case and the defendant are, and how easy it would be for Chubb to just say no” and adding that “We considered this the right thing to do, and we frankly left our own personal feelings aside”, Evan Greenberg—who, tellingly, cites “rule of law” and not “business sense” for aiding Trump—appears to acknowledge that he was involved in the decision-making here; that there were “personal feelings” present that had to be (as he assures us, with a tacit trust me) put aside; and that any attempt at Chubb to apply business sense and the “normal course of business” to this case was self-admittedly hampered by the fact that the case is “emotional.” Ordinarily such assessments would lead a definitionally risk-averse, institutionally unemotional insurance carrier to back off immediately. Here, Trump adviser Greenberg leaned in to rescuing him, instead.
It’s in the context of all of the foregoing that America received the just-breaking news from the Associated Press that Trump ally and (like Greenberg) former Trump adviser Steve Mnuchin is looking to buy TikTok—potentially giving Trump another social media platform he can indirectly control and/or influence in an election year beyond his own Truth Social and Elon Musk’s Twitter.
A Sea Change in How Political Collusion Works
Does any of this mean that Greenberg has himself engaged in misconduct of any kind?
No—and that’s precisely the point.
It’s legal for an American billionaire to aid in the election of a career criminal whose policies he feel will benefit him personally more than they will harm national security.
In fact, it’s the right of an American billionaire not to care about American national security or American democracy at all, as seems to be the case with Mr. Greenberg.
While it would be Bribery for Trump to demand a supersedeas bond from Greenberg in recognition of the ways Trump aided his career in the past—for instance, by taking certain official actions as president that may have benefitted Chubb or elevated Greenberg’s profile as a mover and shaker in Washington beyond what it already was—no one is saying that happened. While there’s no evidence Trump would be above it, we have no evidence of it, either. Just so, while it would be Bribery for Greenberg to green-light the March 8 bond pursuant to a conversation with Trump in which Trump promised some future official action as president, no one is saying that happened or that we have any evidence of it. Do we have evidence that Mr. Greenberg would never deign to engage in backroom dealing of this sort? I would say we don’t, but it’s merely opinion, and proving a negative scenarios aren’t conducive to being conclusively argued.
But is it ethical for an American businessman to put his own financial interests, or those of his company, ahead of American national security? Of course not. And this question is not inflected in the slightest by the stories any American business leader might tell themselves about how their understanding of national security exceeds in scope and seriousness and significance the understanding we get from professional national security experts—who more or less universally say that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to national security and should be left to the dustbin of political history rather than bailed out at the eleventh hour by his friends. Is it ethical for Trump to get special treatment from an insurance carrier that claims to make its business decisions for identifiable business reasons rather than clandestine ambitions and designs? Of course not. Trump spent decades earning his reputation as a worm in business, whose word means nothing and whose desire to take out loans that enrich him is outstripped only by his determination to ruin those who have loaned money to him should they ever dare to try to collect on that loan. It is not unreasonable to feel that Chubb ignoring this history represents a lack of due diligence and business sense that no public letter signed by Evan Greenberg can remedy. The world has a right to think less of Chubb after this transaction. The world also has a right to think less of Evan Greenberg’s leadership of Chubb after this transaction. And journalists have not just a right but a responsibility to expose the business history of the Greenbergs—Evan and Maurice, who have entangled their business interests and their work for pro-Kremlin far-right think tanks—when they step out in public as underwriters of the continued threat to U.S. national security interests that Donald Trump represents.
But none of the foregoing would have prompted Proof to write about Evan Greenberg to the extent it now has.
No, the question being asked about Greenberg here is a much larger one, and is this: has Donald Trump found a wholly legal way to get the foreign election assistance he’s always wanted? Has he learned that the zero-sum tactics he learned in real estate can be modified if revisited under the lens of the “everyone wins” premise of high-level international trade? (A premise that only holds, of course, if you focus not on labor but on corporations, not on human rights but the “rights” of corporations as “people”).
It appears he has, which means that we in U.S. journalism should be closely tracking the American businessmen Trump holds clandestine meetings with or engages in unusual financial dealings with when and as those men have international business interests that align perfectly with hostile foreign governments. Neither Evan Greenberg nor, say, Elon Musk have to be illegally unregistered agents of a foreign power—which there’s no evidence whatsoever that they are—to nevertheless be Trump advisers (as both men have officially been at various points) who do America a grave disservice by putting their own and their companies’ pecuniary interests over American national security. Such a betrayal of the country that made them rich would be at once legal and unforgivable, no matter how they might seek to justify it by redefining the terms of U.S. national security in transparently self-aggrandizing, disingenuous, and implausible ways.
