Trump 31: Parody of a Presidency

[47of74]

I see fuck face is going to Florida to have a rally; 

Just gonna save us all a bit of time and say this is a picture of the rally...

[GreyhoundFan]

He's going to spend a week at Mar-a-Loco.  I guess he needed more "executive time".

Spoiler

President Donald Trump’s ever-growing list of grievances piled up on Monday — and now he has decamped to Mar-a-Lago, where he’s going to have plenty of time to obsess over them.

The president’s regular visits to his Florida property often bring out an even more unfiltered Trump, and people close to the president are bracing for a potentially tumultuous trip, according to three outside advisers.

By Monday afternoon, it appeared there were all manners of triggers that could set the president off.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen again appeared in court under the cloud of a federal criminal investigation. Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump’s friend and frequent confidant, was named as one of Cohen’s clients during the court proceedings. Reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times, which Trump has regularly lambasted on Twitter, won Pulitzer prizes for their coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. And Trump had to walk back a pledge by his ambassador to the United Nations to impose new sanctions on Moscow.

Even before he departed for Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump was fuming over former FBI Director James Comey’s new book and the ongoing criminal investigation into Cohen. Five days at Mar-a-Lago, where he often spends even more time watching cable news and talking to friends, could send his frustrations to new heights.

"Someone should say a prayer for Sarah, Mercy and Raj because rest assured, Mar-A-Lago is the last place they want the president spending his time this week,” said one person close to the White House, referring to White House communications staffers Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mercedes Schlapp and Raj Shah. “They have a lot of clean-up duty ahead of them."

Some in the West Wing have come to dread the trips, which make an already unpredictable president even more difficult to manage. The visits to Mar-a-Lago come with “more distractions, more reminders of pre-POTUS life, more opportunities for outside friends to make contact,” one former White House official said, “and more time watching TV.”

The revelation that Cohen did legal work for Hannity immediately lit up social media and even got play on Fox News. "It's very strange to have my own television network have my name up on the lower third,” Hannity remarked on his radio show Monday, adding, “Michael never represented me in any matter. I never retained him. But I occasionally have had brief discussions with him” on legal matters.

Trump regularly speaks to Hannity and other Fox News personalities, who often serve as unofficial cheerleaders for the president. Trump has sometimes even promoted Hannity’s show on Twitter, including earlier this month ahead of an episode in which Hannity excoriated Comey.

The president has been known to be defensive of his friends and allies, and people close to Trump expect him to be furious that Hannity’s name is being dragged into the Cohen investigation.

With so many of Trump’s trusted advisers gone, from former communications director Hope Hicks to personal aide John McEntee, the president has fewer people around him to tamp down his impulses.

At Mar-a-Lago — where he’s officially going to be hosting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — he’ll likely have greater contact with outside advisers who have been deeply critical of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and have even suggested firing deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

Trump has been ranting in private for days about Rosenstein, who signed off on the FBI’s raid of Cohen’s office and apartment. Comey’s media tour, which featured a primetime ABC News interview on Sunday as well as multiple interviews this week, has only further cemented Trump’s belief that his critics are conspiring to undermine him.

"Comey drafted the Crooked Hillary exoneration long before he talked to her (lied in Congress to Senator G), then based his decisions on her poll numbers," Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday. "Disgruntled, he, McCabe, and the others, committed many crimes!"

The president's online post refers to a finding by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who uncovered transcripts last August showing Comey began drafting a recommendation against filing charges against Democrat Hillary Clinton over her use of a personal email server during her tenure as secretary of state months before the FBI investigation into that server had concluded.

Trump also made reference to Comey's forthcoming book, which includes a passage in which the former FBI director said "it is entirely possible" that his late October 2016 decision to notify Congress of the bureau's discovery of additional Clinton emails on the laptop of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner was partly influenced by the Democratic candidate's significant lead in the polls at the time.

Aside from the president's Monday morning tweet, it was counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway who served as the public face of the White House's response to Comey's interview. She slammed the former FBI director on Monday as an attention-hungry author whose forthcoming book amounts to a “revisionist history” of his interactions with Trump.

Conway appeared Monday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” responding to the hour-long interview special that the network aired Sunday night with Comey in which the former FBI director said Trump is morally unfit to be president and said it is possible that the Russian government is in possession of compromising material regarding the president.

Conway was unflinching in her own evaluation of the former FBI director’s performance, telling George Stephanopoulos that Comey “struggled to answer basic questions and he looked a little shaky.” She called certain parts of his book regarding the size of Trump's hands and the length of his tie "gutter."

Even before it aired, Comey’s interview seemingly sent shockwaves through the White House, with the president erupting with several tweets over the weekend directing vitriol at the former FBI director, whom Trump labeled “slippery James Comey.” The president also called Comey, whom he fired last spring with the bureau’s ongoing Russia investigation weighing on his mind, the worst leader in the FBI’s history.

Comey, elsewhere in his interview with Stephanopoulos, compared Trump’s emphasis on loyalty to that of a mafia boss. He said it was possible that the president’s alleged request during a Feb. 14, 2017, dinner that Comey let go of an FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn could constitute obstruction of justice.

Sanders told reporters Monday that the president watched some of Comey’s interview.

"He saw bits and pieces,” she said, adding, that he “didn't watch the whole thing.”

I bet the only thing he didn't watch was the commercials.

[GreyhoundFan]

[Howl]

11 hours ago, fraurosena said:

What a surprise!

Trapped In The White House: Many Trump Aides Are Too “Toxic” To Get Jobs

Schadenfreude alert! 

And on a happier note, the Trump University fraud lawsuit was settled today for 25 million.  25 million!  

Quote

The circumstances are nothing short of bizarre: a sitting president of the United States has written a check for $25 million to a group of Americans who credibly claimed that he ripped them off by perpetrating a fraud.

You know things are bad for a president when a story like this goes almost entirely unnoticed by the public, eclipsed by a dozen or so more pressing scandals.

Full text at MSNBC: Judge finalizes $25 million settlement in Trump’s fraud case

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Someone should say a prayer for Sarah, Mercy and Raj because rest assured, Mar-A-Lago is the last place they want the president spending his time this week,” said one person close to the White House, referring to White House communications staffers Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mercedes Schlapp and Raj Shah. “They have a lot of clean-up duty ahead of them."

