Is Donald Trump Paul Manafort's Greatest PR Challenge?

     The more I read about Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, the more I like him (sarcasm).  He's advised corrupt leaders in the Philippines (Ferdinand Marcos) and in Ukraine (Viktor Yanukovych), collecting millions of dollars and gaining lucrative business ties by making human-shaped piles of excrement look like noble world citizens.  It's appropriate, then, that Trump is his current project.  The two seem like an ideal team for an old man buddy comedy: the brunette, the more tactful of the two, covering often for his golden-haired loudmouth friend, both of them, nonetheless, horrible people, the best that can be said about them the possibility there won't be a sequel.
     Paul and Don Fuck America, coming this November.
     It's appropriate, too, that capitalism, as practiced by some of the shittiest human beings on the planet over the last century, should result now in candidates (Hillary Clinton included) who operate on an international business level, fulfilling the ambitions of multi- and extra-national corporations, none of which are run at the top by people who give a shit about America.
     Manafort's non-American activities helped get pro-Putin Yanukovych (now in exile in Russia) elected.  After Yanukovych's overthrow in 2014, in Manafort's former office in Kiev, Ukraine, someone found a knee x-ray signed by the ousted president.  The two were tennis partners.
     Turning an x-ray machine on the Trump Campaign would possibly reveal a web connecting the candidate's advisors, including Manafort, with Russian interests, which is to say Bashar al-Assad's interests and Vladimir Putin's.  Trump's encouragement of the Russian hack against the Democratic National Committee and his further goading of Russian intelligence services to find the "missing 30,000 e-mails" of Hillary Clinton, revealed the candidate as a man unashamed of his own flirtation with treason.  Why would Trump be concerned about being regarded as a traitor?  Surely he remembers American journalists' general reluctance to brand Scooter Libby a traitor for selling out a CIA official?  Libby, Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, after a long case and trial, merely paid a 250,000 dollar fine (he's a millionaire) and got disbarred, not electrocuted, as was done to traitors as recently as the 1950s.
     Trump didn't commit treason, but he talked along its edges, as he did by suggesting "Second Amendment people" might do something about Hillary Clinton.  He's an instigator.  You remember them from school days.  They were the children who created trouble on the playground and in the classroom, but rarely felt the teacher's fury, the yells vented upon those who were seen doing the fighting.
     Manafort has also represented dictators Jonas Savimbi and Mobutu Sese Soko and tried to represent Somalia's Siad Barre.  His firm, Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lobbied for the governments of the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria.  Manafort and his associates seem to be attracted to human rights abusers.  Trump no doubt fits right in with Manafort's worldview; that of helping those who murder and torture and profiting from such governments and personages by making them palatable to foreign investors.  This is not necessarily just a Manafort thing; it's an American thing.  U.S. foreign policy (especially during Reagan's time) in Latin America is a history of atrocities, coercion, mass murder, coddling of dictators.
     I've seen Manafort on Meet the Press, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN.  No one on television gets into his evil background.  Given his connections to Ukraine and Russia alone, I suggest that Trump's crush on Vladimir Putin resonates with Manafort's own interests; that Trump's desire to become president has something to do with strengthening Russia at the expense of NATO and the United States, as the post-9/11 world enters a new phase of authoritarianism requiring freshly beefed up authoritarians, with even Hillary Clinton getting in shape for that role.  

                                                                              Vic Neptune