Ramble On: The Umar Kremlev Wedding

A bareknuckle-brawling Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin sprung for the wedding of Donald Trump, Jr. and his new wife Bettina. But sure, Trump/Russia’s a hoax.

Sep 18

Here is today’s ramble.

And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, September 18th. I’m recording it on Thursday evening, September 17th. It’s 8 o’clock PM.

We have to talk about Don Jr.’s wedding. I’m contractually obligated to talk about Don Jr.’s wedding. I have been writing about Trump/Russia for nine years now. I wrote a book about it in 2018, which is eight full years ago. It’s actually eight and a half years ago that the book came out—Dirty Rubles. And I’ve been told that I’m crazy. I’ve been told that I’m a charlatan. I’ve been told that this is a hoax. I’ve been told that it’s a witch hunt, this collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump people.

Guys, it’s not. He’s owned by Russia. He’s been installed by Russia to destroy us, as I wrote eight years ago on Twitter. And we just keep getting data point after data point after data point after data point after data point.

And here’s another one. Don Jr. gets married to Bettina Anderson—who is the daughter of one of Jeffrey Epstein’s bankers, because: keep it in the family.¹ And they have a lovely private wedding in the Bahamas, which requires them to rent not one but two private islands. And it’s a small, intimate affair, just friends and family, except for a small group of Russians that were there. And the other guests were like, “Why are these people here?”

The ringleader of the Russians is a 40-something-year-old man, stout, a little bit overweight, bald, not terribly handsome, by the name of Umar Kremlev. Umar Kremlev has been very close friends with Don Jr. for something like months now. They bonded over their mutual interests in shooting things, killing animals, boxing— you know, manly things. And I guess also mutual admiration for the Tate brothers.

Anyway, this guy is there, and why is he there? Because as it turns out—according to ProPublica, which has been doing great work, great investigative journalism— ProPublica reported that Umar Kremlev was at Don Jr.’s wedding because Umar Kremlev paid for Don Jr.’s wedding.

Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Bettina Anderson—is she now, Bettina Trump? I don’t know—she explained all of this in a very lengthy Instagram post. Guys, it’s not fair or accurate to say that he paid for the wedding. He only paid for the party after the wedding! The wedding was totally small and chill and paid for by the couple! It was the only the party after that Umar Kremlev forked over the the coin for! So thank you, Mrs. Trump, for clearing that up. That makes it much better, I’m sure.

The point is, this guy, even the guests weren’t sure who he was. Eric Trump, through a spokesman, said he’d never heard of the guy. This is the same Eric Trump who years ago said, “We have plenty of money coming in from Russia,” or whatever. Eric Trump doesn’t know Umar Kremlev, apparently. But there was Umar Kremlev. There he was at the wedding, hanging out, doing his thing.

Remember, Don Jr. is the one who met with the Russians in June of 2016 in Trump Tower. He was there with Jared Kushner, he was there with Paul Manafort, and he was there with Natalia Veselnitskaya, one of Putin’s lawyers. And the only reason that they let her into the building is because Don Jr. thought, stupidly, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton that would help his father win the election. Remember the quote? “If it happens later in the summer, I’ll love it.” This is collusion. We may not be legally allowed to use that word, but that’s—it smells collusion-y to me.

Anyway, none of this has changed. Don Jr. is the same person. There’s all these Russia connections. There always have been Russia connections, because the Kremlin owns these people. And that’s why everything that they do is designed to hurt the United States and help Russia. Everything. And it’s always been that way. And if you look at it through that lens—as I’ve been saying now for eight years, eight and a half years, nine years, however many years—if you look at it through that lens, everything makes sense.

So here is Umar Kremlev, Putin’s crony, desperate to keep off the U.S. sanctions list. Hey, why not pay for Don Jr.’s wedding, if that gets him off the sanctions list? So far it’s worked, by the way. He’s not a nice man, this guy, but he’s not on the sanctions list.

Before we go on further, let me read two paragraphs from the excellent ProPublica piece about Umar Kremlev:

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

So, okay, that’s A. Now, next paragraph, which appears several paragraphs later in the article:

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

It’s important to say that Tate’s denied the charges, even though, like, you know, I’m pretty sure he did it. Yeah, I think there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is just—all these people, these are bad men. They’re bad people. Kremlev, bad guy. Tate, bad guy. Barron Trump, bad guy. Don Jr., bad guy. These are bad, bad, bad people. Why are they bad? Because they don’t care about the United States. They care about themselves and they care about Russia. That’s it.

