Donald Trump used to bluster loudly on twitter and elsewhere that Mueller’s investigaion better not go into his personal finances, that that was “the red line” that could not be crossed — or else. All of that changed last Monday with the FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office. Cohen was Trump’s consigliere and dealmaker throughout the Trump Organization’s period of global partnership expansion. Cohen knows where all the skeletons are in the closet and he’s got a lot of them recorded on tape.
Lawyer Michael Avenatti told Anderson Cooper recently that Cohen “is radioactive. I’m going to repeat that. He’s totally radioactive and anybody who’s had any contact with him for the past thirty years, there’s a high likelihood that the FBI now has your records and we know who had the most contact with him: Donald Trump.” New Yorker reporter Adam Davidson predicts that a turning point has been reached and that we are now in the end stages of the Trump presidency:
This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.
However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations. [...]
The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a small, sad operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to money laundering and campaign-finance violations.
In his book James Comey compares Trump to a mafia don and calls his leadership of the country "ego driven and about personal loyalty." He describes Trump as a mobster-like figure who sought to blur the line between law enforcement and politics and tried to pressure him personally regarding his investigation into Russian election interference. Further, it’s been said that “Trump demands attention but shuns scrutiny. He needs to be a brand because he’s terrified of being a person."
The masks are about to come off and the portrait of Dorian Trump is about to come out of the closet for all the world to see. No wonder he’s terrified. He knows who and what he really is and very soon the world will know.