How a One-Time Santa Barbara Landowner and Russian Agents Got Trump Elected – Really

MONKEY BOY BLUES:  To steal a line from Christopher Lloyd — the great actor and longtime Santa Barbara resident — “It’s not my goddamn planet. You understand me, Monkey Boy?”

For some reason, this line — from the 80s cult classic Buckaroo Bonzai — is exploding in my head. Hundreds of people in Russia are being arrested — grief is now an act of political resistance — for placing flowers on the makeshift graves sprouting up across Russia to honor dissident Alexei Navalny, who died this past week from what Putin’s government is describing as “Sudden Death Syndrome.”

Sudden, indeed.

With Putin’s preordained landslide “re-election” right around the corner on March 17 — St. Patrick’s Day, coincidentally — and the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine closer still — February 24 — Navalny’s continued existence had become socially awkward.

Even more awkward — mind-boggling, actually — is the shameless cut-and-run stampede by House Republicans who are, as yet, stubbornly refusing to further underwrite the cost of Ukraine’s military resistance to the Russian invasion. The words of yet another former Santa Barbara resident, Ronald Reagan — also a former actor — come screaming to mind. “Mr. Gorbachev,” Reagan famously demanded, “tear down this wall!” 

Once upon a time, Republicans stood for something. Admittedly, I made a point to disagree with whatever that happened to be, but one can only imagine Reagan’s horrified response to the rigid pro-Putin group-think of the GOP. To an unfathomable degree, the Republican Party’s slogan has become, “Is that a dictator in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

How did this happen?

When in doubt, naturally, I blame Thomas Barrack II, an accomplished vulture capitalist and yet another one-time, part-time, erstwhile Santa Barbara resident. A real estate mogul, Barrack and his company Colony Capital made their bones back in 1991, buying up bad real estate loans in the wake of that year’s savings and loan scandal. For a while Barrack owned property down the road from Reagan’s 688-acre Rancho Cielo ranch. Later, he would buy Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, launch the Happy Canyon vineyard, and open a downtown tasting room. Being exceptionally fit, he played a ton of polo on the team he sponsored.

More significantly, in 2016, Barrack’s Political Action Committee donated $32 million to Trump’s presidential campaign. Barrack would later pony up $107 million for Trump’s inauguration, which still sets the bar for raw joyless lavishness.

But before that hapless event, Barrack — who carried himself always with dignified warmth and impeccable calmness — recommended that Trump hire a political consultant named Paul Manafort to run his campaign and stage-manage his nomination at that summer’s Republican National Convention. In pitching Manafort to Ivanka Trump, Barrack called him “a genius killer,” and emailed Trump directly, describing Manafort as “the most serious and lethal of managers.” 

Manafort, famed for his international black ops bag of tricks, had worked — beginning in 2005 — for 10 years for a Russian billionaire on a campaign, for which he was paid $10 million, designed to make Putin look good. About this same time, Manafort also represented a Ukrainian politician and kleptocrat whose chief virtue was his blind loyalty to Putin. Manafort got his candidate elected president, but when the Ukrainian people revolted at the obvious corruption in 2014, Manafort’s candidate fled to Russia and Putin launched his so-called secret invasion of Crimea — then, as now, part of Ukraine.

Starting to get the picture? 

Manafort is not so much Machiavellian as Manafortian. One of his schemes involved exploiting the hot-button cultural wedge in Ukraine — pitting people whose first language was Russian against those whose mother tongue was Ukrainian. Guess what? It worked. By fomenting sufficient strife, Putin — who always regarded Ukraine as Russian territory — could intervene militarily, pretending to rescue Russian nationals from Ukrainian terrorists. Not to unduly gild this lily, but Manafort’s right-hand man in all this would be exposed by the Treasury Department as being a “known Russian agent.” 

In 2016, Manafort succeeded in making sure Trump had the delegates needed to win the nomination. He even succeeded in removing a plank from the Republican Party platform that had pledged to support Ukraine if Russia invaded. The original language had pledged to send “defensive weapons” to Ukraine; Manafort softened the verbiage to offer only “appropriate assistance.”

When all this came out shortly after the convention, even Trump found himself forced to blush, though perhaps for the last time. Manafort quickly emerged as ground zero for anyone inclined to think Soviet bots helped torpedo Hillary Clinton’s already floundering campaign. 

The “through-line” — as they like to say these days — in all this is: Russian campaign interference on behalf of Trump in exchange for American acquiescence for Russian aggression. What one believes depends on one’s burden of proof. A smoking gun? Or where there’s smoke, there’s fire? Either way, Trump summarily shit-canned Manafort six months after hiring him. 

Manafort then found himself indicted, charged, and sentenced to seven years for money-laundering and tax fraud. Trump pardoned Manafort before his sentence — an ankle bracelet in his own home — had even been served.

Thomas Barrack, who is no longer even an erstwhile Santa Barbara resident, was brought up on federal charges for exploiting his connections as an unregistered foreign agent and had to post a $250 million bail. After deliberating three days, a jury found him not guilty. 

The moral of the story? All roads do, in fact, lead to Santa Barbara. And if you stumble across any makeshift memorial sites, please buy a black rose for Alexei Navalny. In the meantime, I can’t get Christopher Lloyd’s line out of my head. “It’s not my goddamn planet,” he screams. “You understand me, Monkey Boy?”