Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
By Adam Davidson, The New Yorker
18 April 18
On May 1, 2003, the day President George W. Bush landed on the U.S.S.
Abraham Lincoln in front of the massive Mission Accomplished sign, I was
in Baghdad performing what had become a daily ritual. I went to a gate on
the side of the Republican Palace, in the Green Zone, where an American
soldier was receiving, one by one, a long line of Iraqis who came with
questions and complaints. I remember a man complaining that his house had
been run over by a tank. There was a woman who had been a government
employee and wanted to know about her salary. The soldier had a form he was
supposed to fill out with each persons request and that persons contact
information. I stood there as the man talked to each person and, each time,
said, Phone number? And each person would answer some version of The
phone system of Iraq has been destroyed and doesnt work. Then the soldier
would turn to the next person, write down the persons question or
complaint, and then ask, Phone number?
I arrived in Baghdad on April 12th of that year, a few days after Saddams
statue at Firdos Square had been destroyed. There were a couple of weeks of
uncertainty as reporters and Iraqis tried to gauge who was in charge of the
country and what the general plan was. There was no electricity, no police,
no phones, no courts, no schools. More than half of Iraqis worked for the
government, and there was no government, no Army, and so no salaries for
most of the country. At first, it seemed possible that the Americans simply
needed a bit of time to communicate the new rules. By the end of April,
though, it was clear: there was no plan, no new order. Iraq was anarchic.
We journalists were able to use generators and satellite dishes to access
outside information, and what we saw was absurd. Americans seemed convinced
things were going well in Iraq. The warand the President who launched
itwere seen favorably by seventy per cent of Americans. Then came these
pictures of a President touting Mission Accomplishedthe choice of words
that President Trump used in a tweet on Saturday, the morning after he
ordered an air strike on Syria. On the ground, we were not prophets or
political geniuses. We were sentient adults who were able to see the clear,
obvious truth in front of us. The path of Iraq would be decided by those who
thrived in chaos.
I had a similar feeling in December, 2007. I came late to the financial
crisis. I had spent much of 2006 and 2007 naïvely swatting away warnings
from my friends and sources who told me of impending disaster. Finally, I
decided to take a deep look at collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.s,
those financial instruments that would soon be known as toxic assets. I read
technical books, talked to countless experts, and soon learned that these
were, in Warren Buffetts famous phrase, weapons of financial mass
destruction. They were engineered in such a way that they could
exponentially increase profits but would, also, exponentially increase
losses. Worse, they were too complex to be fully understood. It was
impossible, even with all the information, to figure out what they were
worth once they began to fail. Because these C.D.O.s had come to form the
core value of most major banks assets, no major bank had clear value. With
that understanding, the path was clear. Eventually, people would realize
that the essential structure of our financial system was about to implode.
Yet many political figures and TV pundits were happily touting the end of a
crisis. (Larry Kudlow, now Trumps chief economic adviser, led the charge of
ignorance.)
In Iraq and with the financial crisis, it was helpful, as a reporter, to be
able to divide the world into those who actually understand what was
happening and those who said hopeful nonsense. The path of both crises
turned out to be far worse than I had imagined.
I thought of those earlier experiences this week as I began to feel a
familiar clarity about what will unfold next in the Trump Presidency. There
are lots of details and surprises to come, but the endgame of this
Presidency seems as clear now as those of Iraq and the financial crisis did
months before they unfolded. Last week, federal investigators raided the
offices of Michael Cohen, the man who has been closer than anybody to
Trumps most problematic business and personal relationships. This week, we
learned that Cohen has been under criminal investigation for monthshis
e-mails have been read, presumably his phones have been tapped, and his
meetings have been monitored. Trump has long declared a red line: Robert
Mueller must not investigate his businesses, and must only look at any
possible collusion with Russia. That red line is now crossed and, for Trump,
in the most troubling of ways. Even if he were to fire Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein and then have Mueller and his investigation put on
ice, and even ifas is disturbingly possibleCongress did nothing, the Cohen
prosecution would continue. Even if Trump pardons Cohen, the information the
Feds have on him can become the basis for charges against others in the
Trump Organization.
This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering
the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesnt feel like a prophecy;
it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of
reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his
business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that
President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems
not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term,
uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to
certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him
colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then
the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may
have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.
However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trumps
business who doesnt believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant
criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer
for Irans Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered
with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest
known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his
development partner is knee-deep in dirty politics; there are criminal
investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into
his daughter Ivankas role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she
worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back
home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes
associated with the Trump hotel in SoHoan investigation that was halted
suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine
in history for money-laundering violations.
Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have
limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring
Trumps long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial
irregularities. It has become commonplace to say that enough was known about
Trumps shady business before he was elected; his followers voted for him
precisely because they liked that he was someone willing to do whatever it
takes to succeed, and they also believe that all rich businesspeople have to
do shady things from time to time. In this way of thinking, any new
information about his corrupt past has no political salience. Those who hate
Trump already think hes a crook; those who love him dont care.
I believe this assessment is wrong. Sure, many people have a vague sense of
Trumps shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested,
a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace.
Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw
TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain
control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007,
about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific
details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took
a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations
but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis. Sadly, things had to get much
worse before Americans came to see that our occupation of Iraq was
disastrous and, a few years later, that our financial system was in tatters.
The narrative that will become widely understood is that Donald Trump did
not sit atop a global empire. He was not an intuitive genius and tough guy
who created billions of dollars of wealth through fearlessness. He had a
small, sad global operation, mostly run by his two oldest children and
Michael Cohen, a lousy lawyer who barely keeps up the pretenses of lawyering
and who now faces an avalanche of charges, from taxicab-backed bank fraud to
money laundering and campaign-finance violations.
Cohen, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka monetized their willingness to sign contracts
with people rejected by all sensible partners. Even in this, the Trump
Organization left money on the table, taking a million dollars here, five
million there, even though the service they providedgiving branding
legitimacy to blatantly sketchy projectswas worth far more. It was not a
company that built value over decades, accumulating assets and leveraging
wealth. It burned through whatever good will and brand value it established
as quickly as possible, then moved on to the next scheme.
There are important legal questions that remain. How much did Donald Trump
and his children know about the criminality of their partners? How explicit
were they in agreeing to put a shiny gold brand on top of corrupt deals? The
answers to these questions will play a role in determining whether they go
to jail and, if so, for how long.
There is no longer one major investigation into Donald Trump, focussed
solely on collusion with Russia. There are now at least two, including a
thorough review of Cohens correspondence. The information in his office and
hotel room will likely make clear precisely how much the Trump family knew.
What we already know is disturbing, and it is hard to imagine that the
information prosecutors will soon learn will do anything but worsen the
picture.
Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now
looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family
and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker
throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy
oligarchs. He wasnt a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He
knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it,
too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We dont know when.
We dont know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be
resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we
look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the
end stages of the Trump Presidency.
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