If the House Oversight Committee Republicans had shown up for Michael Cohen’s testimony in clown makeup and purple hula skirts their performance couldn’t have been more pitiful Wednesday. Their only script for seven hours consisted of some version of “liar, liar, liar,” a tactic that fell rather flat given that the witness himself said repeatedly that he had lied. And they had a tough time maneuvering around the fact that 95 percent of the lying Cohen admitted to had been done to further the fortunes of one Donald J. Trump. They couldn’t label as a lie the photocopied check with the flamboyant Trump signature that Cohen brought to the hearing as proof that Trump, who had feigned no knowledge of the matter, knew full well Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford was paid to keep quiet about his sexual liaison with her. But these hyperpartisan sycophants apparently weren’t made more than a smidgen uneasy by this lie anymore than they have been by the other 9,000 catalogued Trump lies, which add up to probably more than all past presidents combined.
Cohen will be back this morning to testify in a closed session before the House Intelligence Committee. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that room.
Peter Wehner at The New York Times writes—Republicans Sink Further Into Trump’s Cesspool. What they left out of their questioning of Michael Cohen says more about the degradation of my former party than anything they said:
[...] unlike John Dean, the former White House counsel who delivered searing testimony against President Richard Nixon in 1973, Mr. Cohen produced documents of Mr. Trump’s ethical and criminal wrongdoing. (Mr. Dean had to wait for the Watergate tapes to prove that what he was saying was true.) [...]
In a sane world, the fact that the president’s former lawyer produced evidence that the president knowingly and deceptively committed a federal crime — hush money payments that violated campaign finance laws — is something that even members of the president’s own party would find disquieting. But not today’s Republican Party.
Instead, in the most transparent and ham-handed way, they saw no evil and heard no evil, unless it involved Mr. Cohen. Republicans on the committee tried to destroy the credibility of his testimony, not because they believe that his testimony is false, but because they fear it is true.
David Wallace-Wells at the Los Angeles Times writes—Our five biggest delusions about climate change:
We tend to think of global warming as a legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, according to my research, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has come in the last 30 years. That is, since Al Gore published his first book on climate, and since the premiere of “Seinfeld.”
The United Nations established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, signaling to all the world a scientific consensus about the problem. Since then, we have done more damage, knowingly, than we did over preceding centuries, in ignorance.
The third misunderstanding is about scope. So much of what we know to fear about global warming concerns sea level rise; if we don’t live right on the coast, we tend to think, we should be OK. In fact, if warming continues unabated, by the end of even this century, no life will remain untouched.
Agricultural yields could fall by half. Warfare could double, since every half-degree of warming is likely to bring 10% to 20% more armed conflict. Global GDP could fall by as much as a third; the impact would be twice as deep as the Great Depression, and permanent. Overall, according to my calculations, the damage could reach $600 trillion, or more wealth than exists in the world today.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—The Art of the Deal You Can’t Refuse:
Donald Trump’s former personal attorney had a simple message for Congress on Wednesday: The president is a crook. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Michael Cohen, a fixer for Trump for more than a decade, testified to the House Oversight Committee. “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” [...]
“He has both good and bad, as do we all. But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office, he has become the worst version of himself. He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal.”
That paradox was a recurring theme in his testimony. “Everybody’s job at the Trump Organization is to protect Mr. Trump,” he later told lawmakers. He even confirmed that Trump’s presidential run was a publicity stunt to enrich Trump further. “Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history,’” he told the committee. “He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign—for him—was always a marketing opportunity.” Making America great again was a racket, in other words, and the American people were the marks.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—Michael Cohen Destroyed Not Just Trump but Also His House GOP Defenders:
We the American people are governed today by very bad men, and a few bad women, and after two years, this humiliation feels like a chronic illness for which there’s no relief, a mysterious infection nobody can diagnose or treat. We all know well that the president is a liar, a serial sexual harasser, a business cheat, the plutocrat’s plutocrat; a man who flouts American political norms and even laws; who flaunts his ties to dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin; a man who talks and acts disconcertingly like a mob boss. The corruption of the president and the men (and a few women) around him is obvious and demoralizing. The scandals break so frequently, we’re becoming inured to them. Our chronic illness makes it hard to adequately respond, as individuals and as a nation.
