Yesterday was the worst day of Donald Trump’s *residency, and arguably of his entire life. Just last week he thought he had a handle on his publicity. Should the rigged witches show up to vexate him, he would instantaneously regain the upper hand by simply yanking another security clearance belonging to one of his perceived enemies. Unfortunately, that scheme evaporated in insignificance against a news cycle of such cataclysmic proportions as yesterday, when the split screen images of Paul Manafort, convicted of eight counts of financial crimes and Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to the same, within the same hour no less, instantaneously became a new meme in the national psyche. In the midst of this drama, the TV *resident flew to West Virginia to preach to his flock the new gospel, the coming “Red Wave” in November. New Yorker:
The problem is that there is no red wave in sight, nor do the Republicans who have to deal with that reality expect one to somehow magically materialize. “No, there is no red wave. There is no one who thinks that,” a Republican strategist who has been advising the Party’s keep-the-House efforts told me on Thursday. “It’s like the phrase from his book, ‘The Art of the Deal’: Lying isn’t lying if it’s in the service of Trump.”
The Republican strategist told me that he and his colleagues at the national Party know what they are up against. “He’s not convincing political operators in Washington, D.C., but that’s not his goal,” the strategist told me. “He’s convincing people wearing MAGA hats in Waffle Houses across the country.” […]
“I haven’t spent thirty seconds thinking about a red wave, because I think it is totally delusional. Any Republican pollster or strategist worth their salt just rolls their eyes at the thought of it,” Charlie Cook, the dean of American election forecasters, told me. Cook, the editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, has followed closely every midterm election since 1974, when the Republicans suffered historic losses amid Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, reshaping Capitol Hill for a generation. […]
Cook told me that he currently believes that “we are looking at a twenty- to forty-seat loss” for Republicans in the House, along with significant losses in state legislative and gubernatorial contests. (The U.S. Senate, he said, is a much murkier picture, with anything from a small G.O.P. gain to a small Democratic gain possible.) What’s more, he added, “Republican losses would be looking in the sixty- to seventy-seat range right now,” if not for the uneven battleground dictated by partisan gerrymandering by Republican-controlled legislatures. In short, he said, the midterm election is shaping up to be a “train wreck” and “a complete shit show” for Trump and his party. So, yes, there is a blue wave—the only question is how big. Cook was categorical that Trump would not be able to somehow turn things around between now and November. “We have never seen a midterm election change directions between midsummer and Election Day,” he said. “I have never seen it happen. They either stay the same or they get worse; we’ve never seen it diminish or reverse.”
Trump is committed to his current unreality show narrative, the Red Wave, which perhaps will come as a result of him parting the Red Sea, who knows? Meanwhile, back in the real world, the events of yesterday are being touted as a line of demarcation in the Trump era:
On Tuesday morning, it was still possible to believe that Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort might be exonerated and that his longtime attorney Michael Cohen would only face charges for crimes stemming from his taxicab business. Such events would have supported Trump’s effort to portray the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt” perpetrated by overzealous partisan prosecutors. By late afternoon, though, Cohen, the President’s longtime adviser, fixer, and, until recently, personal attorney, told a judge that Trump explicitly instructed him to break campaign-finance laws by paying two women not to publicly disclose the affairs they had with Trump. At precisely the same moment, Manafort was learning of his fate: guilty on eight counts of bank and tax fraud, with the jury undecided on ten other counts.
The question can no longer be whether the President and those closest to him broke the law. That is settled. Three of the people closest to Trump as he ran for and won the Presidency have now pleaded guilty or have been convicted of significant federal crimes: Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. The question now becomes far narrower and, for Trump, more troubling: What is the political impact of a President’s criminal liability being established in a federal court? How will Congress respond? And if Congress does not act, how will voters respond in the midterm elections? […]
It would take some remarkable news to shake Republicans from their moral slumber; while Tuesday’s events should be more than enough to do so, it is already clear that they aren’t. However, it could shake that small portion of the electorate that voted for Trump but never embraced him fully; even a slight downturn in Republican turnout could well mean a victory for Democrats in the midterms, which, in turn, will guarantee a far more aggressive—and far more public—investigation into the activities of Trump and his shadier cronies. Tuesday’s news also helps build an increasingly compelling case for impeachment and removal from office. It is now clear that the President engaged in at least one conspiracy to hide the truth from the public in an election he won with a tiny margin in three states.
The silence from the GOP is deafening. They’re not about to rock the midterm boat.
There were no reports of concerned Republican Party elders gathering behind closed doors to demand action, or committee chairmen vowing to investigate the President, partisan politics be damned. And, in the next ten weeks, until the midterm elections decide whether Republicans will keep their hold over Capitol Hill, there isn’t likely to be any.
Still, Tuesday’s news suggested that the system had struck back, if not promising full accountability then promising at least some halting steps toward it. In New York, at the courthouse where Cohen pleaded guilty, the top F.B.I. agent on the case, William F. Sweeney, Jr., made a remarkable statement. “As we all know, the truth can only remain hidden for so long before the F.B.I. brings it to light,” he said. “We are all expected to follow the rule of law, and the public expects us—the F.B.I.—to enforce the law equally.” Trump’s name wasn’t mentioned, but it didn’t have to be: the message was unmistakable. “The rule of law applies,” Robert Khuzami, the deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who was in charge of prosecuting the case, said. “We are a nation of laws, and the essence of this case is justice, and that is an equal playing field for all persons in the eyes of the law.”
So where does this leave Trump? Fox News kicked in the expected, this has nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do with Trump, campaign finance violations are like jaywalking, it’s a witch hunt, a president can’t be indicted, ad nausem. Many are saying it’s the beginning of the end for Trump. One thing is certain, it’s the beginning of in depth scrutiny of both Manafort and Cohen. Manafort has another trial coming up and Cohen is apparently dying to talk to Robert Mueller, so more will come out. But that’s not the point. The inescapable truth at this point is that Manafort is a crook who got a lot of people to lie for him and Trump is a crook who got Cohen to lie for him. Maybe this won’t sway “the base” of legend and lore, the people who would still love Trump if he committed murder on 5th Avenue, but it’s got to sway the uncommitted and the previously apolitical.
The walls are slowly closing in on Trump. He’s deeply insecure about how he won the election in the first place. His witch hunt tweets speak to that issue.
“The President is emotionally incapable of dealing with the fact that he got elected on a statistical fluke,” losing the popular vote by a wide margin and yet still winning the Electoral College, Cook said. Trump’s alternate reality for 2018 is built on the conviction that he can break the political laws of history once again, never mind that the only evidence to support that conviction, so far, is his own certainty of it. “All the experts said he was wrong and he won, and therefore there’s no reason to listen to an expert ever again.”
As November approaches it will be interesting to see which GOP candidates stay on the train with Trump and which jump off. A lot are expected to defect and who knows exactly when Mueller will decide to go dark for the midterms or what he will achieve before then? All Trump can think to do about it, if yesterday is any indication, is pump himself up and prattle about the Red Wave. Trump is up the proverbial creek, he knows it, and he’s got no discernible solution. The aides and lawyers he has surrounded himself with are laughable. Too bad Saul Goodman is just a mythical fixer lawyer on television because Trump needs a miracle worker right about now.