Some may ask, what in this is new? There have always been corporate lobbyists; there have always been ways for foreign nations to get their voices heard in Washington.
What’s different is that Donald Trump is a businessman and a self-declared billionaire who has exhibited a willingness and an interest in doing things no prior president was inclined (or perhaps simply never felt legally entitled to) to do:
Hold private one-on-one meetings with other businessmen and self-declared billionaires, the details of which are never revealed, despite those businessmen and self-declared billionaires (a) hailing from a family, like the Greenbergs, that has been alleged to have participated in dubious business practices (or facing accusations of such practices themselves), (b) having overseas interests of such a size and scope that they’d be worthy of their host nations’ governments taking notice of them and seeing them as aligned with their own foreign policy goals in significant ways, and (c) expressing the facially absurd view that business leaders better understand national security than national security experts, either because they really believe it or because they’re attempting to flatter a businessman who infamously has made this exact claim with disastrous results for American national security.
Trade future U.S. foreign policy for current financial benefits on the grounds that (a) he doesn’t care about U.S. policy (because he’s in politics to make money for himself), (b) the federal Bribery statutes don’t appear to cover people who are candidates for office as opposed to those who are already in office, and (c) it doesn’t cost him anything to make promises he may not keep—as he’s an infamous oath-breaker—whereas the benefits he’s likely to be offered as a major-party nominee for President of the United States are immediate and vast (as was the case when Trump spent the several years leading up to Election Day 2016 colluding with the Kremlin in part by negotiating an unimaginably lucrative real estate deal with it while he was promising it the most pro-Russia U.S. policy in American history).
Getting himself in such a destitute financial condition that he must give away substantial pieces of future U.S. foreign policy for comparatively little payoff in the present, which transactions (a) present a fantastic low-cost investment for those American business leaders and/or billionaires who want to take advantage of it, (b) become a natural locus for even more illicit forms of leverage given that Trump’s financial distress is, critically, not merely profound but has been hidden from voters for many decades, and (c) present an opportunity for Trump to deal with the governments of foreign countries that he has significant business interests in through superficially unimpeachable American persons—thereby cutting deals that create three happy parties on the back end (Trump, his American counterpart, and the foreign government whose interests align with his American counterpart).
We can note here, also, that Trump has worked so hard to entwine his financial state with his political success—falsely claiming, in every venue he can, that his businesses are under attack because of his political views—that he’s nearly inured himself against any accusations that he’s giving away political favors in trying to save his business interests, as he’s already convinced his political base that his politics and his personal finances are always-already interlinked in ways that should be culturally acceptable (rather than, as has conventionally been the case in U.S. politics, wildly criminal).
In short, no—Trump is not like other presidents. And while it seems to have taken a long time for many American businessmen with overseas interests so large that they are fully co-extensive with the interests of foreign nations to see it, they now see it.
Evan Greenberg sees it. Elon Musk sees it. Jeff Yass sees it. Anheuser-Busch sees it.
The New Era of Public U.S.-Foreign Collusion Begins
All of the foregoing underscores that Americans must think about who exactly wants a confirmed rapist facing 88 felonies to become President of the United States despite his crimes; who wants a man facing personal and business bankruptcy and hundreds of millions of dollars in civil judgments he can’t pay to become President of the United States despite his insolvency; and who wants a man who is conspicuously a malignant narcissist, dangerous sociopath, possible prescription drug addict, possible early- to mid-stage dementia patient, and pathological liar to become President of the United States despite the fact that a second Trump presidency would clearly threaten American national security—even as it stands to make certain American businesses with significant financial attachments in Asia and parts of the Middle East very rich.
The Kremlin is one answer to all three of those questions.
Hardline bigots in the Netanyahu administration, including Netanyahu himself, are another answer.
Saudi and Emirati royals who have given almost no money whatsoever to aid the Palestinians and fundamentally just want the Palestinian people to disappear—but who must be very careful in their public relations on the matter—are a third answer.
As to all three of these groups, the U.S. intelligence community—which by no small coincidence, Trump has all but declared war on—is well aware that Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, and to an extent even Qatar (see the Proof Trilogy for more) have worked behind the scenes to illegally aid Donald Trump’s political career. The USIC is, if perhaps not totally effectually, on the lookout for further such illegal interference.
But yet another answer to the question above is China, whose chances of entering the CPTPP and regaining Taiwan without U.S. military invention increase exponentially under a second Trump administration rather than a second Biden administration.
