An Indictment of America

Michael Cohen; Mark Meadows (Getty/Salon)

Michael Cohen's testimony: A dark spectacle, and a severe indictment of America's political culture

Did we learn anything new? Only that our president is likely a criminal and our democracy is close to failure

 

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CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

FEBRUARY 28, 2019 4:45PM (UTC)

On Wednesday, Donald Trump's former attorney and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. With his seven hours of testimony another chapter has been added to what feels like a badly written movie but is instead all too real. This new chapter in the TrumpWorld melodrama does nothing to alter the overall story.

Cohen's testimony was part courtroom drama, and part Mafia movie, with an unreliable narrator who is telling (mostly) the truth as he sees it. It is "Idiocracy" meets "Goodfellas" and "A Few Good Men," with elements of "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" -- except that Cohen is not noble, selfless or naive. Instead he is a weak and corrupt person who chose to do the bidding of an even worse one.

Cohen's hearing also borrowed from another genre as well. Conventional Hollywood's romantic comedies have often included the "best black friend" who is the emotional surrogate for the main character, likely a white woman. Other Hollywood films also feature the "magical Negro" character, whose sole purpose in the story is to solve white people's problems.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., head of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, followed this script by having Lynne Patton, a black woman who serves under Ben Carson in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, act as a professional "best black friend" and human shield for Donald Trump. Patton stood there in evident discomfort, straight out of Black Conservative Central Casting, in a vain effort to deflect attention from the (obvious, true and numerous) charges that Donald Trump is a racist.

Cohen's testimony occurred while Donald Trump was overseas in Hanoi, continuing his "bromance" with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, a person who could easily be the lead villain in a second-rate James Bond film.

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Considered in total, this spectacle is an example of what philosopher Peter Gordon describes in "The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump":

Trumpism, though it masquerades as society’s rebellion against its own unfreedom, represents not an actual rebellion but the standardization of rebellion and the saturation of consciousness by media forms.

If [Theodor] Adorno was right, then Trumpism cannot be interpreted as an instance of a personality or a psychology; it would have to be recognized as the thoughtlessness of the entire culture. But it is a thoughtlessness and a penchant for standardization that today marks not just Trump and his followers but nearly all forms of culture, and nearly all forms of discourse. The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. ...

The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.  Expression is displacing critique. ...

This, I think, is why the phenomenon of Trumpism remains so difficult to comprehend. As Adorno recognized long ago, there is a kind of artifice to this rebellion that belongs less to what we used to call political reality than it does reality television.

There are theoretical physicists and philosophers who argue that what human beings perceive to be reality may all be an elaborate computer simulation devised by super-intelligent aliens -- from our point of view, effectively gods. If that is correct, with Cohen's testimony on Wednesday whoever is running this version of reality has now added every story cliché to the program.

Did Cohen share any new groundbreaking information? Not really. The only significant revelation he offered was that Trump may be the target of an additional investigation by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the precise subject of which is not clear. Cohen also claimed that Donald Trump paid him by check while president to reimburse hush money Cohen had paid made to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels.

For the most part Cohen confirmed what is already known about Donald Trump: He is violent, racist, a misogynist, dishonest and likely a criminal.

Cohen delivered at least one great line with his warning to the Republicans in the hearing room and anyone else who remains loyal to Donald Trump:  "I'm responsible for your silliness. I did the same thing that you're doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. I can only warn people, the more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering."

Cohen's closing comments were ominous:

My loyalty to Mr. Trump has cost me everything — my family's happiness, my law license, my company, my livelihood, my honor, my reputation and soon my freedom. ... Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. ... And this is why I agreed to appear before you today.

How did the Republicans on the Oversight Committee behave? Horribly, which was as expected. They seem to have discovered moral outrage towards liars while defending and valorizing Donald Trump, a man who has lied at least 8,000 times since becoming president. At no point did any Republican members even try to contradict any of Cohen's major claims about Donald Trump's behavior and involvement in likely criminal acts. 

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Once again, Republicans showed themselves to be Donald Trump's co-conspirators rather than responsible stewards of American democracy. 

How did the Democrats behave? They were genuinely interested in trying to help the American people and the world gain insight into President Trump's behavior and character by hearing the sworn testimony from a person who was one of his closest allies and confidants. The Democrats also asked specific questions about how Cohen aided and abetted Trump's morally compromised and perhaps illegal behavior.

As has been the norm for some time in America, but especially during the Obama and Trump presidencies, the Democrats were the adults in the room while the Republicans acted like tantrum-throwing babies in soiled diapers.

Nothing that happened during that hearing is likely to alter public opinion significantly. Both Donald Trump's supporters and his detractors will feel vindicated by Cohen's testimony and the surrounding theatrics.

