All the President’s Men: Add Cohen to the list
Caesar wasn’t a very good judge of character. He thought that his good friend Brutus had his back which, in the most general of terms, he did. When you expect that your friends are going to support you regardless of how you treat them or how they view your actions, you are essentially looking for blind and unconditional love. That only exists in Harlequin Romances and on Tinder, at least for the first five minutes after you’ve swiped left.
Yes, I know about that annoying Prodigal Son parable, which I’ve discussed before. We are supposed to open our hearts and minds to the wayward soul regardless of the harm he has done to us, or to others. Frankly, and with all due respect to God, I find that to be a bunch of Papal Bull.
You earn loyalty, you maintain loyalty by being a good and decent friend, you lose loyalty by demanding devotion in the shadow of betrayal.
Because ultimately, it is the person who has erred, not the person who points the error out, who is the true traitor to the relationship. That’s something Donald Trump hasn’t learned, and doesn’t seem capable of understanding.
I don’t want to talk about legal culpability here. There are too many gray areas and nuances to be able, in 700 words, to come to a definitive conclusion about whether our president committed any crimes, let alone any impeachable offenses. I know that some readers will call that a cop-out, because they are blinded by their absolute, reflexive hatred for the man in the Oval Office. Let’s move along, because they are the functional equivalent of white noise.
But I do want to talk about how Trump has placed himself in the role of victim, assuming the posture of a good man who has been betrayed by those closest to him. In that petulant way perfected by toddlers, the president has rewritten history to reframe Michael Cohen as merely a guy who worked for him as a contract employee. The man who once said he would “take a bullet for” the president is now reduced to an hourly asterix, with benefits. It’s so transparent, and in its own way, poignant.
Trump has started to peel off those relationships that once meant a great deal to him (or at least to his net worth), but that are now causing what the Italians call agida and what our Jewish cousins call tsuris. Cohen has “flipped,” to quote his former boss, and is probably going to provide some juicy information about Trump’s generosity to porn stars and Playboy playmates. Trump probably never saw this one coming, assuming as he did that Cohen would show him infinitely more loyalty than Trump could or ever would reciprocate.
And that’s why I say there is a bit of poignancy in this particular earthquake, because whatever you might think about the president, he is a man of passions. Unlike Barack Obama, who wouldn’t break a sweat in Hell’s vestibule, Trump is quite capable of going through the five stages of friendship grief: anger, mean nickname, misspelled tweets, Fox interview and finally, exile.
Last week I wrote about Omarosa, the woman who was much more adept at playing the betrayal game than Cohen, or even Trump. Ms. Manigault was using the president from the beginning, and she was even better at manipulation than the Master of the Deal himself. One gets the impression, however, that Michael Cohen really did love Trump, and was much more of a dog than Omarosa, who was tagged with that canine epithet by the Donald when she published her destined-for-the-bargainbin memoir.
By that I mean that he devoted virtually his entire life to the president, before Trump actually became the president. He had very few other clients, came running whenever Trump needed him, put his own family before his duty to Trump Enterprises and even had those sad basset hound eyes that make it easy to imagine him curling up on a rug beside his master.
I make fun of the situation, but I shouldn’t. This is actually quite sad, and almost Shakespearean in tone. For Trump, Cohen’s flip was a betrayal and an unexpected obstacle in his tug of war with the special prosecutor.
For Cohen, you get the feeling that this was the end of a love story, and a way of life. That might strike you as over the top, and you might think that Cohen is as soulless as many of the other movers and shakers in New York and D.C., but I sense something else behind the bravado.
Like Brutus, he loved his mentor and friend. Like Brutus, the dagger he wielded (in his case his tongue) was a last resort because he felt ignored, humiliated and ultimately, abandoned.
Unlike Brutus, he hasn’t completely taken down his Caesar, and it’s unlikely that he will, despite the best hopes of the foam-dripping crowds on the Left. You need more than what he’s shown us so far.
But this one, this breakup, approaches real tragedy. And this time, it’s Brutus asking Caesar, “Et tu?”