The Walls Are Closing in On Trump

President Donald Trump’s worst day yet: Manafort, Cohen fall and the walls are closing in

Trump seems subdued after his longtime lawyer implicates him in a crime. But does this shift Republican attitudes?

261

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

AUGUST 22, 2018 12:20PM (UTC)

Ever since Donald Trump glided down that golden escalator three years ago it has seemed as though each news cycle is more surreal than the last one. But every once in a while something happens that breaks through the dizzying cascade of crazy tweets, palace intrigue and incoherent, destructive policies. Yesterday was one of those times. Two separate, serious legal proceedings unfolded over the course of several hours, leaving the weirdly unfamiliar impression that something real and recognizable had happened.

At virtually the same moment, Michael Cohen, the president's former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight felonies in New York while Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, was found guilty of eight felonies in Virginia.

In his allocution -- his formal statement to the court -- Cohen said that in addition to his own criminal tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations, his former employer, Donald Trump, had illegally directed him to pay hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to keep them quiet in the weeks before the 2016 election. (I should note that Trump is referred to as "Individual-1" in the document but it's clear that it's him. As the court document states, "in or about January 2017, Cohen left the Company and began holding himself out as the "personal attorney" to Individual-1, who at that point had become the president of the United States.")

The plea deal indicates that the prosecutors had plenty of corroborating evidence, including audiotapes, to use against Cohen if he had gone to trial. It doesn't specify whether or not this corroborating evidence applies specifically to the president, but one can assume there is something there. We've already heard Trump and Cohen on tape, in close proximity to the election, talking about how to funnel hush money. It's fair to conclude prosecutors did not simply take Cohen's word for it.

It's also clear now that the publisher of the National Enquirer did not pay McDougal off simply as an act of friendship toward Donald Trump, buying her story and then not running it (a so-called "catch and kill"). It was always a transactional arrangement whereby Trump would simply pass the money to McDougal through the tabloid. It was even more unscrupulous than we knew.

• You could save $668 on car insurance by switching to ProgressiveBY PROGRESSIVE
• [Pics] When The Bride Grabbed Her Fiancé's Hand, She Immediately Understood This About HimBY SCIENCE LOT (24 MAX)

SPONSORED BY 

It's unclear why Cohen didn't sign a cooperation agreement. According to Vanity Fair, this plea deal came together very quickly. One could speculate that since Cohen's lawyer, Guy Petrillo, used to be in charge of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York -- the same office that prosecuted this case -- a certain level of trust exists between the legal teams and they are working together after the fact. In any case, Cohen's other attorney, Lanny Davis, went on TV on Tuesday night and made clear that Cohen has a lot to say to any prosecutors who care to listen:

Davis also hinted broadly that Cohen could say that Trump had advance knowledge of "hacking," although it's unclear which hacking he was talking about. CNN's Jeffrey Toobin pointed out that a Democratic-led House or the special counsel's office could give Cohen immunity without fear of jeopardizing prosecution now that he's pleaded guilty, and that would mean "Cohen would have to testify in grand jury and before Congress in public. We will hear more from Cohen."

READ MORE: Is a senior Air Force general using his power to spread far-right Christian nationalism?

Meanwhile, down in Virginia a jury found Paul Manafort guilty of eight of the 18 counts charged against him, largely having to do with tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to file reports on his foreign bank accounts. The jury deadlocked on 10 counts but Manafort won't see much to celebrate in that. He's going to prison for years. Now he's faces his second trial in Washington next month, which will deal with lying to the FBI, money laundering and foreign lobbying. His lawyer said on Tuesday that Manaford would be "evaluating all his options."

This might explain why, on his way to a rally in West Virginia, Trump had nothing to say about Cohen but couldn't say enough good things about Manafort, who has so far refused to cooperate:

You can't help but wonder why he is being so kind and generous to Paul Manafort, whose criminal charges have no connection to the Trump campaign. One might even suspect that Manafort has information Trump would like him to keep to himself in exchange for a pardon.

It was an exciting day, and the news cycle was filled with predictions that this would shake loose Republican officials' complacency once and for all. The president had been implicated in a felony and yet another pair of top associates were guilty of serious criminal behavior. Surely this would break the spell and members of the establishment would rise up and do their duty.

Maybe.

