Donald Trump speaking with supporters at an event hosted by Students for Trump and Turning Point Action at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
Trump cozying up to the steely Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and revering Russia's Vladimir Putin are the tell-tale signs of a democracy-deficient direction he'd like to take the country.
This week former president Donald Trump broke bread with Orbán and suggested he could end the Russian-Ukranian war by preventing even a "single penny" be allotted to fight the invasion.
"That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet," Orbán huffed afterward.
Jacob Heilbrunn, author of "America Last", appeared on MSNBC to touch on Trump's blueprint for a second term. Should it happen, it likely would witness Trump striking a kind of deal with both leaders while enriching himself in the process.
"In the end, it is all about the grift," he said. "Orbán is exploiting the so-called immigration crisis just the way Trump is attempting to do it on the southern border right now."
There's a reason immigration has been propped up so prominently in Trump's rants.
"But broadly, these are useful issues to claim power and then, it is about monetizing it for the family," said Heilbrunn. "That is exactly what we are seeing with the Trump family, right now, as the Republicans claim that Hunter Biden is some kind of Napoleon of crime when, in fact, as we see Kushner and Grenell and Trump himself engaging in deals in the Middle East. So, that is where I think the United States would be headed, toward a kleptocracy."
The 45th president's son-in-law managed to mint a $2 billion windfall investment from Saudi Arabia which has also been accused of being a "grift."
Just today, Kushner has also confirmed that he was finalizing major real estate deals in both Albania and Serbia.
The New York Times reported that Kushner's exploration in the Balkans "appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Trump was in office."
Heilbrunn sees parallels to Trump and his family's power plays as a troubling "form of oligarchy."
