The first time I heard the name “Michael Cohen” was in 2015, from a Republican political operative who told me, “It’s his job to clean up Trump’s messes with women.” He went on to explain how Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, would pay a large amount in cash to whichever actress-model-stripper-pornstar was claiming to have been screwed, dumped or knocked-up by the Donald. And, crucially, Cohen — Trump’s “designated thug” as he called himself — would scare the hell out of the women concerned to make sure they signed an air-tight NDA (or non-disclosure agreement). Over the years, this story has turned out to be far more durable than the allegation that Trump was a Russian agent — and on Monday Cohen testified in a Manhattan court that cleaning up the “messes with women” had in fact been his job — his main job — while Trump was running for president.
In The People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump, Trump is charged with falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 election. Cohen has already served time for arranging this hush money — it was deemed an illegal campaign contribution — and the trial turns on the issue of whether Trump ordered him to make the payment and told his company’s chief financial officer to fraudulently bury it in the accounts as legal fees. Cohen is the star witnesses after a string of others testified that Trump was both a micromanager and incredibly cheap — all things which lend weight to Cohen’s evidence, since it appears unlikely that such a large payment could have been made without Trump’s say-so. “Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign off,” as Cohen testified. This, the prosecution says, is the first-hand account of how the conspiracy unfolded, as seen from the inside.
Reports from inside the courtroom — no TV cameras are allowed — suggest that Cohen was calm and measured on the stand. Reading his evidence, it seemed more like controlled anger to me. This was the performance of someone furious at having to take the fall for something he maintains was business-as-usual in the Trump Organization, and all done at Trump’s behest and for his benefit. Discussing the case with Cohen in 2018, before he served his sentence, he asked me, voice filled with disbelief: “I go to jail because he gets his pecker pulled by a porn star?” Now, finally, he can even the score. Cohen told me then that Trump ran his business like a mafia don: discussions were always one-to-one, with no third person who could act as a witness if collared by the Feds. But Cohen secretly recorded some of these conversations and the tapes were played in court today. Trump is heard telling Cohen to pay off another woman, Karen McDougal, a Playboy model, “in green” — cash that could not be traced.
In that conversation, Trump can also be heard saying about McDougal: “So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” There is echo here of the famous smoking gun tape of Nixon discussing paying the Watergate burglars to keep quiet. “You could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash.” History, tragedy, farce. This time, the sums — and the personalities involved — are much smaller, the cover-up about some spectacularly silly sex at a Lake Tahoe hotel, where Trump was appearing at a golf tournament. In her book, Full Disclosure, Stormy Daniels relates how she spanked Trump on his backside with a copy of Forbes that had his face on the cover. “I like you,” Trump supposedly said, as he fastened his belt, “You remind me of my daughter.”
Stormy twists the knife in her book, writing about Trump stripping down to white briefs and socks: “His hard, darting tongue pushed in and out of my mouth. I thought, He’s even a terrible kisser… I’d say the sex lasted two to three minutes. It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had.” On the stand, last week, she said something equally believable but much sadder. Trump had allegedly been dangling the prospect of an appearance of The Apprentice – “Have you seen it? It’s a big hit” — trying to persuade her to embark on an affair with him. She said he had told her: “This is the only way you’re getting out of the trailer park.”
Stormy has her book to sell and Cohen now makes a living publicly lambasting the man he once said he’d take a bullet for. But despite all the caveats, most legal analysts think things are looking bad for Trump, who is of course running for president again on the Republican ticket. Cohen’s most telling evidence today was about how Trump — always the cheapskate — tried to delay paying off Stormy until after the 2016 election. Either he’d be elected president and it wouldn’t matter; or he’d be defeated and he wouldn’t’ care. The payment was allegedly rushed through when it seemed she might go public before voters went to the polls. Cohen said: “He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign.”
If Trump is convicted, it is theoretically possible he could go to jail. On the one hand, the judge in the case has treated Trump with all the deference due a former president — other defendants tweeting aggressively about a case would almost have ended up in the cells for contempt. On the other hand, the judge also has a record on coming down hard on white-collar crime — and the prosecution argues that if Cohen has served time for this, so should Trump. Trump would, though, appeal any conviction, and that appeal would not be heard until after the election in November. And whether or not he’s convicted, it’s unlikely that a conviction would on its own sway the election. To his most loyal supporters, killing bad stories is just what a candidate is supposed to do. And no one is shocked by Trump’s private life any more.
That’s the view of Rick Wilson, a former Republican political consultant and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “I don’t think anyone in this country, who is a supporter of his is not going to be a supporter of his after this thing is over. It’s not going to break off the guy in the red hat, it’s not going to break off the hardcore MAGA supporter.” However, Wilson says it’s significant that Nikki Haley is still winning 15-25 percent of the vote in the Republican primaries, despite having been out of the race for months. That’s because there are softer Republicans and conservative independents who are “uncomfortable” with the latest Trump chaos, whatever that might be. Wilson thinks a conviction could edge up Trump’s numbers in red states such as Alabama but will do nothing to expand his base, which is “a little crazier, a little tighter than it was.” So: “Don’t expect any one of these trials, no matter how consequential they seem, to change the eventual election outcome one way or the other.”
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
