Why did Michael Cohen turn on Trump so easily?
Jon Hill, Graphic designer: autodidact: Hist., PolySci., Religion
Immediately after the Feds raided Cohen’s, well, everything, Trump was livid; after all, he knows what Cohen knows about him. But then it started to sink in, that he also knew Cohen himself was a crook, and the pressure to “come clean” would be very strong, so, he preemptively began to throw Cohen under the bus. It was a slo-mo tossing, as Trump’s back-pedaling was nice and easy at first; but as it became clear what a danger Cohen was, well, that’s when the tire treads appeared on Cohen’s back.
Trump has always demanded total, abject loyalty to himself, first and foremost. Not a code, not an ideal, certainly not anything as silly and mundane as the Constitution, but a person: Donald J. Trump. Violate that loyalty, or even find yourself in a position to have to violate it, and you’re gone! Just watch: I bet dollars to donuts that it will transpire that Flynn has “flipped.” When it does, you can bet that Trump will blast him, “I barely knew him, he’s a liar and a crook, he hardly had anything to do with the campaign, he was only with us a short time—a very short time—blah-blah-blah.”
Solzhenitsyn told about being in the Gulag, when quite often a party official would enter as a new prisoner, they would exclaim in surprise at some other inmate, “Wait, I was the one who snitched on you!” And so it would go, over and over again. They all thought that by snitching on other members (often for crimes that were made up), they could gain Stalin’s trust. But Stalin was like Trump: his only loyalty was to himself. Michael Cohen was right when he warned about blind loyalty to Trump:
There was a moment during Michael Cohen’s testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, about two hours into the hearing, that landed like a thud.
After a relentless battering from Republican lawmakers over his established dishonesty, including lying to Congress, Cohen called them out for carrying President Trump’s water. He pointed to a poster board that a Republican lawmaker had put up with the words “LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!” next to a supersize photo of Cohen.
“It’s that sort of behavior that I’m responsible for. I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years,” he told the Republican committee members. “I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.”
Then he warned, more ominously, “The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.” |
