Michael Cohen had recordings! Trump and a Playboy model! Sex! Lies! (But no video tape — yet.)
Something easy to understand — Donald Trump caught in a conversation about something he denied. He cheated on his wife, lied about paying for silence. What other recordings did Cohen make? What else is waiting to be revealed?
Except… this is what Trump does. It’s no secret. He’s a serial cheater. He paid for sex all the time. This isn’t a surprise to anyone. It didn’t keep evangelicals from thanking God (and now Russia) for his presidency. It didn’t keep the party of “family values” from lining up solidly behind him. This isn’t likely to change that many minds among them.
The existence of Cohen recordings has been suspected for a while. But — is there anything to this one in particular? Supposedly the payoff talked about never happened. Does this story have any ‘legs’ — will it keep generating follow up stories? It’s a bright shiny object capturing our attention for the moment — but what does it really mean? Will there be more sordid details to come out? Has this been leaked precisely to draw attention away from other things?
This bright shiny object will get headlines for a few news cycles and then be dropped. Like a stone dropped into a pool, it makes ripples. Will they die out, or will they join others to make a bigger splash?
Meanwhile:
- Trump’s summit with Putin, where he demonstrated total subservience to the Russian leader, is the gift that keeps on giving. What did he promise in the two hours alone? Did he really give Putin Crimea and tell him to help himself to more of Ukraine? Did he throw Montenegro under the Russian bus?
- Trump trashed the NATO alliance, slammed Theresa May and the Brexit deal, and is still pushing his trade war against our allies in Europe.
- Trump’s administration continues to loot America and dismantle institutions; Scott Pruitt may be gone, but his successor continues to demolish the EPA. The NRA turns out to have been taking millions from Russia to swing the election — so the regulations on political contributions get changed so no one will be able to find out where the money is coming from.
- Trade wars — Trump is cranking them up and provoking a response that demonstrates Trump lacks any ability to deal with anything that can’t be put on a few bullet points on a single page. He’s wrecking trade relationships going back decades, for no perceptible gain.
- The Republican Congress and the Republican Supreme Court are dismantling the labor movement, voting rights, civil rights, and giving corporate citizens primacy over mere human citizens. Roe v. Wade is in the crosshairs; is contraception next? The social safety net is being shredded. Obamacare is being sabotaged. Every day in every way life is being made harder for ordinary people — and better for the super wealthy. The rule of law is being changed from a shield into a sword of oppression.
- Everything is on the block — privatizing public government for private gain is the goal. Opening up public lands for mining, cutting back monuments, privatizing the schools…. It’s all good.
- But plenty of people are fine with all this as long as it makes liberals angry, and puts those brown people in their place. America First — for “Real” Americans. The rest should go back where they came from, stop stealing jobs while living off welfare. And we need to understand their economic anxiety.
That’s just a partial list.
All of them are worth continued scrutiny. But that takes time, resources, and attention to details that frankly bore people and lose eyeballs, and take resources the press increasingly doesn't have. The two major political parties in this country are still largely treated as two sides of the same coin by the press, despite growing evidence the GOP is fine with Russian help as long as it keeps them in power, despite their increasingly obvious disregard for the interests of the American people — all the people. Party over country.
So here we are. The Cohen recordings will take up the news for a time — and the rest will be shoved into the background. The next bright shiny object will displace it in turn, and it could be anything. Whatever gets eyeballs. Serious things are happening — but if we can’t rely on the press to give us an institutional memory, to put things into the bigger context, we are in something like the dilemma of the protagonist in the film Memento. A brain injury has left him unable to make any new long term memories. He can’t remember anything for more than five minutes.
Like that character, things are thrown at us out of sequence. We are manipulated by different versions of the events. We know terrible things have happened, are happening — but the circumstances are a confusing melange with bad actors throwing out alternative facts. Who do we trust? What do we collectively know? What are we forgetting? What are we missing? What are we getting wrong? Who is lying to us, and who is telling the truth? How did we get here? Where do we go next? What do we need to know?
We don’t know how this movie is going to end, or where we will be when it does.