If you insist:

Dear Rufus,

Please prick the hearts of Sarah, Mercy, and Raj, so that they will realize that they are not innocent victims in this scenario, and that continuing to work for a jackass who takes pleasure in hurting vulnerable people speaks volumes about the diseased state of their souls.

Amen

[GreyhoundFan]

This is from Friday. I don't think I shared it then: "Trump is calling Comey a liar because to Trump, all criticism is a lie"

Spoiler

When the long-term story of the Trump administration is eventually written — however short-term his presidency might end up being — James B. Comey may be cast as a secondary player with good intentions and horrible timing.

His last-minute decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just before the 2016 presidential election was one of several variables that seem to have contributed to her thin defeat but probably wouldn’t have made much difference for the result if he had done it weeks earlier or later. Now Comey’s memoir is coming out at what appears to be the peak of a crescendo of bad news for Trump that makes him as likely to try to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as he has been since, well, he fired Comey.

Even more remarkable than Comey’s apparent ability to pinball through history saying what he intends to be the right thing at precisely the wrong time is the reaction to it from Trump and his supporters: a venal mix of hypocrisy and desperate attempts to convince Americans that the former FBI director is a liar — that up is down, and down is up.

Comey’s decision to bring up Trump’s apparent obsession with the allegations in Christopher Steele’s dossier that a video exists of Trump watching prostitutes urinate on each other is being framed by Trump allies as Comey “settling scores” for Trump’s behavior toward him — an ignominious firing without the courtesy of a face-to-face dismissal, followed by repeated disparagements of Comey’s career. But it’s hard to imagine a scenario where anything Comey wrote would not be construed as vindictiveness by Trump partisans. In Trumpland, the only acceptable stance is public agreement with the president, even if the president is maligning your career, values and integrity with no basis to do so — and even if you may have helped hand him the presidency in the first place.

Even people who should know better seem to have internalized this propagandistic pablum. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted that Comey should have resigned if he thought the president was a congenital liar, and if he believed that, then “Why did he work for Trump?” Fleischer was quickly reminded that FBI employees do not work for the president; they work for the country and serve to uphold the values of the Constitution. Where the president deviates from those values or actively subverts them, they have a moral obligation to side with the country over the president.

This, of course, speaks to a key mechanism the Trump administration has used to deflect criticism, which is to conflate the president with the country and suggest that any criticism of the president is an assault on America.

If public servants like Comey believed that, we would have a government that reflected the will of a single individual, however weak, misguided, corrupt or incompetent, and it would collapse with every administrative turnover. And if everyone who believed Trump was a congenital liar resigned, who would be left?

The new book, and Comey’s associated publicity tour, is a giant splash of lighter fluid on this week’s Trump administration conflagration, one that was already well-tindered by Monday’s raid on the home and office of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the persistent existence of Stormy Daniels in general, another potential tabloid payoff, and an assortment of other disasters that do not bode well for the president. In his memoir, Comey compares the administration to a forest fire, but at this point, it’s not merely combustible, it’s potentially explosive — and if Trump’s anger level is already at an all-time high, the book was the last thing he needed.

It’s hard to blame Comey for that, though — book publication dates don’t generally follow the minute-by-minute fluctuations of the news cycle. And at any rate, Comey’s most explosive claims appear to be observations that have been made before and facts that have already verified elsewhere. For example, when Comey compares Trump to a mob boss, he’s not saying anything that hasn’t been documented elsewhere, much of it for decades. A representative line from an article in the April 1991 issue of Spy magazine: “A mobster who knew Trump socially said of him once, ‘he’d lie to you about what time of day it is — just for the practice.’ ” Comey isn’t even the first Republican to make that comparison.

But to the Trumpist die-hards, any criticism is a provocation, no matter how plain and irrefutable its validity or veracity. The speaker does not matter, only that what the speaker is saying is oppositional. This is how the GOP performs the sort of moral contortions that led the party to create a website, lyincomey.com, with the explicit purpose of smearing the former FBI director, a registered Republican, ahead of publication of his book.

It’s unclear whether Republicans in Congress feel this way, considering that some of them viewed Comey’s firing as an attempt on the president’s part to avoid accountability, but they are not pushing back. The party at large is taking a cue from Trump, who has a habit of accusing his enemies of things he has done — even the Sunday school-teacher types like Comey, who are so far outside the model of corruption and dishonesty that Trump embodies that they seem like an entirely different species.

Trump is happy to extend and exacerbate this toxic dynamic, and he tweeted Friday that Comey was a “slime ball” and a “terrible director of the FBI,” a “proven LEAKER and LIAR,” and baselessly and falsely accused him of leaking classified information and perjuring himself. Aside from the fact that at least two of these claims would be a slam-dunk defamation claim for Comey if they were made by anyone but the president — who apparently believes that there are no consequences for anything he says, no matter how destructive and false — many of the epithets Trump attaches to Comey are the ones most frequently and accurately applied to the president. He is a prolific fabulist who produces falsehoods at such volume that it might be easier to catalogue the occasions where he accidentally says something that’s true, and whose habit of leaking to the news media became so ingrained and regular that he invented a pseudonym to better facilitate it.

And Trump’s allies are willing and happy to enable the smears. Sean Hannity, whose entire raison d’etre now appears to be defending the president, maligned Comey, who has prosecuted many members of the mafia over the course of his career, as someone who doesn’t know what a real mob boss looks like. (Hannity himself has prosecuted exactly zero members of the mafia and is predictably convinced that mob bosses look like Hillary Clinton.) Former Trump adviser and intelligence pseudo-expert Sebastian Gorka repeated the slur that Comey is a liar, and called CNN reporters “perverts” for good measure. Jason Miller, former Trump senior communications adviser, suggested on CNN that Comey’s practice of taking notes after meeting with Trump was “vindictive,” even though note-taking in these meetings is standard procedure for FBI officials. In a briefing Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders described Comey’s firing as one of Trump’s greatest achievements and called him a “disgraced partisan hack,” an appellation that seems destined to be applied more rigorously to herself.

