A president at bay

Will Donald Trump stand for re-election? Suddenly that seems far from certain, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. Until now no news event, however shaming, has dented his standing with supporters. But the conviction this week of his 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, on eight counts of fraud; and the guilty plea to crimes involving the president entered by Michael Cohen, until recently Trump’s personal attorney, have changed that. Trump came to office by successfully casting his opponents, indeed the entire Washington establishment, “as a corrupt oligarchy enriching itself at the public expense”. Seeing as he’d vowed to “drain the swamp”, many excused his “gross bullying racism”. But one by one, erstwhile members of his inner circle – his former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials – have been exposed as crooks. Trump, it seems, is a magnet for sleaze. He hasn’t drained the swamp; he is the swamp.

This must be considered “the most damaging single hour of a deeply troubled presidency”, said Adam Davidson in The New Yorker. If Manafort had been exonerated, Trump could have gone on dismissing the investigation being conducted by former FBI director Robert Mueller as “a witch hunt” that had gone beyond its remit – namely, to look into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Now he can’t. Manafort was convicted of crimes committed while he was being paid tens of millions for services rendered to oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin. And as the trial revealed, when he became Trump’s unpaid campaign chair, he was deeply in hock to the oligarchs and in “tremendous financial distress”. What else did such a desperate man have to offer but access to Trump? But even more damaging is Cohen’s guilty plea, said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post. Cohen was the long-term “fixer” who paid $130,000 to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep silent about her alleged affair with Trump. At first Cohen had denied it, but now he admits that he did so at Trump’s behest – thereby implicating the president in a campaign finance violation.

Still, the fact remains that the crimes Manafort and Cohen are guilty of are not the ones special counsel Mueller was appointed to pursue, said Jonathan Turley in The Hill. So if Mueller doesn’t want to end up “looking like the guy who showed up at a bass fishing competition with a trophy deer head”, he’d better persuade Manafort to “flip” against Trump and spill the beans about the alleged Russia connections. Since Manafort hopes to get a “presidential pardon” from Trump, to spare him up to 80 years in jail, that “flip” is most unlikely. But Trump can’t play the same trick with Cohen, said Tom Embury-dennis in The Independent. Cohen’s lawyer has insisted his client will tell everything he knows and “never” accept a pardon from a man he considers “corrupt and dangerous”. Bang goes Trump’s chance of extricating himself from this legal minefield.