Greenberg, Orban & Putin: Trump’s GOP?

Steve Villano
4 min readMar 12, 2024
(In an illustration from the Financial Times of London, Vladimir Putin congratulates Viktor Orban of Hungary on a job well done.)

Did Vikkktor Orban come with gold?

Would Putin’s bagman be so bold?

The same day he arrives from Hungary,

Trump’s bonded debt is suddenly fungery…

Orban the mule for Putin’s rubles?

None of these thugs have ANY scruples.

What’s billions of dollars to hijack democracy?

It won’t be missed in their kleptocracies.

They bought him once in 0’ sixteen,

Then bribed his cultists in between.

Now bleeding bucks and out of dough,

Trump’s still for sale, with Mar-A-Lago.

Kite the payoffs through shells,

Chubb Insurance? Gee, thanks!

Use unscrupulous U.S. businessmen

To cover your flanks.

Trump’s tiny hands in their pockets,

Since his are so empty.

Why aren’t DOJ, SEC,

Acting pre-emptly?

He’ll blow apart NATO

Surrender Ukraine,

If Putin and lackeys

Make money rain.

They’ll pay his fines,

Wipe out his debt;

Control of U.S. secrets,

The least they would get.

On Tucker, On Bannon,

On Miller, On Putin,

Who needs insurrection,

When its easier lootin’?

(NOTE TO READERS: I started drafting this poem on the day after Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, and bagman for Putin, arrived in Mar-A-Lago to visit Donald Trump — at virtually the same time President Biden was beginning his State of the Union address, calling for the urgent defense of democracy. Within 24-hours of Orban’s arrival in Florida, Trump announced that he had miraculously found the $91 million he needed to come up with as a surety bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation & sexual assault verdict against him.

I thought it was fishy that the money didn’t flow until Orban hit Mar-A-Lago. Turns out, Viktor Orban might not be Putin’s only bag man, delivering money with strings to a flat-broke Donald Trump. Independent journalist and fellow Substack writer Seth Abramson has followed the money in series of astonishing exposes, which traces it through several sources with Russian financial connections.

Among those sources are Evan Greenberg’s Chubb Insurance Company, which guaranteed the first $91 million Trump bond. Greenberg, who held an advisory post in the Trump Administration, is the son of Maurice Greenberg, the longtime boss of AIG, who also ran a Russian investment vehicle known as Starr International, according to Abramson. In fact, Abramson identifies Maurice Greenberg, now 98 years old, as “ a Vladimir Putin business associate, who is also associated with Russian spies, other Kremlin agents, and the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.” (See link to Abramson’s article below.)

However, Abramson, whose 3-part series is a scathing indictment of the major American businessmen being used by Putin to leverage Trump, wasn’t the only one to smell something rotten. On Friday, March 8, The New Republic ran a story headlined: “What Idiot Backed Trump’s Bond in E. Jean Carroll Trial? This One.” The focus of the story was on Chubb Insurance CEO Evan Greenberg. The New Republic story went on to report:

“ Court records filed Friday (March 8, 2024) show that the bond was guaranteed by the Chubb Corporation, an insurance group. In 2018, Trump appointed Chubb’s CEO Evan Greenberg to a White House advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations.”

Yes, Trump never stops grifting off of whomever he can get to grift for him. Beyond the Greenbergs, the Chubb Corporation and their national and international insurance dealings, lurks a few urgent questions which may affect U.S. National Security, the security of NATO and the free world:

  • How deeply is Putin behind all of this?
  • What has Trump promised to the Russians in exchange for paying his bonds?
  • Shouldn’t the DOJ, the SEC, the NSA, the CIA and perhaps the U.S. Senate launch investigations into whether the payment of this bond money by third parties, foreign nationals, or, potentially, laundered sources amount to bribery, and violations of national security?

And, almost as if on cue, Orban told the BBC on March 11, 2024, after leaving Mar-A-Lago, that Trump told him that if he is elected President in November, “Ukraine would not get another cent from the United States.”

Isn’t that precisely the outcome Putin wants?

  • (Link to Seth Abramson’s Substack articles: )

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