the young Saudi prince. The Maldives is an island nation in the Indian Ocean where, after several meetings in the Seychelles, future Trump adviser Erik Prince will reportedly meet with Russian and Emirati agents on Trump’s behalf in early 2017 (see chapter 6).10
It is unknown whether Prince, or anyone else who will end up in the orbit of the Trump campaign, meets with the Saudi deputy crown prince (who is also the Saudi minister of defense) while MBS is “vacationing”—in the midst of a war he recently initiated—in the Maldives; there are indications this could have happened, however. At around the same time that bin Salman is mysteriously in the Maldives, allied intelligence agencies begin to intercept substantial chatter among Kremlin operatives discussing associates of Trump.11 According to the Wall Street Journal, “the volume of the mentions of Trump associates by the Russians … have [European intelligence] officials asking one another, ‘What’s going on?’”12 While there is, at present, no known direct association between bin Salman and Trump in spring 2015, it is clear that bin Salman’s “brawny foreign policy” aligns with Trump’s past statements about Saudi Arabia taking care of its own defense needs. MBS’s plan, according to the New York Times, is to have the kingdom be “less reliant on Western powers like the United States for its security”—an echo of the policy position frequently articulated by Trump on Twitter.13 Like Trump, bin Salman opposes any “thawing of America’s relations with Iran,” a euphemism for opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.14 Andrew Bowen, a Saudi expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., will in 2016 associate bin Salman’s belligerent policies with “a surge of Saudi nationalism,” yet another mirroring of Trump’s own political instincts.15 MBS’s “main message is that Saudi Arabia is a force to be reckoned with,” according to another Middle East expert, Brian Katulis of Washington’s Center for American Progress.16
Back in the United States, Paul Manafort spends the spring of 2015 in a clinic in Arizona, having suffered a “massive emotional breakdown,” according to his daughter Andrea.17 The onetime international operator calls his family daily with his voice “soaked in tears,” according to the Atlantic, and intimates to his other daughter, Jessica, that “suicide [is] a possibility.”18 One of his chief stressors is what Andrea describes as a “tight cash flow state” resulting from his former patron Viktor Yanukovych having recently fled to Russia to escape execution at the hands of a nationwide revolution in Ukraine; whether Manafort is aware that the FBI has already begun investigating him for his work in Ukraine is unclear, but his daughters note that he suddenly seems unwilling or unable to access any of the offshore bank accounts that might have alleviated the serious financial strain he is experiencing.19 He is also being hunted—quite literally—by Deripaska, to whom the United States has denied a visa due to what it believes to be his “ties to organized crime” and who, as Manafort would have been well aware, “won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called ‘aluminum wars’ of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry.”20 The previous year one of Deripaska’s attorneys had complained in open court that Manafort was on the run from Deripaska, saying of the former Yanukovych aide—and his business partner Rick Gates, who would soon end up as Trump’s deputy campaign manager—that “it appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared.”21
Manafort’s “disappearance” is short-lived, however. In February 2016, he surfaces at a business lunch with his old friend, longtime Trump confidant Thomas Barrack, telling the Lebanese American billionaire businessman and Colony Capital founder and executive chairman, “I really need to get to” Trump.22 When Barrack helps him do just that—in March 2016 winning him a job, through a course of lobbying Trump, as Trump’s “delegate counter”—the desperately cash-strapped Manafort, still owing millions of dollars to dangerous men overseas, nevertheless offers to work pro bono. As the Atlantic will note in early 2018, “When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign … he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures … evinced the character of a man … [with a] lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.”23
It is little surprise that Barrack has the influence