Donald Trump never even wanted to be president. He ran for office "to make his brand great, not to make our country great," Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and fixer, told lawmakers in his opening remarks Wednesday. Trump never had any "desire or intention to lead this nation," he said, only "to build his wealth and power."
"Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the 'greatest infomercial in political history,'" Cohen recalled. "He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign, for him, was always a marketing opportunity."
In other words, Trump's entire candidacy was a fraud, and now we have a fraudulent pr*sident, who didn't win the popular vote and got a multi-million dollar electoral boost from Russia. He didn't want it. We didn't want it. Only Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted it, and now we're paying dearly as a country for having a president who treated an entire election as a wealth building exercise. Public service never even whimsically passed through the mind of Donald Trump as he geared up to reap the rewards of a major pay day following his political dalliance on the world stage.
The entire venture was a business transaction. Why worry about breaching the public trust when your entire candidacy is nothing more than a vehicle to securing a massive deal on the other side of the campaign? Avidly pursue that real estate deal in Moscow even as you're assuring the American public that you have no such ties there? Sure, why not? No one's gonna care that you landed a Trump Tower deal in Russia after the nation has moved on under another president.
Make illegal payments to keep your affairs hidden from voters? Sure, why not? Once the campaign's over and someone else is president, water under the bridge.
But then Trump wins! It's the miracle he never wanted and lied about repeatedly and profusely and yet he won anyway. And so he moves the fraud that he perpetrated on the campaign trail straight into the White House and resumes business as usual.
"So picture this scene," Cohen wrote in his prepared remarks, "in February 2017, one month into his presidency, I'm visiting President Trump in the Oval Office for the first time. It's truly awe-inspiring, he's showing me around and pointing to different paintings, and he says to me something to the effect of…Don't worry, Michael, your January and February reimbursement checks are coming. They were FedExed from New York and it takes a while for that to get through the White House system. As he promised, I received the first check for the reimbursement of $70,000 not long thereafter."
And then sure enough—there's one of the $35,000 checks with Trump's John Hancock on it, one of 11 separate payments as part of a scheme to disguise the reimbursements as a monthly retainer.
Oh, and hey, Michael, why don't you come by the White House in May 2017 to figure out how to message that Moscow negotiation that extended well into the campaign even though Trump assured voters it absolutely didn't. Maybe Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulow can just make a few small adjustments to falsify your testimony to Congress. No harm, no foul. Right?
Wrong. Lies. All of it. Trump lied about wanting to be president from the very first, sullying his entire candidacy and ultimately his presidency. He won. Vlad won. And the American people got sold out.