Trump continues his retreat to the bunker, or is it a social club. He further incriminated himself in this morning’s Fox News interview, confirming that he was a co-conspirator with Michael Cohen. Now there’s more whining about people who “flip”.
He’s desperately trying to tell us he’s a kafaybe criminal, a cartoon where “truth isn’t the truth”, while pulling out more extreme diversions, like a fictive “white genocide”. So like a cartoon, he’ll come back to life after getting stuck on the head with a folding chair, holding a sign that says, “Ain’t I a stinker?”.
He’s been reportedly been fuming at Cohen, calling him a “rat”, and he has tweeted a reference to a John Dean -type “rat” because of Don McGahn’s conversations with Mueller.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said he was not surprised that his onetime lawyer and fixer cooperated with prosecutors in exchange for a lesser punishment — “It’s called ‘flipping,’ and it almost ought to be illegal,” he said.
[...]
“I know all about flipping. For 30, 40 years I have been watching flippers,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday during an interview with “Fox & Friends” that aired on Thursday.
Then Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Cohen’s case. “But if you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you will go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that. And I have seen it many times. I have had many friends involved in this stuff.”
The president’s professed experience with “flippers” illustrates his views on law and loyalty and helps to explain his opposing reactions to two men who are guilty of defrauding the federal government.
[...]
“Plea bargaining is a defining, if not the defining, feature of the federal criminal justice system,” a 2011 Justice Department report on the subject said.
www.nytimes.com/...
Trump has himself flipped on some mobsters, including when Mueller was a prosecutor, so he does “know all about flippers”. Tweets are the hidden folding chair of his WWE rhetoric, so threatening the disloyal has rodents in its lexicon.
As he admitted to Fox News, he’s thinking of a pardon for Manafort, or at least wants to signal that possibility (presumably in exchange for silence), which may actually prove to make matters worse for Lord Dampnut.
I have not seen Sammy “the Bull” Gravano in a very long time—he has spent most of the past two decades in prison, after having failed to hide his drug-distribution business from his federal monitors—but my thoughts turned to him yesterday, when I read President Donald Trump’s tweet on the subject of loyalty and respect.
The president, who is obviously perturbed by the felony conviction of his former campaign chair Paul Manafort and the plea deal taken by his former attorney Michael Cohen, wrote the following:
What we see in this astonishing tweet is an implicit endorsement by the president of the United States of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, which has been honored, especially over the past 30 years or so, more in theory than in practice.
And then there’s Pecker rolling...
The latest news is that National Enquirer chief David Pecker also “flipped” and agreed to cooperate in the Cohen/Trump case. This was pretty clear in the Cohen Information document, though it was not stated explicitly. For what it’s worth, this seems like the least surprising thing in the world.
If you read the Cohen Information, which is essentially the charging document, it makes clear that the Trump/Enquirer arrangement wasn’t just a friend keeping an eye out for his friend – the way the relationship and modus operandi had been portrayed in the media. It was a very specific arrangement: The Enquirer would troll for Trump-damaging stories, which there were obviously going to be a lot of, buy them and then sell them to Trump. The last part is key; and we didn’t know that until Tuesday. This wasn’t just being a pal. It was a specific, standing financial arrangement. The Enquirer would essentially act as a cut-out, buying stories on Trump’s behalf without the seller of the story knowing what was happening.
In First Tweets, today’s occured at 1:10 am. After his dog whistle tweet to racists either POTUS or one of his ghosts felt the need to not leave that tweet sitting at the top for more than four hours, so something had to be tweeted:
Then he went on to hype his incriminating interview:
In a worthy sequel to the memorable line from Rudy Giuliani that “truth isn't truth,” we learned yesterday from President Trump and his supporters that a crime is not a crime.
“It’s a bit baffling,” writes the Washington Post, “that Trump would assert that criminal charges accepted by Cohen aren’t a crime.” Yet it’s not baffling at all. It’s simply the continuation of the fictions of an authoritarian leader. Why do people buy into such fictions? “Totalitarian propaganda,” we learned from Hannah Arendt, “thrives on this escape from reality into fiction.”