Could Michael Cohen’s stunning Wednesday testimony—about Trump’s lies, his greed, his cheating in business and marriage, his cruelty, his dealings with Russia while running for president, his prior knowledge about the WikiLeaks assault on the Clinton campaign—begin our needed national cure? It’s complicated. Cohen is himself a bad man, despite his testimony to the contrary, who did bad things—some for Trump, but many for his own enrichment. There can be no cure for us, of course, until the president leaves the White House. But as the bad men around Donald Trump are forced to tell the truth, we get closer to that day of reckoning. Wednesday surely brought us closer, but it’s not clear yet how much.
David Corn at Mother Jones writes—How Cohen’s Testimony Backs Up the Case That Trump Helped Russia Attack the 2016 Election:
It’s already been demonstrated that Trump and his lieutenants possessed private knowledge that the Kremlin wanted to secretly assist the Trump effort during the campaign. In early June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner—Trump’s top three campaign advisers—met in Trump Tower with a Russian emissary after being told she would deliver them dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a Moscow plot to help Trump. Two months later, Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, received a briefing from the US intelligence community in which he was told US analysts had concluded Moscow was behind the hack-and-dump attacks targeting Democrats. And from mid-June on, there were many media reports noting that cybersecurity experts and US intelligence agencies had fingered Russia as the culprit in the cyber break-in of the Democratic National Committee.
Yet throughout the campaign, the Trump team consistently declared in public that there was no reason to blame the Kremlin. (These denials prompted other Republicans, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, to say little or nothing about the Russian attack.) Cohen’s testimony offered further reason to believe that Trump knew—or should have known—he was lying when he said Russia was not attacking the US election.
Will Bunch at the Phildelphia Daily News writes—Michael Cohen reveals Trump’s dark secret: He thinks Americans are suckers:
Cohen’s daylong testimony before the House Oversight Committee — on the heels of his Trump-related felony plea — drew inevitable comparison to Watergate whistle-blower John Dean, who spoke of “a cancer on the presidency” back when there was at least a functioning presidency. In 2019, Cohen was here to say the president himself is a malignancy. [...]
“Being around Mr. Trump was intoxicating,” Cohen testified, doing an arguably better job of playing Henry Hill than Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta. He pegged Trump’s management style – the coded language, the loyalty demands, calling Cohen “a rat” after he flipped — in terms befitting a Bensonhurst mob boss, not an American president. [...]
But Cohen’s most damaging statements weren’t unexpected revelations — just a Trump insider confirming what many of us have seen from afar from Day One. And the biggest questions Wednesday were the ones that go beyond the purview of a congressional committee.
How did the American political system get so broken that a con man bragging about his “infomercial” while grossly inflating his wealth could win the 62 million votes he needed to leverage the Electoral College? Or get those votes when the racism that Cohen saw on a daily basis was so obvious to many of the rest of us? What is the body politic supposed to do about a president so fundamentally unfit for the job?
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Loyalty to Trump cost Michael Cohen everything. Republicans pay heed:
Donald Trump has done some strange things to the Republican party. Gone is their disgust at Stalinist tyrants from North Korea. Vanished is their outrage at deficit spending. Evaporated is their horror at a president who ignores Congress and the constitution. [...]
To be clear, the House Republicans thought they were doing a fine job for their Great Leader by trashing his former lawyer at every turn. Cohen is undoubtedly a proven liar who lied to Congress: we know this because he confessed to doing just that in his guilty plea last year.
Trump’s loyalists in the House seemed to think that was the end of the story. Who could believe a proven liar like Michael Cohen? The only snag is that he was lying on behalf of his client, one Donald Trump. So the more they talked about his lies, the more he talked about his lying client.
Like so many things in Trumpworld, this line of questioning is several diopters worse than shortsighted. It is the kind of brilliant argument dreamed up after several beers: a bar-room brawl masquerading as political strategy.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Michael Cohen is the monster Trump created:
Cohen’s claim that he’s seeking “redemption” is suspect, and his mendacity means the threat he poses to Trump is not in anything he tells a committee but in what evidence he gave prosecutors of illegality by Trump. (He testified that he provided such information.) There’s little doubt that Cohen has been the con man he accuses Trump of being; the difference may be that Trump is better at it, because he is in the White House and Cohen is going to the big house.
But one thing rang true in his testimony, because so many have been ruined similarly by service to Trump. “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you are doing now for 10 years: I protected Mr. Trump,” Cohen told Republicans. “I can only warn people: The more people who follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
If there is justice, Cohen’s prophecy will be fulfilled.