Where does this leave the majority of the American people, most of whom do not follow politics closely? They are fatigued by the Trump-Russia scandal. New research from PRRI shows that the American people are highly polarized and extremely divided. Trump's support may be softening among some key voters, including the "white working class" in the Rust Belt states. There has also been a softening of support for Trump among some "Obama to Trump" voters (a small proportion of the electorate). But in total, Trump remains remarkably popular among Republican voters.

In the Western narrative tradition, stories usually follow a three-act structure, with a beginning, a middle and an end. They also follow a pattern: there is the introduction, rising action, a climax, a complication, falling action, and then a conclusion and resolution.

When special counsel Robert Mueller's report on the Trump-Russia scandal is finally made public, regardless of its findings -- and they will likely be very damning for Donald Trump, his inner circle, the Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement -- there will be no neat and tidy conclusion to this American drama-nightmare. That too will be another chapter in this interminable story. Trump's cultists will not abandon their Great Leader. Liberals, progressives and other principled people of conscience will be disgusted and sickened that Trump remains in power and could well be re-elected in 2020.

The average American will just be further exhausted by what they see as a broken government that does not protect and serve their well-being and best interests. Faith in the very idea of government will be further undermined.

The plutocrats and the kleptocrats, as always, will find a way to increase their wealth and in doing so expand their power and control over society. Authoritarianism is good for business. They are opportunists: A broken government is a carcass that they can devour with ease and at their leisure. This should be understood as the ultimate goal of "plutocratic populist" leaders such as Donald Trump.

That the American people and the country's elites are unwilling or incapable of uniting around a basic and obvious truth -- Donald Trump and his movement are illegitimate and represent a dire threat to American democracy and the safety and security of the American people -- reflects a profound and deep cultural problem. It cannot be fixed by impeachment or the 25th Amendment, or even by voting to elect a different president next year.

By Now

In The New York Times Opinion Section, Peter Wehner writes: "By now Republicans must know, deep in their hearts, that Mr. Cohen’s portrayal of Mr. Trump as a 'racist,' 'a con man' and 'a cheat' is spot on. So it is the truth they fear, and it is the truth — the fundamental reality of the world as it actually is — that they feel compelled to destroy."

Andrew G. McCabe - The Threat - (Book Review)

As part of his ongoing effort to stop the Russia investigation, Trump fired McCabe on January 16, 2018 when he was Deputy Attorney General.  McCable had appointed James Comey as special prosecutor.   McCabe strikes back in this book.  When all is said and done and Trump has fallen, McCable's words will be a big part of the story.

A big part of his story is a stirring defense of the FBI, something that shouldn't be necessary but is necessary given Trump's unprecedented attack on our own's country's law enforcement.  It is tragic but Trump has no choice since all he cares about is himself.

Cohen is testifying today before the House.  We hope there is a noose tightening around Trump.

McCabe tells how he became an FBI agent.  He includes his application resume.  You can't help but be impressed by what it takes to join the FBI.  Amazingly difficult to become an FBI agent.

"Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law."  P. IX  So McCabe beings his story.

The FBI works on the basis of established and proven procedures.  One of them is the FD-302.  Every interview conducted by the Bureau is summarized and reported on a form called a FD-302.  This document is the building block of an investigation.  P. 1

McCable's personal encounters with Trump read spooky.  The basis was always which side are you on?  Trump demands mobster loyalty.  P. 13

McCabe began his FBI career in 1996 chasing Russian mobsters in New York.  I think he knows what he's talking about on the subject of Russian organized crime.  P. 17

The agent's responsibility is to determine the facts.  P. 19

Russian interference is ongoing, and it is not conjecture.  P. 20

The evidence is "incontrovertible."  P. 20

What the FBI really does, and why it is important.  P. 20

Our POTUS values the word of our major adversary more highly than he values his own intelligence agencies.  P. 21

To keep American safe, the FBI must be independent.  This president is violating this norm.  P. 22

The author tells his compelling story of how came to became an FBI agent.  Chapter 2: Answering the Call.  Most impressive.

An art history and political science major at Washington University in St. Louis.  The only requirement to apply to the FBI is a college degree.  Strict application, checking of references, and a blistering polygraph exam.  Trump would never have passed.  Weapons training.  Punctuality is not optional.  Must be able to articulate every decision you make.  McCable was in on the beginning of the FBI's investigation of Russian crime in the United States.

Gripping stories of chasing Russian criminals.  Rough people to say the least.

This book added to Cohen's testimony before the House destroys Trump.