There’s irony in the GOP response: The central thesis of Comey’s book is that the steady stream of lies coming out of the Oval Office is damaging to democracy, and there’s no evidence that Comey has lied about anything. The notion that “Comey is a liar” is less the view of mainstream Republicans than an attempt by the president’s supporters to redefine “lie” as any assertion of inconvenient information, no matter how easily or obviously verifiable. In Trump’s formulation, a lie is not a fabrication of fact or a statement intended to mislead; it’s anything that offends his sensibilities or those of his cronies. The result is an almost Orwellian algorithm: If what’s said is true but unflattering to the president, it’s a lie. If what’s said is a lie but flatters the president, it’s true.

Even this simple binary fails when confronted with contradicting statements, both of which are unflattering to the president. Late Friday afternoon, Trump took the opportunity to call someone else a liar in all-caps on Twitter — three times in succession, with exclamation marks — following the release of a report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general stating that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired because he “lacked candor” about conversations with members of the media and misled investigators. Trump also fired McCabe, and the report is convenient in the sense that it allows Trump to call McCabe part of a “den of thieves and lowlifes” with some credibility. But it’s inconvenient in the sense that the report is also based on Comey’s assertions about what happened with McCabe. This is the Catch-22 for the president: If you believe that McCabe lied to Comey, you have to believe that Comey told the truth.

And the truth matters, because Comey is right: There is no value to democracy in entrenching an individual’s mistakes and protecting the president’s reputation at the expense of the country and our values. And even if it feels inconvenient right now, that message is still better delivered than not. There’s no bad time to remind Americans that its leaders do not get to construct an alternate reality and demand that everyone else live in it. A lie is still a lie, by the standard definitions, and even the president can’t change that.

 

[Howl]

Poor Trump.  No Hopey.  No whoever that young guy was who kept everybody happy in the West Wing.  And that John Kelly is being SUCH  a beotch. 

 I'm thrilled to pieces that Lord Dampnut is so verklempt  that he had to decamp early to Mar-a-Loco on A MONDAY!  He's hosting the Japanese prime minister starting today, but still. 

And this after Nikki Haley announced more Russia sanctions and then everybody had to walk that back, because, nope!, don't want to get on Bro Putin's bad side. 

Also, Ross Douthat  has an op-ed from April 2011 telling us why it might be time to start looking at Pence for 2020.  I don't care for Ross Douthat (religious conservative) but he makes some very interesting points about Teavangelicals and Trump and why they  still cling to Trump, even in the face of ongoing scandals. 

Why Not Mike Pence?

(For those who get into this and think, TLDR, this is the final awesome paragraph: And for those same religious conservatives to pass up the chance, preferring a scorched-earth battle in defense of priapism, would be a sad confirmation of the point that a beloved Christian author made many years ago: The doors of hell are locked on the inside.

Spoiler

 

A few days ago, which is to say an eternity in our Trump-dilated time, there was a story on NPR about anxious evangelicals’ seeking a meeting with the president.

The subject of their agita, not entirely surprisingly, was the Stormy Daniels affair, in which the president’s lawyer-fixer, Michael Cohen, appears to have averted a possible October surprise by buying the silence of a porn star (and perhaps more than one) with whom Trump committed adultery shortly after the birth of his third wife’s only son.

But the prominent evangelicals seeking the meeting were apparently less concerned about the adultery (or the payoff’s possible campaign finance violation) than about the political ramifications — low religious-right turnout in 2018, a defeat for Republicans, and from there defeats on the policy issues that forced religious conservatives to make their peace with Trump in the first place.

Now with the F.B.I. raids on Cohen’s various offices, the emanations and penumbras from Robert Mueller’s investigation seem to have raised the Stormy Daniels stakes, pushing us closer to a scenario in which our first openly Hefnerian president gets impeached for illegalities related to an adult entertainer and her charms.

The sudden investigatory focus on Cohen and Daniels might turn out to be a legal tempest in a D-cup. But still, for evangelicals concerned that their agenda is yoked so closely to the fortunes of that Hefnerian president, this seems like a good time to contemplate a simple question: Why not Mike Pence?

In the 2016 election, once Marco Rubio was defeated and Ted Cruz dispatched, religious conservatives faced a binary choice: Vote Trump or get Hillary. One does not have to agree with the ultimate decision that most of them made to understand the logic that motivated a decision for Trump.

But the politics of the coming year, once the Mueller investigation ceases to be a black box and delivers whatever it’s going to deliver (you’ll get no predictions from me!), might offer a very different choice. If Trump were impeached and removed from the White House, the presidency would devolve to precisely the kind of man whom much of pre-Trump religious conservatism insisted that it wanted in the Oval Office: an evangelical Christian family man with a bluenose’s temperament and a boring Reaganite checklist of beliefs.

Which means that if, in what is no longer an absurd hypothetical, the president were to face real legal-political jeopardy over the Stormy Daniels business, the evangelical leaders currently fretting about Trump’s political position would face a case where doing the consistent thing — namely, returning to their Bill Clinton-era position that character counts in presidents and using illegal means to conceal gross infidelities are impeachable offenses — would actually deliver something closer to what they claimed to want, not so very long ago: not a liberal in the White House, but President Mike Pence.

Now I understand very well all the reasons that in the event of a Trump impeachment over Stormy Daniels or anything else, most evangelicals will probably rally to him instead of gently elbowing Pence in to take his place. We do not have a parliamentary system where party leaders fight internal battles and get replaced by their internal rivals on the regular; instead, we elect a quasi-monarch, whose removal seems as traumatic as a regicide. And thus party loyalists tend to identify with their leaders the way royalists identify with their kings, and regard the prospect of impeachment not as an opportunity for a change of leadership but a revolutionary threat.

What this means for the Trump coalition is that lots of Republicans who once resisted the Trumpian takeover have now accepted the various narratives that cast him as an indispensable man — because he’s the only Republican who knows how to fight, because his removal would be a victory for the hated establishment and the even more hated media and the many-tentacled Deep State, because whatever else happens you can’t let the liberals win. And evangelicals have their particular version of these Trump-the-indispensable conceits, from the analogies to King David (who slept around a lot, too, didn’t he?) to the widespread belief that Trump’s repeated against-the-odds victories mean that Providence somehow chose him for this role — and whom God has elevated, let no man impeach.

