Tuesday August 21st will be remembered as an earth shattering day in politics, even if some people are already trying to down play its significance. On that day, within the same hour, former President Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight charges of corruption and tax evasion, while Trump's lawyer for around a decade Micheal Cohen plead guilty to illegal campaign contributions. While corruption by people around a sitting president is nothing new, the near simultaneous, split screen criminal stories show how far down this president, who ironically claimed that he would be "tough on crime" and "drain the swamp", has taken this country.
Of the two stories, the Cohen one is far more potentially damning for the president: Cohen has testified under oath that Trump himself directed him to pay off two women to prevent them from going public about their affairs with then candidate Trump before the election. The payments were made to specifically keep the women's claims from effecting the outcome of the election, making them illegal campaign expenditures. In fact, these crimes are considered felonies.
In typical Trumpian fashion, our president responded by sending out tweets that sounded like they came from a mob boss: he praised Manafort for "refusing to break", and dumped on Cohen, whom he claimed might "flip". It is typical of the appalling nature of Trump that he refuses to condemn or even mention the crimes committed by these men and went straight to how this all affects him personally. Indeed, his public worrying that Cohen might flip is really him almost admitting that he has committed crimes in the past that Cohen may be aware of; why would Trump worry about his lawyer testifying if he's done nothing wrong?
But then, from day one, this administration has never cared about its public image: from granting security clearances and cabinet positions to his unqualified family members to the first lady going to visit children separated from their parents at the border while wearing a jacket that says I DON'T CARE, DO YOU?, from Trump holding a private meeting with Vladamir Putin, the man he has been accused of criminally conspiring with, to his refusal to stop profiting from his businesses, not to mention his constant barrage of bratty, insulting and dishonest tweets. Yes, violating every norm of presidential decorum and simple human decency is something Trump and the people around him do every day.
And why should he change? His cult like popularity with his base in the Republican party has remained high, and if the party stood by him while he insulted John McCain's war record, made racist comments in campaign speeches, was heard bragging about sexually assaulting women on tape (and was accused of making such assaults by nineteen different women), defended white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville (and retweeted white supremacist posts), called the press "the enemy of the people", and held a fawning press conference with a hostile foreign leader that he claimed to believe over his own intelligence agencies, then having two men that were once close to him revealed to be criminals is just another thing that elected Republicans will have to ignore.
Thankfully, change may be coming; although the Republican party may never have the courage to properly investigate their leader, the coming elections that appear to showing the Democrats at least retaking the House of Representatives if not the Senate, which will allow them to begin properly looking into the many possibly corrupt things that Trump appears to be involved in (along with the Russia connection and mistress payoffs, there's also his violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and his misuse of his charitable foundation). Quite frankly, it would be nice to see that for once his life Donald Trump may be held accountable for the terrible things he has done.
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