Core value
A president who demands loyalty finds it fleeting in D.C.
Et tu, Michael Cohen? Loyalty has long been a core value for President Donald Trump. But he’s learning the hard way that in politics, it doesn’t always last.
Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, this week implicated the president in a stunning plea deal. Days later, word surfaced that David Pecker, a longtime Trump friend and media boss, also was co-operating with prosecutors.
On Friday, media outlets reported that Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg, a longtime personal and professional ally, had been granted immunity in the Cohen probe. The Wall Street Journal and NBC News were first to report from anonymous sources that Weisselberg got immunity to talk to federal prosecutors.
Taking the Cohen news as a personal betrayal, Trump criticized his longtime fixer for “flipping,” saying on “Fox and Friends” that such double-crossers “make up things” to get reduced prison time and become “a national hero.”
The defection of Cohen, who had once grandly declared he would “take a bullet” for the president, was deeply troubling to Trump. And the lawyer is just one in a series of former Trump loyalists who have dissociated themselves from the president, intent on saving themselves in a series of nasty legal and political battles. The growing list includes Pecker, former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
Pecker, a Trump confidant and chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for providing information in the criminal investigation into hush payments made by Cohen on Trump’s behalf before the 2016 election, media outlets reported Thursday.
Weisselberg, who started working for Trump’s family in the early 1970s, was given immunity to provide information in the same investigation, according to the media reports.
A senior White House official said Thursday that the president was undoubtedly frustrated and surprised by the latest developments, particularly campaign finance-related charges against Cohen, as evidenced by Trump’s tweets and public statements. But the official disputed the notion that the president was visibly upset over the news. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Trump carried out his normal complement of meetings Thursday and bantered as usual with staff and lawmakers who were at the White House.
The official said Trump and his aides have grown accustomed to being smacked with bad news when they look up at the television — and their reactions are more muted than when Trump first took office.
But Manigault Newman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” outraged the president last week with the release of a tell-all book and series of secretly recorded audiotapes, as she accused Trump of being racist and suffering from a mental decline.
Trump is still stung by the decision of Flynn, his first national security adviser, to plead guilty to lying to the FBI last year about his contacts with a Russian official in exchange for co-operating with authorities in the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
And he was irate when former strategist Steve Bannon was quoted in Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury,” as saying it was “treasonous” for Donald Trump Jr. and others to meet during the 2016 campaign with a Russian attorney who claimed to have incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
Yet no other administration figure has caused Trump more agitation than Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who infuriated the president by recusing himself from the Mueller investigation. Trump re-ignited his feud with the former Alabama senator Thursday by complaining in the Fox interview that Sessions “never took control of the Justice Department.”
“He took the job and then he said I’m going to recuse myself. I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’ And by the way, he was on the campaign. You know the only reason I gave him the job because I felt loyalty, he was an original supporter,” Trump said.