But for all their inevitable appeal, these are bad reasons to pre-emptively reject impeachment, in the Daniels case or any other that Mueller might reveal. And I don’t just mean they’re bad reasons because they’re too partisan and tribal; I mean that the evidence from the last case like this, the Clinton impeachment in all its splendor, is that the partisan and tribal response does not necessarily serve your party or tribe that well.

There is no way of knowing exactly what would have happened, of course, had Clinton been pushed out by Senate Democrats and Al Gore installed in his place. But there are good reasons to suspect that as an incumbent steward of late-1990s prosperity untainted by his steadfast support for a lying boss, Gore would have had an easier time dispatching George W. Bush in 2000, and the entire trajectory of the early 2000s would have been more favorable to Democrats. And there are also good reasons to think that professional feminists, who contorted themselves absurdly in defense of Clinton’s predatory conduct, would have been better off accelerating their reckoning with the pigs of liberalism rather than waiting for the age of Trump and the old age of Harvey Weinstein.

These lessons could apply to a Trump impeachment as much as to the Lewinsky affair. A Republican Party that ran in 2020 with a boring Midwestern guy (albeit, yes, one sure to be trailed by protesters in Handmaid outfits) as the steward of prosperity would not necessarily be worse off than a party lashed to its current leader; if Gerald Ford could almost win in Nixon’s shadow, why not Pence in Trump’s? And a religious conservatism that sacrificed a lot of cultural credibility in defending Trump might regain a little by abandoning him, vindicating itself against what seem now like reasonable charges of “character for thee but not for me” hypocrisy.

Plus, there’s the providential aspect. Sure, making use of Donald Trump to keep Hillary Clinton from being president is a fascinating flourish by history’s Author, but the idea that the Almighty might use a porn star to make Mike Pence president represents, if anything, an even more amazing miracle. So anyone interested in looking for the hand of God in history should probably welcome that miracle’s arrival, rather than resisting in the name of MAGA.

Am I jesting? Only to a point. That God has a sense of dramatic irony and narrative surprise seems like one of the most obvious lessons to be drawn from the Trump era. That God is using Trump not as an agent of his good work but as a kind of ongoing test of everyone else’s moral character seems like a not-unreasonable inference to draw. That God would offer religious conservatives in danger of selling their souls a chance not just to step back from the brink but to literally replace Donald Trump with a fellow religious conservative — well, that seems like just the kind of opportunity that a beneficent deity would grant to erring members of his flock.

And for those same religious conservatives to pass up the chance, preferring a scorched-earth battle in defense of priapism, would be a sad confirmation of the point that a beloved Christian author made many years ago: The doors of hell are locked on the inside.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The White House is laughably distancing Trump from Michael Cohen. So we imagined how it might minimize other allies."

Spoiler

It's a well-worn path: Someone in President Trump's orbit gets in trouble, and the White House bends over backward trying to distance itself from that person — often in ways that strain credulity. Top aides suddenly become interlopers. Foreign policy advisers become “coffee boys.” The crucial months of the 2016 campaign are reduced to an insignificant period of time. We are assured that Trump doesn't even really need aides.

Trump's longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen is the latest to be on the receiving end of this treatment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested Monday that Cohen was just another lawyer. “I believe they've still got some ongoing things, but the president has a large number of attorneys, as you know,” she said. Fellow White House spokesman Hogan Gidley repeated the talking point on CNN on Monday night, saying that Cohen was one of “many” Trump lawyers.

Come on. Trump certainly has a lot of lawyers — especially given his special counsel investigation problem — but Cohen was the only one negotiating hush-money payments with porn stars, appearing on TV as a surrogate, and to whom Trump regularly referred as “my attorney.” Cohen is the guy who has expressed unflinching and complete loyalty to Trump. Cohen isn't just another lawyer. In fact, “lawyer” doesn't begin to describe his closeness to Trump.

Similarly, here's how the White House and Trump campaign have played down the roles of other aides who faced trouble:

George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser on the 2016 campaign: “The coffee boy.” “An extremely limited role.” “A volunteer position.”

Michael T. Flynn, White House national security adviser and 2016 campaign adviser: “A volunteer of the campaign.”

Paul Manafort, who served as head of the campaign for months spanning the Republican National Convention: “Played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

Carter Page, another campaign foreign policy adviser: “Hanger-on.” “Has made no contribution to the campaign.” “Was a very low-level member of I think a committee for a short period of time.”

Roger Stone, a longtime informal Trump adviser: “Hanger-on.”

You get the idea.

But it got me thinking: What if other members of the White House or close Trump allies got in trouble? How would their roles be minimized?

Below are some possibilities:

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt: “Not even an actual Cabinet secretary.”

Chief of Staff John F. Kelly: “One of many generals.” “Served as a Cabinet secretary for a very limited amount of time.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “Related to one of the president's many vanquished primary opponents.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions: “Not a loyal Trump supporter or defender.”

National security adviser John Bolton: “Trump never liked his mustache and didn't listen to him.”

CIA Director (and secretary of state nominee) Mike Pompeo: “A leader of the deep state.”

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow: “A TV personality who wasn't even on the good channels.”

Assistant to the president Dan Scavino: “A microblogger.”

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway: “Spokesperson.”

Vice President Pence: “Not a supporter of Trump's campaign.” “Was going to lose reelection until Trump picked him for VP.”

I love some of the options. I wonder if SHS will note them to use when the people in question fall out of Dumpy's favor.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I couldn't agree more: "It’s more important than ever that we see Trump’s tax returns"

Spoiler

Some Tax Day traditions have developed over the years, like grumbling about the complexity of the system and complaining about wasteful government spending. Here’s another thing that deserves to  become a widely shared tradition.

We have the right to know why the president of the United States continues to hide his tax returns from us. While we should have seen them years ago, this is not an old, irrelevant story. In fact, seeing them is more important now than it’s ever been.

President Trump has been lying about this question from the beginning. In 2014, he told an interviewer, “If I decide to run for office, I’ll produce my tax returns. Absolutely.” When he ran, he said “I will absolutely give my returns but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished.” This was completely false: The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t prevent anyone from publicly releasing their tax returns while they’re being audited.  Then when Trump took office, he and and his aides switched gears to argue that this was all settled by the election.