Geoffrey Cain at The New Republic writes—North Korea Is Not Vietnam. Expecting the brutally repressive state to liberalize magically the way Vietnam did is a pipe dream:
North Vietnam reunified with South Vietnam by force, completing the revolution that gave the communist party so much legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters. The Communist Party of Vietnam had to find a new “revolution” to peddle to its people, so it promised growth and abundance, heralding projects like its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2005. Vietnam has every reason to keep warming up to the U.S., its biggest trading partner. And such economic success based on free trade ironically keeps the communist party in power.
Those suggesting North Korea follow the Vietnamese model probably aren’t thinking of having Kim Jong Un annex South Korea. They’re thinking of economic liberalization as an unstoppable, magical force transcending politics—which has repeatedly been the mistake people make when assuming North Korea is forever on the brink of change. The men I met in Ho Chi Minh city doubtless returned to Pyongyang with plenty of action items. I’ve yet to see them on the nightly news, technocrats at the forefront of a vast North Korean economic policy overhaul.
Vietnam had the right leaders, despite their well-documented flaws, at just the right time—as the Cold War was winding down, and the markets were set to open globally. North Korea has no such benefit.
Charlie Jane Anders writes—Pop culture is no longer full of apocalyptic nuclear visions. That’s too bad:
Whatever happens as President Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to talk about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, the risk of a devastating nuclear conflict appears higher now than at any time since the Cold War. And yet, pop culture has more or less stopped warning us of the dangers of atomic devastation — and that’s too bad. We need fresh stories to help us understand the renewed and complex risks we face, and to nudge us out of our complacency. [...]
Pop culture was once full of mushroom clouds and nuclear winters. From the somber warnings of “On the Beach” to the satirical absurdism of “Dr. Strangelove,” mass media continually sounded the alarm about where we seemed to be headed. Authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and performers including Prince and Tom Lehrer obsessed about our tendency toward self-destruction, as did director James Cameron in his movie “The Terminator.” [...]
It’s hard to imagine the enormity of nuclear war — which is why books, movies and TV shows were so vitally important in helping us visualize the worst scenarios. But now that the risk is high once again, many of us are in denial about the peril. We need activism, but we also need new stories, to push us to confront this nightmare before it’s too late.
Moira Donegin at The Guardian writes—Trump’s new rule to defund family planning hits the most vulnerable:
On Friday, the Trump administration inflicted yet another bit of needless, bigoted cruelty when it announced that it would bar organizations that provide abortions or abortion referrals from receiving funding under Title X, the federal family planning program.
The Hyde Amendment, a sexist and unfair provision, already prohibits any federal funding from being used for abortions. The new regulations, designed specifically to remove funding from Planned Parenthood, would make it impossible for low-income patients to receive birth control, cervical and breast cancer screenings, STD testing or treatment, pelvic exams or sex education from any organization that provides abortions or even tells their patients where they can get one. It prevents groups that provide abortions from using this federal money to provide any reproductive health services at all.[...]
Most people who use the funds are women who do not have medical insurance through an employer and are ineligible for Medicaid; their incomes are too high to qualify for free care, but too low for them to afford insurance out of pocket. The funds disproportionately help people of color: 21% of Title X patients are black, and 30% identify as Latino.
Joshua Holland at The Nation writes—Why Democrats Should Ignore the Chatter About Moving ‘Too Far Left’ and Go Big. Backlash is inevitable. So Democrats should be bold.:
The 2018 midterms brought an infusion of fresh blood, new ideas, and youthful energy into the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, and a number of lawmakers—notably those with presidential aspirations—are pushing ambitious, unapologetically progressive proposals to solve some very serious problems. The most prominent may be Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, but there several others: Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to significantly expand the inheritance tax; Senator Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax and universal-childcare plan; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bid to put predatory lenders out of business by empowering the Post Office to serve as a community bank; Senator Cory Booker’s proposal to use “baby bonds” to close the racial wealth gap and, of course, various versions of Medicare for All. And in the House, Democrats are championing a comprehensive proposal to advance key voting rights and curb the influence of deep-pocketed donors.
While it’s an exciting moment for progressives who have long urged Democrats to embrace these kinds of bold policy ideas, it’s also unleashed a predictable flood of hand-wringing from pundits, conservatives, and more moderate Democrats about whether the Dems are moving “too far to the left.” [...]
Political scientists Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels have argued convincingly that most voters just don’t have a solid grasp of public policy and take their cues from politicians they admire and other influential voices. So there is a danger that the media’s relentless drumbeat about these proposals supposedly being outside the mainstream could convince voters that the criticism has merit.
That’s why we shouldn’t just ignore all the hand-wringing about Dems’ going too far. We need to push back against it aggressively before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.