Swamp filling one Playmate at a time
The Trump presidency is living down to expectations. The man is exactly as diagnosed: sick of self-love and desperate for praise. If he gets praise, from whatever source, he rolls in it like a dog in a dead sheep. His cabinet meetings are Stalinesque, a prostration of lickspittles.
Trump promised to drain the swamp. It was a fine slogan. Here was an outsider coming to Washington to pull the plug. As the swamp waters sank they’d reveal the creatures that skulked there, the parasites sucking on the body politic, the slimy consultants and reptilian lobbyists, all of them drawn to the swamp by the twin baits of power and money. Exposed to daylight these creatures would shrivel and die.
Well ha, of course. Trump’s arrival thrilled the swamp. The dark waters swirled with creatures keen to feed. Some, Trump had brought with him. Others were long-term residents. One such was Elliott Broidy. He’d been hanging around Washington for years, finding ways to make money. He’d lobbied for corrupt governments. He’d been paid through the sort of Cypriot banks that money launderers favour. He’d been convicted once of bribery but had turned informer to stay out of prison. Over the years he’d made a fortune.
The Republican Party, the party of law and order, was so appalled by Broidy’s swampy record that they appointed him deputy finance chairman of their national committee. And alongside him on that panel of virtue they put Michael Cohen, now famous as the president’s part-time lawyer and fulltime fixer.
A month or so ago the FBI raided Cohen’s offices, took all his records. A few days after that, a story broke that Elliott Broidy had had an affair with Shera Bechard, a Playboy model. He’d impregnated her and then paid her $1.6 million to have an abortion and shut up.
Interestingly the deal had been brokered by Cohen, who’d brokered a similar deal between Trump and the porn star Stormy Daniels. The pseudonym that Cohen used for Trump was David Dennison. The pseudonym he used for Broidy was also David Dennison.
Even more curiously, within a day or two of paying off Ms Bechard, Broidy secured a one-onone meeting with Trump, a priceless thing for someone who touts their influence to foreign clients. And only a few days after that, most curiously of all, Broidy’s firm secured a $600 million contract with the United Arab Emirates. And it has since gone on to secure US defence contracts worth millions more.
Now, several American journalists have noted that the story of Ms Bechard’s pay-off makes no sense. Broidy is not a public figure, so $1.6m is a vast sum to pay merely to keep a story from his wife. After all it took only $130,000 to silence
Stormy Daniels. Furthermore, Broidy has no history of sexual dalliance.
One who does have a history of sexual dalliance, however, and a proven taste for Playboy models, is Trump. So the story makes far more sense if it was Trump who had the affair. When Cohen’s offices were raided Trump knew the story would emerge and feared that the abortion would cost him the support of evangelical Christians.
So he sent out his fixer to find a fall guy at any price. Cohen tapped his fellow committee member and promised him wealth beyond his needs or dreams if he’d only confess to the affair. And thus Trump wriggled clear.
Is that how it was? Your guess is as good as mine. Mine is yes. And thus the world goes round.