Trump is the alpha con man. Rick Wilson
Is it dangerous to be
friends with Donald Trump? Duh.
If yesterday didn’t prove to you my theory that Everything Trump Touches Dies, I have to presume you were locked somewhere deep in an underground bunker, submerged in a warm-water sensory deprivation tank while tripping balls on some high-quality hallucinogens. You certainly weren’t watching now-wrecked lives of two of Trump’s former confidants, fixers, business associates, wives, girlfriends (compensated and otherwise), and political allies join the long, long line of people who have learned that it’s dangerous to be friends of Donald Trump.
The associative
property of Trump’s reality-TV glamour, his crude fame, his various
blandishments, and his seductive promises of fame, wealth, and empowerment have
long lured in suckers. Don’t be ashamed if you’re one of them; from major
international banks to the thousands of people who bought into his low-rent,
ersatz “university” multilevel vitamin marketing schemes, shoe-leather
prison-meat steaks, jug-wine, assorted dead-on-arrival real estate branding
projects, and of course, his objectively ludicrous presidency, Trump is the
alpha con man.
Tuesday, August 21,
2018, will stand as one of the more terrible days in a catalog of terrible days
in the era of this terrible president. All cons fall in the end, and there are
always marks, victims, and collateral damage left holding the fecal end of the
stick. Yesterday, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen felt the cruel, hot pain of
reality’s hardest bitch slap; both men are going to prison either because of
crimes in service to Donald Trump or because their association with him drew
their malfeasance into the baleful glare of the law.
Trump watched as his
former personal attorney stood in a Manhattan courtroom and began the process
that will amount to a beautiful, brutal, and richly deserved betrayal of his
former friend and client, the president of the United States. Cohen, as I’ve
written before, has the keys to the Trump Kingdom. He was the keeper of a
gigantic pyramid of evidence, experience, and inside-the-Tower knowledge. He’s
the sticky-fingered archivist of emails, text messages, documents,
contemporaneous notes, recordings, NDAs, contracts, medical records, and who
knows what kind of sketchy bank paperwork, used pregnancy test kits, DNA swabs,
and Hefty trash bags full of crusty hotel sheets that would glow vividly under
UV light.
For outside observers,
it was a thing of karmic beauty. For years, victims of Trump’s utter lack of
loyalty to anything but his monstrous ego, rapacious greed, and whatever caused
his last erection felt almost entirely powerless. They were victims of a man
with a corporate organization designed from the ground up to fuck over his
latest partners, contractors, wives, and hoochies-du-jour.
Now, no matter how
many snide tweets Trump throws to further humiliate and demean Cohen, his
ex-fixer is in a position to rip the veneer off of Trump’s finances, business
practices, personal life, and taxes. Cohen has testified that he acted to
violate the law on Trump’s direction and can point to the greasy financial
snail-trail of Trump’s payoffs to Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, and others.
(Over at the professional evangelical headquarters, they’ve laid on a second
shift for the mulligan machine.)
No matter how much
Trump’s media enablers want to downplay Cohen’s admission of guilt, the facts
stand. He is now drawing a direct implication that the president of the United
States, while still a candidate for office, used Cohen to illegally silence two
of the candidate’s most recent sexual conquests. The fear emanating
from the Trump’s tweets about Paul Manafort is an entirely different flavor… read more:
