Power Play
I am watching Rachel Maddow interview Michael Cohen, who is now on house arrest and out of the federal penitentiary where he has been spending his time. While I think highly of Rachel, I find this interview beneath her. As an avid anti-Trump person, I suppose I should like anything that Michael Cohen says in his book or on cable news that is harmful to Trump. And no one is more scorned by Trump than Michael Cohen. This inner-circle acolyte is tailor-made for someone like Trump. He attended second-string schools, he was a native New Yorker from the outer-boroughs, he dabbled in the dark sides of business like the medallion cab business (which is rife with grey-market activity). His ethics seem to have always been for sale. He seemed less prone to practicing real law and more prone to wheeling and dealing in the shadows, where professionalism is largely absent and you eat what you kill. He also met the ultimate Trump acid test, he was willing to swear loyalty, even going to far as to suggest that he would take a bullet for the Donald. Like Trump himself, Cohen favors hyperbole, so he didn’t really mean that about the bullet. Bullets hurt and people like Trump and Cohen do not have very high thresholds for pain.
When I listen to Cohen, I cannot get past the fact that he anxiously swallowed the Trump program hook, line and sinker. He lusted after the role as the helper to the power guy…and that was when Trump was a reality TV star and minor-league wheeler/dealer. Once Trump stumbled into an election win, something Cohen adamantly states that neither Trump nor anyone around him expected or wanted, Cohen’s ambition must have scaled some new heights very quickly. Of course, as we all know, that was the beginning of the end for Michael Cohen. For some reason, perhaps because he was not sophisticated enough to have stayed pristine while he did Trumps dirty work, he was dirty in ways that seemed far too obvious to the seemingly clean types like Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and others that were lining up for Administration assignments. Power moves in waves and while Cohen served a useful purpose to a free-wheeling citizen and even candidate Trump, he was more a liability than asset to President Trump. The power had made a quantum shift and Cohen was suddenly on the outside looking in.
Once outside, everything is suddenly different. After the inaugural parties were over, hanging around the White House was not possible for Cohen. Instead of being down the hall from the Center of the Universe, he was a three-hour Acela ride away and by appointment only. And there was that little payment he had made on the bosses’ behalf to Stormy Daniels and like always, Donald wasn’t making it easy to let him get his money back with the normal vig attached. And then, less than a year later the FBI raided his office under the direction of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. WTF?! That wasn’t supposed to happen to the president’s lawyer. And that’s when reality set in. He was not only not the president’s lawyer, Trump was practically disavowing ever knowing who he was. And then there was nothing practically about it. Trump let Cohen go sideways fast and there he was, hung out to dry being forced to take the heat for the Stormy Daniels thing all on his own. Double WTF?! Cohen snapped in a way that foreshadows the way Trump will likely go down. Once he realized he was being forced to take a bullet for the boss, he suddenly wondered where the reciprocity was with this whole loyalty thing. So, fuck him, he would go before Congress and tell all, just like Trump deserved. That would show him and it would get him off.
But the funny thing about power is that there is no telling when it finds its limits (deserved or not) and when it just builds to new heights (especially deserved or not). In Trump’s case, for inexplicable reasons which trace the trajectory of his inexplicable rise to power, it was growing and growing to the point where it had no time for losers and suckers like Cohen, who was not only a meaningless nobody, but a rat to boot. Imagine that guy thinking he could lay a glove on trump.
Now Cohen has written his big tell-all book, Disloyal: A Memoir, being released today. Hence, the Rachel Maddow interview. And the bottom line is that I have little time for Cohen. There is something strangely prophetic that a weasel that turns into a rat finds himself whining about the harsh treatment he is receiving when the guy who directed and benefited from his illicit actions that landed him in the position of being a felon, should be living the untouchable life of someone immune from all recourse. I’m thinking that is what Trump trained for his whole business life to do, to live life without repercussions. What is it that the old adage about real estate lending tells us? A dollar borrowed is a dollar earned and a dollar repaid is a dollar lost forever. Only suckers and losers repay loans and let others bring them down. After all, this was Trump’s manifest destiny to be King of the World and absolved of all obligations to anyone.
They say that power corrupts and that may be so, but the corrupt also seek power above all else because they know that power brings with it everything to which the corrupt aspire. As much as this all seemed like a great and fun game in 2016 when the stakes were about a big old branding play, it very quickly became something more than a game. It became the ultimate power play. In fact, one can argue that there is no bigger power play in the known universe. If human history is to continue, it will mean that this chapter will be written about for what it is, one of the great power trips of all time. And what a ride! They say that history is written by the victors, but I suspect that is less true in the days when social media allows anyone with an iPhone or better to record his or her thoughts about the world and tell it as they see it. I am betting there will be far more democratized people writing about the abuse of power than there will be those writing about how it was all really very righteous in the “big picture”.