A STENCH SURROUNDS TRUMP, MCPARLAND,

All successful mob bosses share an essential element: the ability to survive while those around them perish.

If they didn’t have it they wouldn’t be where they are, enjoying the good life while their rivals rot in jail, at the bottom of lakes, or cemented into overpasses. They spend their lives surrounded by liars, connivers, chancers, grifters, con-men and cheats. Somehow they manage to emerge on top while the others all fall away.

Donald Trump has been like that all his life, climbing his way to the top amid a crowd of lowlifes, opportunists and thieves, cheating suckers, scamming the gullible, sticking others with the tab for his failures. The higher he rises, the more the chisellers are drawn to him, keen to share his aura and a bit of the booty. He tolerates them as long as they remain useful, then leaves them to their fate. Too bad for them: suckers always get what they deserve.

Michael Cohen is the biggest sucker to date. Cohen fancied himself Trump’s “fixer,” the guy who could get things done. He was willing to get dirty, to deal with the pimps and prostitutes, to make the deals with the dirtballs and deliver the payoffs. He’d take a bullet for Trump, he claimed, such was the extent of his admiration for the man. On the way he did his best to emulate his hero, cheating on taxes, lying to the government, skimming off cash when he spotted the chance. Though a lawyer by trade — the best fixers often are — he made his real money in taxi permits, which, along with construction and the trash business, is a classic avenue for shady operations.

Now he’s taking the fall. Cornered by the law, he’s looking at several years in jail after copping a plea on eight criminal charges, including tax evasion and violating campaign-finance laws. He stated that he broke campaign laws at the direction of Trump, organizing payoffs to two women — a porn star and a former Playboy model — to buy their silence while Trump sought the presidency. He said he made the payments “for the purpose of influencing the election.” He directly contradicted Trump’s claim he didn’t know of the payments at the time, testifying that he coordinated the deals with “the candidate,” who was just weeks from the presidential election.

Whether Trump takes a fall along with Cohen is uncertain. Such is the law, and the level of wretchedness to which the U.S. has sunk, that overwhelming evidence implicating the president in an illegal scheme, backed by the testimony of a close associate of many years, isn’t necessarily enough to lose that president his job. There was a time when the stench that surrounds Trump would have been enough for Americans to clamour for his removal, but one of the achievements of Trumpism has been to render millions of Americans insensate to sleaze. His future may depend on whether voters are repulsed enough to hand Democrats the House of Representatives in November’s mid-term elections, increasing the chances of an impeachment effort. Republicans are so deeply implicated in Trump’s sordid world they may not want to risk sharing his stain by turning on him now.

Trump, of course, isn’t even embarrassed, much less penitent. Cohen had barely concluded his confessions when Rudy Giuliani, his replacement as Trump’s most compliant legal beagle, was proclaiming that the charges contained “no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president.” Giuliani, once widely admired for his heroic actions in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has squandered his reputation in service to Trump, for no apparent reason other than his desperate need for public attention. Giuliani shared his basic view on the law on the weekend when he asserted in an interview that “truth isn’t truth,” but just two opposing points of view. In a legal sense he has a point, in that it’s sometimes impossible to know which of two competing interpretations best reflects an event, but as an example of presidential values it’s not exactly up there with “all men are created equal,” or “ask not what your country can do for you …”

Cohen joins a growing crowd of losers who discovered that their devotion to Trump wasn’t adequate to earn his sympathy or protection. He’s been dumped without ceremony or regret like so many before him: Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Rob Porter, Rex Tillerson, the hilarious Anthony Scaramucci, Paul Manafort and, most recently, Omarosa Manigault.

Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, was convicted Tuesday on eight counts of bank fraud and other financial crimes, and, like Cohen, could beheaded for prison. Characteristic ally, Trump immediately professed the matter “doesn’t involve me,” and is a “witch hunt” in any case. That he hired a man notorious for serving corrupt politicians to run his campaign in no way strikes any loyal Trumpite as reflecting badly on their hero. Just as they were unperturbed by his association with any of the numerous other aides and associates who have pleaded guilty to crimes, are facing indictments, or been sentenced to jail.

Despite his astonishing ability to thrive amid muck and decay, Trump isn’t entirely safe yet. The shrillness of his cries against special counsel Robert Mueller betrays the level of his fear that Mueller may succeed in tying him to actions he can’t escape. And outliers remain: in her tour of TV interviewers, Omarosa has shown herself to be just as much the slick, skilled and unscrupulous practitioner of reality TV morality that is the essence of Trump doctrine, and claims to have “plenty” of secret tapes revealing the seedy goings-on within the White House, which she plans to feed out at intervals leading up to the mid-terms. And Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said Tuesday his client has information on “a conspiracy to collude” with Russia during the presidential campaign, and would be “more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.”

As always with Trump, it’s difficult to pinpoint which is sadder: that millions of Americans continue to defend a man who should be behind bars, or that he could yet survive to launch a bid for re-election.