Which is perhaps why it’s no surprise that in 2020 Donald Trump privately asked the Chinese to illegally interfere in the U.S. presidential election; then publicly asked the Chinese to illegally interfere in the U.S. presidential election; lied about his virtually endless financial ties to the Chinese; lied about his political opponent’s non-existent financial ties to the Chinese, And now in 2024 talks brusquely about Beijing, even as nothing in his policy portfolio suggests his reelection would be anything but a boon to the Chinese Communist Party.
Here, too, however, the USIC must be and appears to be on guard against any Chinese election interference in 2024. This is not to say that there’s a limit on what China—or any of the countries named above—can do to assist Trump, only that there’s a limit on what they’re willing to do that they might be caught doing and therefore would have to answer for to a prospective second Biden administration.
All of which brings us to Evan Goldberg, Elon Musk, and other would-be plutocrats of their ilk.
These are Americans who are well positioned to legally rather than illegally aid Trump in his reelection efforts, even as they know Trump is a threat to national security. Men like Goldberg are open about the fact that they define U.S. national security in terms of their own financial profit, and make no apologies for viewing the world through the lens of corporate supremacy—essentially Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics” acting as a speed-dating guide to global diplomacy, on the premise that corporate profits always redound to the benefit of democracies’ citizens, decades and decades of evidence entirely to the contrary notwithstanding.
In short, Evan Greenberg saved Donald Trump's bacon for a very good reason—and possibly not one anyone can do anything about, even if it meant Greenberg making a business decision he could under no circumstances defend to his shareholders; even if his decision imminently threatens U.S. national security; even if his decision bolsters a rapist and career criminal who aims to end American democracy at the earliest possible opportunity; even if his decision requires him and Chubb to lie to journalists about what they’re doing and why; and even if decisions like Greenburg’s palpably advantage some of the worst people on earth: from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Viktor Orbán, from Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed to Donald Trump.
Someone, somewhere, is presumably going to bail Donald Trump out to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars sometime within the next two weeks.
We know from the just-passed bond proposal deadline in the “Carroll Two” case that major media will offer little scrutiny of Trump’s finances whatsoever as he sells future U.S. foreign policy to the highest bidder. This trend will undoubtedly continue not just for the rest of March 2024, but for the entirety of the 2024 general election in the U.S.
But at least narratives and revelations like those above prepare American voters to better process what they appear to be seeing in real time: the selling off of national security, at the behest of venal U.S. businessman, to hostile foreign governments that want American democracy dead and America’s once-august positioning in the world to collapse.
Conclusion
Just as the desires of hostile nation-states can find proxies in American businessmen, the illegal election-interference schemes hostile foreign nations want to inject into U.S. presidential elections can be laundered through Americans who lack scruples but also—and this is the critical point here—are in fact legally entitled to give money to any politician they want and for any reason they want under existing federal statutes.
While neither Evan Greenberg nor Elon Musk can act as foreign agents without first registering as such, what they can do—and appear to be doing—is something adjacent to this that is altogether legally permissible, even as it remains morally and ethically unsavory and a significant threat to American national security. They can work so closely with foreign nationals whose interests aren’t aligned with America’s, to the point of Musk having secret conversations with Putin, and so flippantly transpose their own venal ambitions with matters of national security that they come to feel that advancing their own and their businesses’ interests is synonymous with honoring their country. On some level these men may understand that they’re risking democracy, rule of law, and electoral traditions in the United States for the sake of corporate profits, but as we can’t get inside their heads or their hearts on that question we can’t really know one way or another. All we can ascertain, from their words and actions, is that they either don’t apprehend how ruinous their conduct is for America or don’t care.
And needless to say, the answer may different from American billionaire to American billionaire. Evan Greenberg is a cutthroat businessman no more or less arrogant than anyone else at the top of their profession; he may exhibit, in the video of his CSIS speech above, a breathtaking arrogance and sense of entitlement with respect to his role in defining what is or isn’t inside the scope of American national security, but his commitment to free trade and the normalization of relations with Russia and China (no matter how violently and spitefully those countries may act on the word stage) is apparently ideological, and has been for decades. On the other wide of the spectrum, we see in Elon Musk a puerile nihilist with absolutely no abiding interest in anything larger than his own ego and advantage—but also with a much, much greater facility for and attunement to how he can use public relations to convince low-information followers (often called Elongelicals due to their radicalism) that the opposite is true.
But what is evident in both cases is that these men know what other countries want the United States to do; have discussed with powerful and influential persons in those countries the fact that they (Greenberg, Musk, and others of their thinking) share the views of these hostile nations; are isolated enough from normative human conduct to see no gasp-inducing lack of humility in their conviction that their understanding of global systems is superior to those who’ve dedicated their lives to the specific issues at hand (from academics to counterintelligence agents, career diplomats to attorneys specializing in international law); and are willing to use their outsized resources to have an outsized influence on American politics, even if (a) they are by result if not by explicit design doing the work of foreign nationals who hate and/or are in competition with the United States, and (b) the apocalyptic consequences of their actions are ones they’ll never feel acutely and so feel justified in never really thinking about at all.
