https://www.svd.se/a/rPQwBm/recension-var-man-i-washington-av-regis-gente
Annoyingly certain about Trump's Moscow connections
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at a meeting in Hamburg in 2017. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
There is nothing wrong with the premise: that Trump's Moscow connections need to be investigated. It's the tone, the exclamation points, the overly obvious winks. Thomas Engström reads Régis Genté and concludes: "The man has, in short, bad taste."
Our man in Washington. Trump in the hands of the Russians
by Régis Genté
Non-fiction
Polaris
Translated by: Nils Wadström, 195 pp.
The reason not to stay too late at the bar is that sooner or later you end up in the clutches of someone who knows everything. The person in question is always a man, usually over 50 and not infrequently a foreigner – that is, an expat , someone who is on a more or less permanent visit to a foreign country. With almost uncanny regularity, he is American or French.
As some may already suspect, I am not particularly fond of “Our Man in Washington,” a gossip-filled featurette about an American president, written by a Frenchman in Tbilisi. That said, I do sympathize with both the hostility to Trump and the desire to get to the bottom of what is really going on, now that the US seems to be making a geopolitical U-turn where the enemy is becoming a role model.
No, it's not Régis Genté's starting points or instincts that are wrong, it's the execution. The tone. The overly obvious winks, the too many exclamation points, the even more and even more annoying ellipses (or whatever you call three dots, "..."). In short, the guy has bad taste.
And that's a shame , because there is, after all, a lot of useful information here. The troubling facts that are listed for Trump are unavoidable, and horrifying in their implications: his many early connections to the Soviet and Russian mafia in New York, his tendency to return home after visits to Moscow crammed with Russian talking points, the apparently Russian-backed financing of Trump's business empire via the devious Deutsche Bank (which, according to the New York Times, has lent him a total of $2 billion over the years), his undisguised admiration for both Putin and other barbaric leaders like the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte or North Korea's Kim Jong-un.
Yet the whole thing – even though the book doesn’t reach the 200-page mark – is just too much. It’s all reminiscent of how George W Bush was constantly accused of incompatible vices during his time in power. One second he was portrayed as a complete idiot, an uneducated and uncouth cowboy with no plan, only to be portrayed the next as diabolically evil and manipulative. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work when we’re talking about Trump either.
Genté seems as little as anyone else to be able to make up his mind, which would be fine if he had at least admitted it. But the questions must be asked. Is Trump a simple rawhide, influenced by the toughest real estate industry in the Western world and only after money and glamour – or an ice-cold master politician, trained by the Republican torpedo lawyer Roy Cohn? Is he indebted to the Russians, is he being blackmailed by the Russians (two different things) or is it instead as simple as that he admires them for a political system where there are no ideals, only the law of the jungle? Is he completely uninterested in being liked, completely unmoved by the establishment's patronage, or on the contrary obsessed with winning all sorts of nice recognitions (such as lavish state visits to Britain and France or the Nobel Peace Prize)?
Genté insists on being overconfident.
It is probably, on some kind of quantum physics level, theoretically possible that the answer to all of the above is yes. I don't know. But Genté doesn't either, and yet he insists on being completely sure. Side up and side down.
He does convey one crucial insight, however, and that is that Trump needs friends – allies in the construction of a new world order. Other leaders who will give him support and protection as he, and after him J.D. Vance, tear apart American democracy and split the Western world. There we have perhaps the single most important explanation for Trump's continued prattling on about Putin. It is such a horrific thought in itself that the other anecdotes and circumstantial evidence mostly boil down to a single murmur.
Or, as I said, a single late grind at the bar.