In the past, a president’s tax returns (or those of candidates) tended not to be very interesting. Politicians might have a salary, royalties from books, mutual funds, speaking fees and so on. But Trump was different. In fact, there has never been a president for whom it was more important that we see his returns. Trump owns a large private company that is set up as an intricate network of hundreds of subsidiary organizations. In places all over the world, it makes deals with local developers, who are often engaged in questionable relationships with corrupt governments.

Every time journalists take a hard look at one of Trump’s projects, they seem to uncover a web of shady dealings, often involving oligarchs from the former Soviet Union. Unless you’re pathologically obsessed with following Trump news, you probably haven’t heard much about the Kazakhstan connection to the failed Trump Soho, the failed Trump project in the former Soviet republic of Georgia or the failed Trump Tower in Toronto, to name just a few. All were complicated stories that raised troubling questions about the way Trump and his cronies do business, and with whom.

But there’s a missing piece in every one of those stories, a black hole at their center. How much is Trump making? Where is his money coming from? To whom does he owe money? Whose interest might he be pursuing, and who has influence over him? We can’t seriously answer those questions unless we see his tax returns.

And just as no sane person believed him when he said he’d be releasing his returns once his audit was over (by the way, isn’t it over by now?), no one really believed him when he said he was separating from his business as president. You’ll recall that dramatic press conference featuring stacks of blank folders containing what were most likely blank papers, which Trump claimed were documents he had signed turning over control of the business to his sons. Do you really think Trump isn’t closely monitoring what goes on with his business? Do you think Eric says to him, “We’re thinking about this deal,” and the president says, “Stop right there, Eric — you know I can’t hear anything about this. I’m focused on the country”?

In everything Trump has done since the election — the way he doubled the membership fee at Mar-a-Lago, the way he continues to promote his hotels and resorts, the way he charges the Secret Service for using golf carts when they’re protecting him at his properties — Trump has made clear to the world that he’s open for business, and he’d appreciate it if you sent some money his way. Foreign governments know that, as does everyone else who might want to exert some influence with the administration.

I’m certain that when this question first came up, Trump made a calculation. Refusing to do what every president and major party nominee since Richard Nixon half a century ago had done would mean a good deal of controversy and criticism, he knew. But he plainly believed that revealing his tax returns would be even worse. Trump isn’t keeping them secret because he’s so modest that he doesn’t want all the kudos he’d receive once the returns are public and everyone realizes what a savvy businessman he is and how generous is his charitable giving.

It’s more than obvious that he has kept them secret for a simple reason: He has something to hide. And that very fact makes it all the more urgent that the public see what’s in his returns, so we can understand just how bad it is.

At this point, no one can deny that Trump is never, ever going to release his returns voluntarily. So the only answer is to compel him to do so. If Democrats take back the House, they’ll be able to: According to an obscure provision in the law, the congressional tax-writing committees have the power to demand anyone’s tax returns from the IRS, and then make them public if they choose. Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee tried to invoke this law and get the returns last September, but Republicans voted down the move. If Democrats have the majority come next year, this should be one of their first orders of business.

Then maybe we’ll learn just what Trump has worked so hard to keep secret from all of us.

 

[formergothardite]

52 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

If Democrats have the majority come next year, this should be one of their first orders of business

Yes. The first thing they need to do is get hold of those tax returns and make them public. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s Lifelong Addiction"

Spoiler

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump has a thing about women. In addition to his three wives, there are scores, perhaps hundreds, possibly thousands of women he’s hit on, dated, married, cheated on, employed, promoted, denounced and ridiculed.

But there’s another type of individual he has a thing for—some might even say it’s an addiction. And it’s a group that may be far more essential to his way of being: lawyers.

Most business executives tend to be lawyer-dependent, but for the better part of 50 years, lawyers have done everything for Trump except have his children. They have finagled unprecedented tax abatements, kept him going through multiple corporate bankruptcies (and out of personal bankruptcy), protected his finances from public scrutiny. They are so entwined with every aspect of his public and private life, it is unimaginable that Trump could have gotten anywhere close to where he is today without them. But now, in the aftermath of the FBI raid on the offices and residences of his most prominent personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen—he of the $130,000 pre-election payment to the porn star—the same techniques that Trump’s lawyers have employed for decades to smooth his business path are the very things that threaten to blow holes in his still-young political career. For perhaps the first time in his life, a lawyer has become Trump’s biggest problem—instead of his salvation.

Trump inherited his love of lawyers from his father, Fred Trump. In the 1930s, the elder Trump began to put together what would be the first Trump real estate empire. While other builders were still reeling from the Great Depression, Fred had a secret weapon: a beneath-the-radar attorney named Bill Hyman who used pseudonyms, stand-ins at auctions, even dummy subsidiary corporations to avoid tipping off Brooklyn landowners who might have held out for higher prices if they knew Fred Trump was assembling packages of adjacent lots for large-scale housing developments.

Ever the apprentice, young Donald followed suit and lawyered up. But he wanted more than behind-the-scenes, Bill Hyman-style competence. He wanted someone who would get right up in an opponent’s face and blast away. His dream came true when Eugene Morris, who had represented his father, introduced Donald to Morris’ first cousin, the infamous Sen. Joe McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, who had stood trial multiple times for bribery, perjury and extortion but had never been convicted. “I think Donald was attracted by the fact that Roy had actually been indicted,” Morris told me when I was working on a Trump family biography. The famously pugnacious Cohn told a reporter in 1980 that Trump called him “15 to 20 times a day, always asking what’s the status of this, what’s the status of that?”

In 1973, when the U.S. Department of Justice charged the Trump Organization with housing discrimination. Cohn hit back with a $100 million countersuit, the quintessential Cohn move of punching back harder. In the end, Cohn pulled off a wrist-slap settlement that spared Trump and his father from a guilty plea or any financial penalty. Over the next decade, Cohn used his mob connections to smooth the younger Trump’s relations with construction unions; inked a stingy prenuptial agreement with Trump’s first wife, Ivana; leaned on city politicians to favor Trump deals; traded favors in Atlantic City’s notoriously corrupt casino industry; and tried to strong-arm the National Football League into a merger that would give Trump a first-tier team at a fraction of the going rate.

