I have always thought that Donald Trump would be able to wing it. After all, he had the complicity of many Republicans who hate him, know he is corrupt, but were willing to sell out the country for power. But some Republicans, those with some modicum of integrity will be responsible for his demise, and it seems to be in progress now.
It is vital that most of the investigation that will expose the fraud that is Donald Trump is, in fact, being led by Republicans to ensure he or his minions cannot cloak his ouster as partisan.
New Yorker’s Adam Davidson’s article “Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency” is a must-read. But the following quote is prescient. Davidson points out that while many did not believe how bad the 2008 crash or the catastrophe of Iraq would be there were those who called both. And with that, he points out,
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.
Later he continues.
I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality.
And that is likely Trump’s Achilles heel. After failing at business for so long doing it in a somewhat capitalist modal, wouldn’t his only other recourse be criminality to maintain his semblance of success? Davidson accurately describes that reality as follows.
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 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.
And then he describes the end most of us who have been following the investigations must agree with.
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 wasn’t 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 don’t know when. We don’t 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.
Fasten your seat belts. We are in for a wild ride.
(h/t ursulafaw @ Daily Kos)