By comparison to Trump and his allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are seeking an alliance with Netanyahu, the Iranians are far more likely to support Gantz than Netanyahu, given the latter’s recent declaration that he favors war with Tehran; the Iranians are therefore far less likely to threaten the election chances of the “Blue and White” party’s candidate (Gantz) by publicly exposing him to blackmail.330 Days before the election, the Associated Press reports that a mysterious “network of social media bots,” including “hundreds of fake accounts,” are “frequently and exclusively” supporting Netanyahu and attacking Gantz—even, in an echo of the 2016 general election in the United States, “inciting hate speech.”331 The country from which these bots and fake accounts originate is unknown.
On April 9, Netanyahu defeats Gantz in the race for Israeli’s presidency, a development the Associated Press reports means that Netanyahu will “press ahead with a hardline agenda that will likely eliminate the last hopes of a two-state solution with the Palestinians.”332 Netanyahu’s reelection also ensures that all six of the world leaders who endorse a “grand bargain” in the Middle East—MBS, MBZ, el-Sisi, Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu—remain in power in their respective countries.
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In 2019, the world will see new revelations regarding the scope of Putin’s international election meddling. In Italy, L’Espresso reports, as summarized by Mother Jones, that “Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of the hard-right Lega Nord party … sought [in 2018] a 3 million euro funding commitment from Kremlin-linked entities to finance his political campaign … [with] the money to flow to Lega Nord covertly, tucked behind an ordinary-seeming oil export deal between Italian and Russian companies.”333 In England, Channel 4 News reveals that “in the heated months in the run-up to the ‘Brexit’ referendum”—a referendum whose passage Putin strongly favored—“millionaire Brexit backer Arron Banks eagerly pursued a multibillion-pound gold deal brought to him by a Russian oligarch with links to the Kremlin”; by June, the European Union, along with the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the governing body most immediately and profoundly affected by “Brexit,” will announce that “Russia conducted a ‘continued and sustained’ disinformation campaign against Europe’s recent parliamentary elections.”334 And in the United States, the Washington Post cites a recent report by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs establishing that “Russia is responsible for 80 percent of disinformation activities in Europe.”335 Meanwhile, CNBC reveals that Putin’s top lieutenant, Dmitry Peskov, has managed to place his daughter as an intern at the European Union—a particularly troubling development given the Kremlin’s commitment to breaking up the EU and its past interference with the union’s elections.336 Indeed, as far back as 2016 the BBC had aired a report accusing Putin of “using hybrid warfare”—that is, the BBC explains, “any form of [international] aggression short of open invasion”—to “destabilize the EU.”337
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In the spring of 2019, new attention is focused on Trump’s connections to China—first detailed as problematic and potentially collusive in the Steele dossier—as a Chinese woman with a suspicious thumb drive looking to meet with Trump gains access to Mar-a-Lago, and numerous individuals close to Trump are found to have been in contact with a second Chinese woman, Cindy Yang, who bragged online about selling access to the president.338 In the first instance, the woman who breaches security at the president’s country club, Yujing Zhang, is found to have two Chinese passports, a self-executing malware application, nine USB drives, five SIM cards, $7,500 in $100 bills, and a “signal detector to detect hidden cameras.”339 Most troublingly, Zhang presents “an invitation to Mar-a-Lago managers … [that] is the same as an invitation posted on the website of Cindy Yang, the Florida spa founder who was allegedly selling access to Trump events at Mar-a-Lago” to Chinese nationals.340 Federal agents tell a court that they “believe she [Zhang] may be a Chinese intelligence agent and an ‘extreme’ flight risk.”341 Yang, the spa owner, is at the time a potential witness in a “human trafficking investigation” as the former owner of several spas that were shut down by federal investigators for allegedly selling illicit sexual services; the investigation, notes the Miami Herald, had by the time of Zhang’s arrest “shutter[ed] ten massage parlors and result[ed] in charges against more than 300 men”—including one well-known businessman who is a close friend of the president, New England Patriots president Robert Kraft.342 Of Kraft, the Miami Herald writes, “Only in Florida could a billionaire’s massage parlor pit stop unmask