So Junior’s out there hobnobbing with this oligarch who even some of his guests don’t know who this guy is, and they’re like, “Why are these weird Russians here?” Well, maybe that’s not so weird. But the fact that this Kremlev guy thought it was okay and that it wouldn’t get out to show up at this thing? I don’t know. It says something.

Meanwhile, Jared Kushner this week actually released a video where he was explaining how, in order to to get peace in Ukraine, everybody needs to come to the table, everyone needs to make concessions, Putin has to save face, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s just spewing Kremlin propaganda. That’s all he’s doing. And he’s doing it with a look on his face. Jared has that look on his face like he smelled something really bad. Maybe he’s spent too much time standing behind his father in law? I don’t know, but he’s got that look on his face, like everything just stinks badly.

So he’s out there doing that. He’s in Moscow with Steve Witkoff, another old crony of his father-in-law’s, who’s basically groveling at the feet of this disgusting Putin. No one grovels quite like a lesser mobster.

So all of these guys, what do they have in common? They want to give Putin what he wants. That’s what they want, right? It’s disgusting. And you know, that’s what’s happening. And it’s not going to be a situation where we’re going to change course on Ukraine because Trump is in charge and that’s not what he wants. Because Trump cares about Putin more than he cares about Ukraine or really just about anything else.

As for Ivanka? I’m just gonna show this clip here. I’m not sure if this is AI or not. I don’t really care. Here is Ivanka on a beach, riding a horse really, really fast with her arms extended. I don’t know. In the context of Russia, maybe she’s trying to get her Catherine the Great on. I’m not sure.

But it weird. It’s weird. This whole thing is very strange. This is a weird family. These are weird people. They’re evil. They’re out of touch. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about me. I don’t even think they care about each other. They just want to make as much money as possible and rule the world, you know? And rule the world by being basically subordinate to Vladimir Putin. They think that’s okay. It’s all very strange.

Okay, we better turn off the video of the horse. We don’t want to get Kash Patel too excited.

The reality of the United States right now, the reality we’re living in, is that the Director of the FBI made it okay for the FBI to hire people who had been accused of bestiality, because he thought that it was necessary to do that. And then he stood there as lawmakers grilled him about it and couldn’t really answer the questions in a way that made much sense. So I don’t know. It reminds me of the old joke: He was just helping the sheep over the fence, guys. That’s all.

But back to Don Jr. I mean, I don’t know what else I can do at this point. And I know you watching this, everybody who’s watched, especially this far into the video or read this far into my piece, you know that I’ve been talking about this for a long time. You agree with me, you know where it’s at, and I appreciate that.

And look, you’re not crazy. I’m not crazy. This is really happening. This is a thing that’s really happening. The son of the president of the United States had his wedding paid for by a Russian oligarch, so far up Putin’s ass that he’s really in all the little murky, scummy details.

And his name is Umar Kremlev. Kremlev! I don’t know if we could make up a better name. We could sit here all day and not make a better name than that.

I don’t know. It’s all very weird. I don’t understand it. I’ll never understand it. But I’m telling you, I’ve been saying this for years, and I’m gonna keep saying it until people start to realize it, or perhaps for the benefit of people in some future society who might be able to unravel this and wonder what became of the United States and how the entire civilization collapsed: We installed a candidate owned by the Kremlin. We elected that guy, and then, we elected him again. That’s what we did. That’s what we did.

Unless we didn’t. I haven’t seen the Alex Gibney Elon Musk documentary yet, but maybe we didn’t. Maybe it’s all a hoax, right? I don’t know. Can’t wait for that to come out.

I got nothing else to say. Shout out to Uncle Umar. And I’m glad that Donald and Bettina had such a lovely time at their wedding. So nice, such a beautiful couple.

All right, until next time, we shall prevail.

TONIGHT

Just me and LB and our guest, the writer Curtis White, author of a new manifesto on art and literature and philanthropy and more, ON RESISTANCE.

Not to be confused with Maria Butina.

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