THE TRIALS OF TRUMP
His comeuppance is coming, but it won’t fix America’s sickness.
We now know the dramatic opening scene of what is certain to be the Oscar winner at the 2022 Academy Awards, The Collapse of the Trump Presidency.
On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after 4 p.m., a young NBC News intern — later dubbed in the media as “the lady in the blue dress” — was captured by camera crews frantically racing down the steps of a Virginia federal courthouse breathlessly bringing news of the eight guilty verdicts just imposed on Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chief.
Separately, but at the same moment, the split screen on America’s news channels was also showing chaotic scenes from a federal court in New York where Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, ashen and subdued, was confessing to crimes “at the direction” of Trump himself.
And so began Trump’s worst hour as president.
It was when America learned conclu- sively that Trump is an illegitimate president whose election came about through fraud. But for that reason, we also begin the most dangerous weeks of his presidency.
If Trump wants to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation into his Russian ties — and he knows he must — Trump has to do it before the Democrats win back the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections.
Otherwise, Congress after November will have the power to reinstate Mueller’s investigation regardless of what he does.
Trump knows that Manafort’s conviction on tax and bank fraud provided a powerful boost to the Mueller probe in the face of the president’s unrelenting efforts to discredit it.
But he also knows that Cohen’s confession really drew blood. Cohen directly implicated Trump in authorizing hush-money payments to an adult-film star and a Playboy Playmate just before the November 2016 presidential election.
In other words, this was an illegal effort, virtually on the eve of the vote, to keep these affairs confidential — and to swing a razor-thin presidential election that was ultimately decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states.
And this is only the beginning. We are still waiting to hear confirmation from the Mueller probe that Trump engaged in conspiracy with Russian intelligence to undermine the presidential election and committed obstruction of justice by trying to prevent those crimes from becoming public.
As to why Trump has been so beholden to the Russians, it is also known that Mueller is investigating Trump’s oncebankrupt business empire on suspicions it has been kept afloat for years by illegal money laundering and investments from the Russian mafia.
Trump obviously feels cornered and is weighing his next move.
On Wednesday, he lavished praise on his former campaign chief — “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family,” he tweeted — prompting speculation that he may pardon Manafort.
But if he does that, it will only accelerate the inevitable. Trump’s road to ruin as America’s 45th president is unavoidable, in my view, even if there are still enormous bumps to come.
In a column a year ago, I predicted he would try to fire Mueller and, in doing so, would trigger “a constitutional crisis that will rock its institutions to the core.” But, I added, Congress would intervene, and he would eventually resign in exchange for a pardon from his servile vice-president, Mike Pence.
I still believe this is how the Trump crowd will crash and burn, but that really won’t be the end of it.
Nearly 63 million Americans voted for Trump, and his approval rating still hovers around 40 per cent.
When he and his family have been driven off the stage — ideally in the direction of a prison cell — the dark side of America and the deep corruption of its political culture that his tenure has so dramatically exposed will still need to be confronted.
The dark side of America and the deep corruption of its political culture that his tenure has so dramatically exposed will still need to be confronted