Sometimes things have gone badly for Trump—his football venture failed, and in an ensuing lawsuit, he received only a humiliating $3 in damages. But even when his ventures have tanked (Trump Air, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, his casinos, the Plaza Hotel, Trump Soho Hotel, and a string of never-opened Trump-branded ventures in Argentina, Brazil and Canada, among other places), to all appearances, lawyers have kept him solvent.

It’s been close to half a century since Trump retained Cohn (and more than 30 years since the iconic fixer, who died in 1986, performed an act of legal brutality for Trump). But at nearly every stage since then, Trump has hired a no-holds-barred lawyer to make a problem disappear. When he had to squeeze extra floors into a new building, he called Sandy Lindenbaum, a zoning-law guru who called himself “the last of the gunslingers”; when he needed the New Jersey Casino Control Commission to see things his way, he turned to Atlantic City fixture Nick Ribis; when he wanted to divorce Ivana (and, later on, her successor, Marla Maples), he retained Jay Goldberg, a self-described “killer” who says he can “rip skin off a body”; when it was tax time, he reversed decades of bragging about his billions and had tax attorneys say his properties were worth only a fraction of what he had publicly proclaimed (an ongoing tax appeal in Chicago declares Trump Tower Chicago “a failed business”); when he was in the market for a troubleshooter, he hired Michael Cohen, who has threatened journalists who’ve written about Trump with bodily harm. In the summer of 2015, Cohen told a Daily Beast reporter to “tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting,” and last fall he told Vanity Fair he’s “the guy who would take a bullet for the president.”

Perhaps most important, whenever Trump has seen anything that he thinks poses the slightest risk to his business or his reputation, he has sicced a lawyer on the offending party. Often such threats arrive in the form of a letter on heavy, cream-colored stationery, adorned with an embossed gold T and declaring that unless the addressee ceases and desists from all objectionable behavior, the Trump Organization intends to pursue said person to the full extent of the law, i.e., sue his or her pants off. I know. I got one of those missives when I published my book.

Sometimes, as in my case, the threat is all that happens. Other times, an actual lawsuit ensues, as when Trump retained attorney Marc Kasowitz to sue journalist Tim O’Brien for $5 million, claiming O’Brien libeled the notoriously image-conscious developer by asserting Trump was worth much less than he claimed. (They settled out of court.) And in still other cases, there has been a nondisclosure agreement, such as the one Cohen arranged for porn star Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) after she claimed to have had an affair with Trump. According to an ongoing USA Today tally, as of April 2018, the Trump Organization has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, far more than any other real estate developer—or any president, for that matter.

Apparently, after entering the White House, Trump felt entitled to the same robust legal protection that he enjoyed in his 26th floor office at Trump Tower. But things haven’t worked out that way. What Trump might euphemistically call “negotiating” in a boardroom runs the risk of becoming criminal obstruction when it’s done in the Oval Office. Unlike the lawyers Trump retained in New York, lawyers who work for the federal government aren’t his employees and can’t automatically cover for him when questions arise. He discovered this the hard way when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, once his most ardent supporter in the Senate, recused himself from the Russia investigation, paving the way for the special counsel investigation that continues to cloud the Trump administration. The lesson recurred when then-FBI director James Comey declined to swear loyalty or to let then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, accused of having lied about his contacts with Russians after Trump’s election, off the hook. Now Comey’s calling the president “morally unfit” in TV interviews to promote his book.

And there’s a corollary: Even Trump’s private lawyers don’t have the maneuvering room they had in the past. Last summer, Kasowitz had to step aside after laying into a critic with a profanity-filled email. John Dowd, whom Trump hired after being told he needed a Washington defense lawyer for the Russia investigation, has quit because he was being sidelined by other White House advisers. And despite Trump’s claim that plenty of lawyers and “top law firms” want to work for him, a growing number have passed on a chance to represent a client who contradicts them in public, changes his story repeatedly, expects them to lie and has a history of stiffing his employees.

Then again, perhaps Trump has come to the right place after all. According to the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, Washington has a mind-boggling 773.8 registered lawyers per 10,000 residents (almost nine times as many as the second-most densely lawyered-up place in the nation, New York state, which has 88.7 registered lawyers per 10,000 residents). Surely at least one of them is willing to sacrifice reputation, sanity and perhaps a paycheck to defend the man who was elected to lead the country less than a year and a half ago. But it’s unlikely Trump will ever find another one willing to take out a home equity loan—and risk prosecution for bank fraud—just to spare his boss from an embarrassing sex scandal.

 

[Howl]

12 hours ago, Howl said:

Also, Ross Douthat  has an op-ed from April 2011 telling us why it might be time to start looking at Pence for 2020. 

Gah! Sorry, that should have been April 11, this year. 

[AmazonGrace]

 Did Dumbo just confess to being a spy?

[AmazonGrace]

I would point out that apparently Trump doesn't know that South Korea is not in TPP but i don't believe he wrote this one.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

11 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

I would point out that apparently Trump doesn't know that South Korea is not in TPP but i don't believe he wrote this one.

There is no way he wrote that tweet. He would have misspelled contingencies. Also, there is no wacky capitalization.

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course he did.

[AmazonGrace]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-campaign-paid-trump-bodyguard-keith-schiller-s-lawyers-records-n866781

Quote

The Trump campaign spent $834,000 on legal fees during the first quarter of 2018, federal campaign records show — about 20 percent of total spending.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good snarky piece from Dana Milbank: "Trump’s merchandising empire has collapsed. Here’s how we can save it."

Spoiler

Tuesday morning’s Post carried the dispiriting news that Donald Trump’s merchandising empire has collapsed.

But I think we can make it great again.

Trump-branded items — steaks, shirts, underwear, perfumes, chandeliers, mattresses, shoes (for Mexico!), vodka, pillows, eyeglasses, coffee pods, urine tests and more — have almost all been discontinued, undoubtedly a consequence of the ­TOTALLY UNFAIR coverage President Trump has received.