But we've been here before, haven't we? Time after time, some outrage or incident has been expected to bring Trump down. Yet he's still in the most powerful office in the world, making mess after mess while his enfeebled party blindly follows along. It was only a few days ago that dozens of elder statesmen of the intelligence community and senior members of the military spoke out in unison to protest Trump's decision to revoke former CIA director John Brennan's security clearance. One Republican senator's response was to back the president and call Brennan a "butthead."

On Tuesday night, the right-wing reaction on Fox News and social media was to suggest that even if Trump had committed a little campaign finance felony or two, it's no big deal. Everybody breaks campaign finance laws! Paying hush money to porn stars and centerfolds to keep them quiet before an election is also standard operating procedure, apparently. Some supporters are downright excited that all this will help get out the Republican vote:

Nonetheless, Tuesday was likely Trump's worst day in office, at least so far. It certainly seemed that way at his West Virginia rally, where he appeared distracted and enervated. He whined about "elites" who dislike him, saying, "I'm smarter than they are. I have many much more beautiful homes than they do. I have a better apartment at the top of Fifth Avenue. Why the hell are they 'the elite'? ... To me, I'm insulted."

On a day when two more of Trump's close associates found out they will face years in prison and the president himself was implicated in a federal crime, the crowd lustily cheered him up with a rousing round of "Lock her up." Bless their hearts.

TODAY'S HOTTEST TOPICS

Check out the latest stories and most recent guests on SalonTV.

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

MORE FROM HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

On Rational Discourse

As rational discourse dies in this country, I am not sure how to react. There was a time when I might turn to Dylan for answers, but those times passed in c.1979. I could do some Biblical proof-texting, but people just look at me funny when I do. The i Ching never took hold with me. Neither have Chinese fortune cookies. I don't know any menschs. Politics is what got us into this mess. Doughnuts and coffee is all I know to do. Maybe somebody at Joe's Doughnuts knows something.

Rudy Knows the Truth

26 minutes ago
Rudy Giuliani on Mueller Probe: ‘Truth Isn’t Truth’
Giuliani on Mueller Probe: Truth Isn’t Truth
JIM BOURG/REUTERS
Rudy Giuliani railed against the “wild, crazy, unorthodox” Russia investigation on Sunday and said investigators have no reason to interview President Trump. In an interview on NBC News’ Meet the Press, Giuliani said investigators looking into possible collusion and obstruction of justice by Trump should already have all the answers they need to wrap up the investigation because the president has publicly asserted his “true belief that he did nothing wrong.” “I’m not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury,” Giuliani said. He went on to dispute the idea that Trump should testify if he’s got nothing to hide. “When you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth so he shouldn’t worry. Well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth,” Giuliani. Told by NBC host Chuck Todd that “truth is truth,” Giuliani quickly retorted, “No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth.”
READ IT AT NBC NEWS

Comme

Post-Truth

A philosopher explains America’s “post-truth” problem

“We can never really be post-truth.”

By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com  Aug 14, 2018, 8:10am EDT

SHARE

President Donald Trump speaks at a rally to show support for Ohio Republican congressional candidate Troy Balderson on August 4, 2018, in Lewis Center, Ohio. 

 Scott Olson/Getty Images

The president of the United States is a serial liar.

In May, the Washington Post created a tally of Trump’s false or misleading claims. The number they found was 3,001, which averages out to roughly six lies or half-lies each day in office. That number has climbed to nine per day in recent months. 

For some, this is a sign that we’re living in a “post-truth” world — a place where shared, objective standards for truth have disappeared. Trump seems to pay no political price for his lying, and the news cycle is dominated by references to “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Some of this panic is overstated, but some of it feels justified. 

So what the hell is going on? Does the phrase “post-truth” make any sense? Has something really changed?

To get some answers, I reached out to Simon Blackburn, a philosophy professor at Cambridge University and the author of On Truth. We talked about what’s misleading about the phrase “post-truth,” and why the real problem may stem from a lack of trust.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

How did we get to this place where the American president is able to lie so shamelessly and so casually without any tangible political consequences? 

Simon Blackburn

That’s a very good question, and I wish I knew the answer. For most of my adult life, I lived in what was sometimes called the postwar consensus. There were decent ways of doing politics. There were people who might veer toward free markets, and others who might veer a slightly different way, toward state interventions and subsidies, and so on. But basically, there was a general consensus about baseline facts, and disagreements were rooted in those facts. 

Things have changed, though, and people often use the metaphor of a silo. We live in information silos now. The individual is insulated from outside forces and surrounded by people who think and believe the same things he or she thinks and believes. There’s no doubt that Facebook and other social media have played a huge role in that.