Enterprise Theory is a new investigative avenue for the FBI to investigate by linking suspects together as like a crime syndicate rather one person at a time.  Fascinating stuff.  "How We Work"

RICO allows leaders to be held responsible for the actions of those under them.  P. 54

His personal story of 9/11.  P. 63

McCabe went from organized crime to counterterrorism.  P. 70

Profile of Mueller.  Straight-laced.  Not a charming communicator.  White shirt, red tie.  P. 71

Work in counterterrorism and you are always on call.  P. 72

Legitimate questions never go away.  P. 75

There is a difference between interviewing and interrogating.

Information is the lifeblood of effective government.  McCabe discusses the importance of the President's Daily Brief and how Trump disses it.  This is truly criminal.  P. 122

McCabe rips Jeff Sessions.  Says that Sessions was only interested in drugs and immigrants.  He tried to relate everything to these topics.

Sessions had no comprehension of Islam.  P. 128

Putin over the PDB.  P. 134

Apparently Trump only listens to himself.  So scary.  P. 137

Benghazi to Boston.  P. 138 to 159

The Benghazi folktale.  P. 164

Comey would ask, "Tell me your story."  I like it!  Judgmental but not two faced.  P. 166-67

Exonerating Yates and Lynch.  P. 185

When is the right time to become cynical about the society that you had faith in?  P. 190

Comey influenced the 2016 election.  P. 196

Trump violates justice norms.  He is an affront to our judicial system.  P. 207-08

People don't appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability.  P. 217

Trump exposes himself as a deliberate liar.  P. 217

He is disconnected from reality.  P. 227

"It would be impossible to overstate my concern at the president's behavior and rhetoric."  P. 260

A New Story

Many Americans want a new national story: How about this one?

Can we rebuild democracy, and America's civic culture, with a progressive new national myth? It's worth trying 

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JIM SLEEPER

FEBRUARY 25, 2019 1:00PM (UTC)

The 18 Yale students who crowded into a seminar room one September morning in 1999 for a course entitled “New Conceptions of American National Identity” didn’t know what they were in for. Nor did I, their instructor. Nor did most Americans know what the nation itself was in for, as we know now, 20 years later.

Or do we? What have we learned about American national identity since 9/11, since the Afghanistan and Iraq war fiascos, since Hurricane Katrina and other climate disasters beyond any one nation’s power to prevent, and since 2016, when the accumulation of injustices in our own streets and suites erupted in blind rage to empower a casualty and carrier of what he called the “American carnage” to “fix it”?

One thing I thought I knew on that first day of that 1999 class was that “The New Colossus,” a grand civic poem that Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty, signified what had really made America powerful in the exceptional and, yes, troubling ways that had brought most of my students’ grandparents or parents to the country and the students themselves to my class:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name:
Mother of Exiles....
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

No other nation had peopled itself and become strong that way, as I could see from the surnames of the young American citizens who’ve taken my course: Remes, Bumatay, Kim, Ly, Jarrow, Fiskin, Espitia, DeShong, Dizon and on and on. Yes, white Americans had slaughtered Native Americans and had conquered, abducted and subordinated Latinos and Africans who hadn’t joined the United States of their own volition. Ernst Renan’s 1882 essay “What is a Nation?” showed my class that every nation lies to itself about its suppression and forcible incorporation of varied peoples into a supposed national family. The historian Benedict Anderson’s brilliant "Imagined Communities" showed us that members of even supposedly homogeneous nations know and feel bound to one another mainly through school textbooks, market exchanges and national story lines -- collective fictions like “The New Colossus” and myths dramatized in movies and other mass media -- that tell them who they are as a people and what they share and owe to one another.

What makes those national story lines true? When Lazarus’ new colossus welcomed the world’s huddled masses in 1883, a still-open frontier and burgeoning labor markets beckoned them too. But as a rising plutocracy’s Gilded Age clamped down on republican civil society, the Golden Door began to resemble the biblical Golden Calf that some Israelites fabricated and worshiped idolatrously even as Moses was bringing them the tablets of the Covenant. Even universalist, republican France, which gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States, was just as hypocritical in dissembling its oppression of colonies and its grinding inequities at home.

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What no other nation besides the U.S. had done at the time of the American Revolution was to establish itself officially on universal, “self-evident truths” about equal dignity and unalienable rights, instead of on nationalist myths of divine destiny, blood kinship and sacred soil – Blut und Boden, as Germans called it. America’s exceptional national story line told of a gunshot, fired by “embattled farmers” against an empire in 1775, that was “heard ’round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, heralding the Enlightenment’s entry into history.

In that American myth, a new, republican citizen was rising against divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. History seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1787, urging ratification of the Constitution.

That Constitution made the American nation all the more exceptional, precisely in abducting and plunging into its “white” midst masses of people who, because the Constitution existed, had the highest possible stakes in making the country make good on its enlightened, constitutional response to Hamilton’s “important question.” Some former slaves and their descendants became the national myth’s strongest adherents and most eloquent champions, insisting that citizenship isn’t a racially, ethnically, sexually or economically exclusive club but a joint public effort to reach goals in common that no subgroup or lone ranger can reach by acting on its own.