The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold, with researchers from American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, found that only two of 19 companies are still offering any Trump wares. Most tragic of all: The failure of Trump’s Success cologne, marked down to $9.99 from $42. Sad! I stopped by Fahrenthold’s desk on Tuesday, sprayed some Success by Trump on my wrist and immediately felt more confident and powerful! Even now, my exclamation points are multiplying!!! And I am BUSTING OUT IN ALL CAPS!!!!!! MAGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry.

Anyway, as I was saying, it is just WRONG that the Trump lines have failed, because they were tremendous: Trump, the board game (“Live the fantasy! Feel the power! And make the deals!”); Trump lighting (“jewelry for the home”); Trump glassware (“creates and improves the ‘ambient’ ”); Trump luxury floor coverings (“oversized planks”); and Trump eyewear (with a Trump logo on the lenses, for professionals who “understand the importance of ­image”).

Trump-branded clothing is no longer a viable line, now that the world has come to know his baggy suits and extra-long red ties. The Trump name isn’t going to sell mattresses and pillows anymore (the guy doesn’t sleep), and nobody is going to believe that a guy who takes his meat well-done sells “The World’s Greatest Steaks,” as the Trump line claimed.

Trump-branded urine tests were supposed to assess “metabolic markers in your body’s natural waste fluids,” but that is a poor fit for a self-professed germophobe who, according to James B. Comey, disavowed any interest in urine. Nobody is going to believe that a teetotaler sells “The World’s Finest Super Premium Vodka,” or that a guy who drinks only Diet Coke sells coffee that “effortlessly oscillates between classic smoothness and robust taste.” Nobody wants oscillating coffee.

The good news is Trump can continue to make money by selling his name. We just need to update the product line.

For example, Trump’s Success fragrance “is an inspiring blend of fresh juniper and iced red currant, brushed with hints of coriander. As it evolves, the mix of frozen ginger, fresh bamboo leaves and geranium emerge taking center stage, while the masculine combination of rich vetiver, tonka bean, birchwood and musk create a powerful presence throughout wear.”

A newsroom sniff test produced a simpler description: “Smells like Old Spice.”

Similarly, Trump’s Empire is for confident men “who aspire to create their own empire. . . . Bold notes of peppermint, spicy chai and a hint of apple demand attention.”

Different times call for different scents. I suggest:

Emoluments by Trump: An insinuating blend of Saudi turmeric, Philippine tamarind and the finest dukkah from Dubai, this cologne has the bouquet of exotic bank notes. Immediately recognizable to any member of the Trump family, the fragrance conveys: You are rich. You deserve preferential treatment.

Also in the new perfume line: Obstruction by Trump (bold, powerful and distracting) and Stormy by Trump (for the man who lives dangerously).

Other Trump-branded products that would sell well:

Trump golf drivers, which come with a free mulligan after every stroke.

Trump IQ tests, which tell you whether you are a “very stable genius,” “like, really smart” or Maxine Waters.

A new line of Trump dictionaries (“the best words”), Trump juvenile products (“nobody has better toys”), Trump fasteners (“our buttons are much bigger and more powerful”) and a new Trump cabinet line that flatters the owner’s good taste.

Trump brands will also expand into services: Trump tax preparation (“paying no taxes makes you smart”) and a Trump handyman service (“I alone can fix it”).

But the biggest Trump branding opportunity, I believe, will be in a revival of “Trump, the Game” using different rules.

The previous version, which flopped, was a Monopoly variant in which players bid on seven properties and played cards labeled “THE DONALD” and “YOU’RE FIRED.”

In the new version of “Trump, the Game”:

You receive rent from Saudi diplomats for your hotel rooms.

You play a “TRUMP CARD” by calling the president of Panama to help you in a hotel dispute.

You sell your mansion to a Russian oligarch at a handsome profit.

You pass “go” and collect $200 million from bankers you regulate.

You stiff your creditors and get richer.

You get a $1 billion tax cut.

You do not go to jail.

And you always win.

 

[onekidanddone]

This would be funnier if it weren't so true. Especially about the Xanax.

 

[Cartmann99]

*snickers loudly*

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘People don’t realize’: Trump and the historical facts he wants you to know"

Spoiler

As President Trump announced that South and North Korean leaders have his blessing to discuss a permanent end to the military conflict between their two countries, he dropped in a quick history lesson.

“People don’t realize the Korean War has not ended,” Trump said on Tuesday, his face contorting into a look that seemed to communicate surprise and bafflement. “It’s going on right now.”

For Trump, people don’t realize a lot of things.

There was the time in March 2017 when Trump informed top Republican Party donors that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. “Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right?” Trump said. “Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that.”

When he visited France last summer, Trump explained that “France is America’s first and oldest ally” and that “a lot of people don’t know that.” Several days after the trip, Trump said in an interview that French President Emmanuel Macron “loves holding my hand” and that “people don’t realize he loves holding my hand.”

Trump’s public remarks are filled with dozens of similar comments. They often begin with some variation of the phrase, “Most people don’t know . . .,” and end with a nugget of information that many of those surrounding him — fellow world leaders, diplomats, journalists, politicians or aides — do indeed already know.

According to Trump, most people don’t know that there’s more than one Air Force One; that the heroin epidemic has ravaged New Hampshire; that the Empire State Building was constructed in less than a year; that universities “get massive tax breaks for their massive endowments;” that Clemson University is “a great academic school, one of the top 25;” or that nonprofit organizations and churches are barred from endorsing political candidates.

Trump’s lessons are often accompanied by raised eyebrows, widened eyes and a “gee whiz” look that suggests perhaps the nation is witnessing the president’s education in real time.

Is Trump playing the role of educator in chief, or simply sharing historical facts he’s newly learned? The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

It is true that many Americans do not know basic facts about their country, said Charlie Copeland, the president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative group that challenges the quality of education that many university students receive. The institute used to do an annual survey to measure civic literacy — but the results were repeatedly so abysmal that it was stopped in 2011, he said.

“I think that American history has become almost an untaught subject today,” Copeland said.

Many of Trump’s “people don’t know” remarks have involved foreign policy. In a meeting with the Italian prime minister in April 2017, Trump noted that “Italy is one of America’s largest trading partners” and that “a lot of people don’t know that.”

