I'm John Batchew with my colleague Craig Unger, whose substact page is telling the story of American Compromat and House

of Trump, House of Putin. So the short version is the substack page, the lengthy part with the

footnotes and the connections to investigation, as Craig says, a lot of it, a great deal of this is

open source at the FBI, is in the two books American Compromont in House of Putin, House of Trump.

It is easier to see things many years later than you could see at the time.

And Craig, this is right before Donald Trump comes down, the golden escalator to announce his candidacy.

He had run for the presidency before.

We need to recover that. This wasn't a sudden idea of a man

looking to get his name in front of the American people in a year in which the presumption was

Mrs. Clinton was going to be the candidate for the Democrats. The presumption was that Mrs. Clinton

was going to sweep the field. When did he first think about running for

the presidency and who was he connected to then or how did he figure he needed bigger connections for

the next time he ran? Well, we need to go back nearly 40 years to 1987, really, when he started to

run for the 1988 presidential nomination. And July of 1987 was Trump's

first trip to Moscow. And when he came back from that, I mean, it was sort of startling,

but he was known as this brash, sort of vulgar playboy,

and suddenly he's running for president.

And that was a shock to everyone, I think.

But among other things, as soon as he came back, he took out a full-page ad in the New York

Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

And this was an ad that essentially put forth the same kind of foreign policy we're seeing

that he's trying to enact today. He was effectively dismantling the Western Alliance and America's alliance with Japan. So he took out a full-page ad

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