Having said all this, there are often criminal dimensions to counterintelligence cases.
Howsoever it comes about, and even if each step along the path to its completion is in isolation wholly legal, the compromising of a sitting President of the United States to a foreign power is an immediate national security threat and can easily slip into grave criminal conduct. When Trump gets valuable advice or even money from a person he knows works closely with the Russians or the Chinese, he understands that it is likely he partly has the Russians and Chinese to thank for having made clear to Americans giving him money or in-kind value that it’s in their interest—bluntly, in the interest of their own companies and their own ambitions—for them to do so, and secretively.
Evan Greenberg doesn’t bail out Donald Trump if he thinks doing so will anger his business partners in China any more than Elon Musk would associate with Trump if he thought doing so would cost him—rather than win him—a Tesla factory in the Moscow suburbs. And if, somewhere along the way, the Chinese should have made clear to Greenberg exactly what they want or the Russians should have made clear to Musk exactly what they want, what of it, the two men might say. After all, Trump himself publicly asked the Russians and Chinese for illegal election aid, and DOJ didn’t seem to care at all—even though Trump’s actions significantly outstripped in outrageousness Greenberg and Musk having (by way of example) long dinners with foreign politicians in which all the diners’ shared interests were explored at length.
Proof does not argue here for any change in U.S. law, as even if there were to be one, it wouldn’t apply retroactively or resolve any existing issue the country now faces due to past behaviors. But what the U.S. intelligence community didn’t do in either 2016 or 2020 that was to the detriment of American national security is that it didn’t inform the public in any meaningful way about the dangers we’re facing from abroad—or, yes, from a clandestine (if sometimes legal) interlinking of domestic and foreign entities.
Nor did the USIC push at all hard into such matters to determine if any evidence of one of more parties being compromised or taking actions that compromised others, particularly politicians, could have slipped into federally criminal conduct. After all, what Musk apparently did with Starlink in Ukraine—turning it off with warning only to the Kremlin—looks to have caused both military and civilian deaths in Ukraine.
Just so, Greenberg bailing Trump out on March 8 appears to have been one of several proximate causes of Trump immediately going out and defaming E. Jean Carroll again under cover of a new sense of seeming invincibility. There are, Greenberg must have understood, consequences to providing a bond for a rapist who no legitimate business was willing to help at the time yours stepped in—and some of those consequences are foreseeable and can in theory generate unexpected future legal liability.
So as the clock ticks down for Trump to secure a bond five times larger than the one he only got at the eleventh hour and maybe had to call in a favor to get, and which he might have still needed a co-signer with ten times his own net worth to access, we all must ask, how many Americans have the asset base to cosign Trump’s March 25 bond?
Given that any co-signer’s asset base would have to be between $85 billion and $100 billion, per industry expert Neil Pedersen, according to Forbes only two Americans qualify who would ever loan money to Donald Trump: Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
And the former of these two men Trump has been secretly meeting with and having conversations with for many, many months—or perhaps even longer, which may be one reason Musk was so dead-set on banning permanently from Twitter a 21 year-old college student who did no more than collate public information about Musk’s travels.
We know what Elon Musk wants to see happen in Russia and China, just as we know what the lender who was behind Mr. Trump’s first spectacularly large bond wants to see happen in Russia and China. And there is every sign that Trump is willing to sign away his Russia and China policies for cash, and every sign that the policies his allies are seeking to induce from him by any means are not in the national security interests of the United States—and may even advance the eldritch and illegal designs of hostile foreign powers who want to steal the 2024 U.S. presidential election for Trump and in so doing hasten the destruction of America.
And as for Trump, what wouldn’t he do to win the presidency and thereby keep himself (a) solvent, (b) out of prison, and (c) squarely at the center of all the world’s attention?
If you’re interested in reading more research and writing from Seth Abramson, you can check out his Top 20 History substack, Retro, by entering your email address in the space below:
Use this relationship map (based primarily on Seth's article) to follow the money behind "Evan Greenberg’s ACE Insurance, which became Chubb in 2016, with Maurice Greenberg, his onetime Russian-bank-owning father’s Russia investment vehicle Starr International... Maurice is a Vladimir Putin business associate who has also associated with Russian spies, other Kremlin agents, and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign."
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/03/11/chubb-posts-91-million-bond-for-trump-defamation-case-follow-russian-connections/
This is highly concerning. Evil has no bounds and the almighty dollar is the goal