Active Measures: The Trump Miss Universe Play

Last week, we traced how the Kremlin’s troll factories penetrated American media and flooded the information space with memes, posts, and comments designed not only to erode trust in democracy, but to actively shape the 2016 election, amplifying hatred of Hillary Clinton, boosting Donald Trump, and deepening the polarization of Americans. And over the past chapters, we continued returning to Russia’s use of hybrid tactics, where propaganda, disinformation operations, business ventures, covert espionage, and religious and cultural display are woven together into a single arsenal of influence.

This week, we turn to Donald Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, an event that appeared at first glance to be little more than another glittering parade of models and celebrities in a long line of Trump-branded productions, but which in reality operated as one of the most consequential staging grounds for the Kremlin’s deeper cultivation of Trump — laying the networks that would later be weaponized in the 2016 election. For Trump, the Moscow pageant was a global branding opportunity, a chance to reassert the fading glamour of his name on an international stage and a personal platform for his ego. For the Kremlin, it was something more – precisely the kind of spectacle the Kremlin could use to cultivate leverage.

Trump’s Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA contests were never just pageants. Behind the dazzling stage lights and television cameras stood a long trail of allegations and controversies: former contestants and staff described exploitation and humiliating treatment, including claims that Donald Trump entered dressing areas while women were undressed, behavior he also discussed in a 2005 Howard Stern interview about going backstage “as the owner of the pageant.” In multiple accounts, women from the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants stated that he walked in on them during rehearsals or while they were changing, with contemporaneous reporting by major outlets documenting the claims. Pageant insiders also alleged that contestants were crudely sorted based on appearance and that ownership engaged in demeaning conduct, further eroding the brand’s reputation.

But for Russia, the meaning was altogether different. The Kremlin saw the pageant as a chance to bring an American celebrity to Moscow whose obsession with building a tower in their capital had stretched back decades, cultivate him through oligarch intermediaries who already operated at the intersection of politics, security services, and organized crime, place him in an environment where kompromat could be gathered effortlessly, and bind him through business promises and flattery to Kremlin-linked officials and businessmen whose reach extended far beyond the world of construction and entertainment. What unfolded over the course of that weekend in November 2013 was a convergence of Kremlin-owned oligarchs and mobsters seated side by side with political technologists and social media propagandists, all circling around a man whose personal ambitions aligned perfectly with Moscow’s strategic interests.

https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/active-measures-the-trump-miss-universe