While meeting with the president of Afghanistan last fall, Trump acknowledged that the situation on the ground is complicated and “people don’t realize you had 20 terrorist groups in Afghanistan.”

And during a news conference in Vietnam in November, Trump said that “people don’t realize Russia has been very, very heavily sanctioned.”

Sometimes Trump will go a step further and suggest that Washington needs to simplify the way that it talks about complicated issues so that Americans will better understand.

He has suggested calling community colleges “vocational schools,” because “we don’t know what a community college means.” He claims to have urged congressional leaders to use the phrase “tax cuts” instead of “tax reform,” because “nobody knows what that means.”

And during a visit to West Virginia this month, he didn’t even bother to explain his concerns about China stealing U.S. intellectual property.

“We have our intellectual property, and a lot of people don’t understand what that means,” Trump said. “And it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not. You understand the concept of being taken advantage of, and we can’t be taken advantage of any longer.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump, Cohen and Cohn: When ‘my attorney’ becomes just ‘one of my lawyers’"

Spoiler

From his first weeks in office to his latest crisis over the FBI’s raid on his personal lawyer’s office, home and hotel room, President Trump has periodically expressed the same exasperated plea: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

Throughout his career, the president has expressed frustration that he has never found a lawyer quite as tough, loyal and effective as his first, the legendary New York street fighter who taught Trump to always hit back 100 times harder than he’s been punched.

Trump has relied on a series of attorneys who have been as much consigliere as courtroom lawyer. They had informal discussions with people who threatened to damage Trump’s public reputation. They worked the news media more than they wrote briefs. They talked tough. They made problems go away.

The latest such lawyer in Trump’s bullpen has been Michael Cohen, the New Yorker who made payments in 2016 to a porn actress and a Playboy model who said they had extramarital affairs with Trump.

But as often as Cohen — like Roy Cohn before him — has publicly expressed his loyalty to Trump, the president has at times through the years taken a clear step away from his most trusted attorneys.

The president has for weeks referred to Cohen publicly as “my attorney.” But this week, the way White House officials spoke of Trump’s relationship with Cohen shifted.

“I believe they’ve still got some ongoing things, but the president has a large number of attorneys,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Monday. Another White House press aide, Hogan Gidley, went on TV to call Cohen just one of “many” Trump lawyers.

The rhetorical pivot would have sounded familiar to Roy Cohn, who died in 1986, having been largely abandoned by his longtime client and friend.

In 1973, Cohn looked like he’d seen more than his share of street fights. His hooded eyes, bloodshot and scarred nose, close-cropped hair and sharp tongue fortified his reputation as a scorched earth lawyer, a ruthless advocate for his clients.

Meeting Cohn that year changed everything for Trump. Their first encounter took place inside a Manhattan members-only club that Trump described as “the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy 75-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.”

Trump, then 27 and just breaking away from his father’s real estate business, was hungry for connections, looking to meet the power brokers who could help him fulfill his dream of becoming a big deal Manhattan builder. Cohn was just the ticket — a celebrated and much-feared former prosecutor who boasted about his ties to New York’s Mafia bosses, worked on the espionage case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and served as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s sidekick in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

Attorney and client, strategist and builder, Cohn and Trump worked together for more than a decade. They pushed back against a federal race discrimination suit stemming from allegations that Trump and his father had made it difficult for black tenants to find apartments in Trump buildings (they eventually settled with prosecutors.)

They won glowing profiles in top magazines and newspapers, and they were happily quoted praising one another. They spoke often, sometimes a dozen times a day. They joined forces to battle construction unions, win building permits, and press libel suits against critical reporters.

“Roy was a very good lawyer for me,” Trump told The Washington Post in an interview in 2016. “Roy was a really smart guy who liked me, and did a great job for me on different things .... Roy was a very tough guy.”

Trump said that the two men’s styles clicked, especially when they worked aggressively against competitors or critics. Their retaliatory approach wasn’t just Cohn’s creation, Trump said: “It was a combination maybe, but it was a style that worked.”

But Trump bristled at the idea that Cohn was the leader in their relationships. “He wasn’t a mentor,” Trump said.

Asked if Cohn had inspired his aggressive style in business, Trump backed away from his praise. “Perhaps,” he said. “I mean, I was young. Perhaps, but I think even at a young age I had a certain style. I had a certain feel. But Roy was one of my lawyers .... I’ve been blessed with some really good lawyers in my life that did really good work for me. And I’ve had some lawyers that didn’t do as good. That’s more of the normal.”

In 1984, Cohn fell ill, suffering from HIV. As Cohn lay dying at the National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Trump distanced himself from his longtime friend. Cohn believed Trump had cut him off because he was HIV-positive.

“I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,” Cohn said at the time. “Donald pisses ice water.”

Trump always denied any anti-gay motivation, saying that he had always known that Cohn was gay and never minded it.

But in the final months of Cohn’s life, in 1986, when New York legal authorities accused him of unethical behavior and moved to disbar him, Trump joined other prominent Cohn clients and defended his character publicly, inviting him to visit Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.

Cohn died five weeks after he was disbarred. At his memorial service, Trump stood silently in the rear.

In the first months of the Trump administration, according to the New York Times, the president, perturbed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from supervising the investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia, asked aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

Michael Cohen, who read Trump’s bestseller “The Art of the Deal” while he was still in high school, has worked for Trump for more than a decade. He once pledged that he would “do anything to protect Mr. Trump.”

Cohen’s legal career is far less storied than Cohn’s was, but Cohen found his way into Trump’s inner circle first by buying condos in Trump buildings in Manhattan and later by working with the developer on an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Like Cohn, Cohen talked tough, once threatening a Daily Beast reporter who had asked about Ivana Trump’s allegation, later softened, that Donald Trump had raped her when they were a married couple. “I will take you for every penny you still don’t have,” Cohen told the reporter.

Cohen has continued to pronounce his loyalty to Trump, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News last year that he “will do what’s necessary to protect him.”

After the FBI raid, Trump called the seizure of his lawyer’s records an “attack on our country” and a “disgraceful situation.” The president has not spoken publicly about Cohen since then.

 

[AmazonGrace]