There’s always been selection of news — people basically read what they want to hear and gloss over things they don’t want to hear. I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. But it has become easier to do this, and the insidious power of things like Facebook and Twitter exaggerates it.

Sean Illing

Is the phrase “post-truth” useful? Does it capture something unique about this moment?

Simon Blackburn

I think there are legitimate concerns out there, which I sympathize with, but I don’t think this phrase pinpoints them accurately. The message of my book is that you cannot be post-truth.

You know perfectly well that if you go out in the street and there’s a bus bearing down on you, it’s very important that you believe that there’s a bus bearing down on you. If you’re wrong about that, you could be dead. Your whole life is premised on things like that. 

In that sense, we can never really be post-truth. 

What we do have, though, is a problem in other domains, like politics and religion and ethics. There is a loss of authority in these areas, meaning there’s no certain or agreed-upon way of getting at the truth. 

This is a very old problem in philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato, so it’s not exactly new — although it’s interesting that it’s come to the fore again in the way that it has. 

Sean Illing

That’s the thing about this “post-truth” panic — it usually goes too far. We’re only post-truth in a narrow sense. 

Even the most ardent Trump supporter doesn’t challenge his oncologist’s cancer diagnosis, or walk into a physics conference and question the validity of string theory. It’s only when a proposition is contaminated by politics that truth suddenly flies out the window.

Simon Blackburn

The problem is that in politics, people get very attached to hope. They hope for a vision which may or may not be realistic, and may or may not be grounded in truth and facts.

It’s a bit like conspiracy theorists, who actually thrive on the fact that all the evidence points against their theory, because that just shows that the establishment is clever enough to conceal what’s really going on. People get attached to certain ideas and nothing will shake them. And when convictions start to live in opposition to reason or truth, that’s a very dangerous thing. 

“ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS THAT A SERIAL LIAR WANTS TO DO IS UNDERMINE YOUR TRUST IN THE PROVIDERS OF FACT THAT WOULD CHECK HIS LIES”

Sean Illing

So preserving these convictions becomes far more important to people than some abstract commitment to truth.

Simon Blackburn

Absolutely. In the book, I write about a great American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, who thought that doubt was such an uncomfortable position that people would do almost anything to seize on a belief or conviction that removed it.

I think that’s what we’re seeing in politics. 

Sean Illing

But is the problem really about trust, not truth? Is the real issue that we don’t trust each other, and we don’t trust the institutions that are supposed to unearth the truth? 

Simon Blackburn

That’s an interesting question. One of the first things that a serial liar wants to do is undermine your trust in the providers of fact that would check his lies. If you’re a criminal bent on asserting your innocence, then you undermine trust in the police. You undermine trust in the judiciary. You may be a murderer and a rapist, but you claim it’s the system that’s against you. This is sort of Trump’s best move: It’s the thing he understands most. 

He sprays around accusations of fake news while knowing full well that he’s the liar. It’s a tactical move that absolutely works in a media landscape like ours, and he knows it.

Sean Illing

Let me ask you a strange but, I think, necessary question: Why should people care about truth in the first place? 

If the choice is between believing something false that provides meaning and comfort or believing something that’s true but inconvenient, why choose the latter?

Simon Blackburn

It’s a good question, and I’m not sure how to answer it concisely. Of course, many people vote with their feet, in terms of believing something that’s false but provides meaning and comfort. After World War I, many people thought they could talk through mediums to their dead children, and unsurprisingly, a whole industry of fake mediums appeared to help them. 

Like Nietzsche, who I know you’ve written about, I’m very cautious in matters of truth. If there is no evidence for a belief and lots of evidence against it, it should not matter what you would like to be true or hope or wish to be true. Follow the probabilities and put up with the inconvenience.

That’s an academic or a scholar speaking, but it has always been the only hope for human progress. 

Sean Illing

How do we encourage people to care about the truth and to hold liars accountable for their lies?

Simon Blackburn

This is really a moral problem, and it is always difficult to predict what will make people act on their moral compasses. I do point out in my book that perjury is still a very serious crime; maybe it will be the downfall of the Donald one day! 

Of course, people are good at shirking the facts and threatening and bullying anyone who challenges them; this has always been the case. But I believe that all decent people eventually reject this kind of behavior, and want to see liars held responsible for their lies. 

I can’t say whether or not this will happen ... but I sure hope it does.