Twenty years ago, most of my students and I took that creative American tension and its emblematic, progressive struggles as given: In America, “the language of hegemony and the language of dissent were all but inseparable,” as the literary historian Sacvan Bercovitch told us in "American Jeremiad." Speaking truth to power was daunting and sometimes lethal, but ultimately it was irrepressible in our civic culture and national character.

So we’d been told, and it certainly seemed true on the night of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, when thousands of Yale students, including my own, poured spontaneously out of their residential colleges and into the historic Old Campus, bursting,  unbidden and unrehearsed, into singing rounds of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The groundswell of unabashed, “liberal” patriotism seemed to answer Hamilton’s question again, and the answer was echoed as Obama, in Chicago’s Grant Park, affirmed that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” had not perished from the earth.

But now it seems that the United States needs a rather different story line -- that it has needed a new one at least since 9/11 and the Iraq War fiasco discredited its claim to herald a classically liberal, capitalist, democratic world order. Certainly we’ve needed a better national story since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina showed us all that climate change’s causes are all-too-human (and disproportionately American.) Surely we need one now that reactions to proliferating injustices in our streets and suites have elevated a carrier and casualty of accident, force and fraud to subvert Hamilton’s Constitution.

Have we decided his “important question” by proving ourselves incapable of democratic self-government after all? Have the swift, dark undercurrents that are also transforming other nations and notions of order swamped all hope that even America’s worst crises make us exceptionally promising? Are we back at the foot of Mt. Sinai, worshiping a Golden Calf?

Some New England Puritans thought so in 1701. They founded Yale because they thought that Harvard was dragging the holy Puritan mission into a swamp of slippery deals, in a world increasingly connected and flattened by commerce. The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts, and young Americans need myths and coordinates that are clear and potent enough to help them plumb those depths, face the demons in them and in themselves, and sometimes defy worldly powers on behalf of a higher one.

I’ve reckoned with those claims this week in an assessment for the Los Angeles Review of Books of historian Daniel T. Rodgers’ "As a City on a Hill," which tells how the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, tried to offset the “carnall lures” of its early capitalist profiteering with stricter enforcement of its “weal,” or common good. “It is a true rule that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public,” Winthrop warned. That sounds like today’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts senator, Elizabeth Warren, when she tells entrepreneurs and investors that their private success depends on public investments in education, infrastructure and more:

You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. … You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea -- God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

One of John Winthrop’s favorite public narratives was the biblical account I’ve cited of Moses versus worshipers of the Golden Calf. Winthrop took up Moses’ daunting rule in leading a wayward, sometimes-fickle people from slavery to a new promised land. So did Yale’s founders, who put Hebrew on its seal and called it a “school of prophets,” likening themselves to the Israelites leaving Egypt. So did John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who proposed that the Great Seal of the United States depict Israelites crossing the Red Sea. So did Martin Luther King Jr., who invoked the Exodus myth often in leading his formerly enslaved people toward a new American promised land.

All these “national” story lines converged at Yale’s 1964 commencement, when university president Kingman Brewster Jr. -- himself a descendant of the Elder William Brewster, who ministered to a Puritan “exodus” on the Mayflower -- presented an honorary doctorate of laws to King. They shook hands across not only the color line but also across time and space, bending the poetry of a national story line toward power.

We needn’t revert to Winthrop’s puritanism to renew a narrative that’s progressively national and exceptional, without being ideologically “nationalist” in the ways that the current occupant of the White House wants. My classes on American national identity have pondered that challenge.

G.K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church” because its civic compact requires faith, even as it wisely refrains from imposing a particular doctrine and leaves room (as Winthrop’s commonwealth did not) for respectful non-believers like me and many of my students. To pull off that balance, and to prevent militarized, bureaucratized states from hovering like crows over the nests that nations make, as the historian Robert Wiebe put it in "Who We Are," a fine book defending our anthropological need for nations even when they're economically and technologically outmoded and misrepresented by states.

To nurture and defend familial nations against brazen nationalism, we’d need to tap and channel American civic culture’s mythic wellsprings and story lines vigorously toward national service projects for the young and larger contributions from “particular estates” that prevent “the ruin of the public” and of private estates themselves. Anyone who claims otherwise is likely a nationalist defender of mythically “sacred” blood and soil and the Golden Calf, but not a patriot of the liberal American nation through whose Golden Door my students’ families and mine escaped the cobwebs and chains of ethno-racial superstition and nationalist war.

JIM SLEEPER

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale and the author of "Liberal Racism" (1997) and "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York" (1990).